12 hours Ago By Renisha Mall
MURRAY, Utah (ABC4) -- Flipping through a photo album, Wayne Hendrickson recalls the day when he witnessed the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in North America. Hendrickson, who is a Utah resident, tells ABC4.com that he was stationed in Alaska when an earthquake' of magnitude 9.
2 occurred in the Prince William Sound region in 1964.He was 23-years-old then. He was recently recruited into the Army and was stationed at Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage.
"I got there in December and I thought there was going to be snow stacked there 4 foot-5 foot high. We landed at the Elmendorf Air Force Base which is right next to Fort Richardson. Well, they were havingthe dog sleigh races during the first part of January.
And lo and behold, there was no snow on 4th avenue for the dogs and so they brought the snow from the runway at Elmendorf."RELATED: Nearly 950,000 planned to participate in 2025 Utah Great ShakeoutWhat happened on March 27, 1964"I was in what they call the clipper room where they take your empty dishes and has the washing machines," Hendrickson recalled. "So we run out there to see what is going on.
And everybody is starting to scramble. ..
. We went out the back to the loading dock and across [the street] we saw everyone vacating the building. There were hundreds and thousands of people, maybe.
"According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the earthquake rupture started approximately 25 km beneath the surface, with its epicenter about 6 miles east of the mouth of College Fiord, 56 miles west of Valdez and 75 miles east of Anchorage.
It is the second largest earthquake ever recorded, next to the 9.5 earthquake in Chile in 1960, according to USGS. "They have little rumbles every day up there.
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That was the worst and only one ever," Hendrickson told ABC4.com."One of our sergeants lived off base, and he was driving home, and he told us the next day that he thought the wheels were coming off his car and he got down to check and his car was just shaken," Hendrickson adding that it was a sight to remember.
"You look at the power lines between the two poles and it was just bouncing up and down."What happened next?"It was during the Vietnam War," Hendrickson said. "We weren't allowed to leave for about two weeks.
We were a headquartered company, so our top brass had control. We had infantry up there that were training prior to Vietnam.""We came in and had to clean up that mess.
We were there until 11 pm that night because they had to serve breakfast the next morning."Hendrickson says there was a sizeable aftershock exactly a week later.61 years since the Good Friday Earthquake"I have gone back and it's all different.
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4th Avenue is all rebuilt and its pretty much the same." Hendrickson, now 84, says that though it lasted for about five minutes, those memories have been etched in his mind forever. According to USGS, nearly 131 people were killed during that earthquake.
Utah experts say there is a 57% probability that the Wasatch Front will experience at least one 6.0 magnitude or greater earthquake and a 43% probability of a 6.75 magnitude or greater earthquake in the next 50 years.
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