Earthquake around Homer

I was here for the 64 quake also. Last night I was in bed reading when this one hit. It seemed to roll longer, the house definitely moved around some. There were two sizable aftershocks which I slept right through.

Bill

My MIL, who has had the same log house since '54 (???), says that this one seemed to move the opposite direction than did the '64 quake, like shaking left-to-right instead of front-to-back.

Of course, at 87, the memory might not be precise.

For some of the younger folks, this was probably the biggest quake they'd experienced, although I seem to recall a few at 6.5 + scattered throughout the '80's and '90's. Not like '64 though.

Both daughter and DIL called us (in Ewe-stun) shortly after the shaker...and while we could make sympathetic noises and such, we weren't quite sure what assistance we could offer from Ewe-stun.

Since the scale for measuring earthquakes is a lot like that used for hurricanes, in that like sound measures, it is logrhymic. (Not sure if that is the right word or not) but anyway the Good Friday earthquake of 1964 was 630 times more powerful than the recent one in Homer at 6.7 to 7.1 on the Scale. The good Friday quake was rated at 9.2.

People that I know that live in the Anchorage Bowl area or the Kenai, don't appear to be any better prepared than they were in 1964. Here in this part of Florida, Stuart, we and all of our neighbors have done extensive hurricane preparation, from stock piling food, water and most as of us have standby generators and stored fuel to run the house for a week or ten days. But not so with friends and acquaintances that we have south central Alaska. I guess it is the old adage of what I can't see won't hurt me.

Back when we owned a river front lot on the Kenai River and had set up our 5th wheel semi permanently as a fish camp, one of the volcanoes decided to have a major eruption across Cook Inlet. We drove down a week or so after from Nenana where we lived, to check on the trailer. We found the volcanic ash was about 4 inches deep on the lot and trailer, roads were covered in a fine grey ash. This ash was highly abrasive and since the Kenai electric grid is powered by natural gas turbines, they had shut down the power grid to keep the turbines from sucking in the abrasive ash.

People in the area weren't set up to provide their own power and neither were the businesses such as super markets etc so they all closed .

When people live in a hurricane area, they seem to understand that at times, they will get hit and prepare for it. But many people that live in earthquake and/or volcanic zones don't seem to expect there will ever be another disaster for some reason. I was as bad as anyone else the 25+ years we lived in Alaska. The Nenana Valley was formed by an earthquake many long years ago, running from almost Healy to the north side of the Tanana River (Tan a naw) at Nenana (Née nan ah) rhymes with banana. LOL the only preparations we had was our normal pantry filled with groceries and the generator in our motorhome plus our wood stoves which heated our home. That and about 20 cords of split and stacked firewood out back by my shop. LOL

Surprisingly the local Fairbanks newspaper had never reported this quake hitting the local area Sunday Jan 24 at 130am local time - as my house jolted for almost 1.5 minutes as I estimate 6.2 to 6.5 ish.

The November 2002 quake was the most seismic (7.9) I been thru in hundreds of quakes I experienced and no significant damage to my house trailer with no power outage....that quake had 4.0+ tremors for the next three days and around 100 frequent or so tremors 8 hours after the major jolt.

Some find it hard to prepare for a quake, as in, it hasn't (seriously) happened yet, so why should i? I have my Camper Van loaded up for my min. 1 week+ of self sufficiency, except in the winter there is no water. It's not a matter of if, but when the big one will hit (Here on Vancouver Island)