Maine news, sports, weather | Kennebec Journal, Augusta, Maine

DAVID B. OFFER: Remains of ’64 quake, ’89 oil spill still scar Alaskan landscape

FAIRBANKS, Alaska — The 1964 Good Friday earthquake was my first major story as a reporter.

I was studying journalism at University of Washington and living in Seattle with my mother and stepfather, who owned a small suburban radio station.

We were talking on the telephone to his brother and family in Anchorage when the earthquake hit. We quickly passed the news to United Press International, which issued a bulletin. It was the first report of the earthquake.

I then went to the radio station and tried to contact anyone with phone service in Anchorage so I could report what was going on.

The quake — 9.2 on the Richter scale — was the most powerful ever recorded in North America, and the second-most powerful ever measured by seismograph. My mother reminded me last week that we felt the quake in Seattle.

I had thought of the earthquake in terms of the massive damage in Anchorage, where buildings toppled and nine people were killed — the only deaths directly attributed to the quake. 

But last week my wife and I drove to Homer, Seward and Valdez, and I learned how wrong I had been. Damage was even worse in the south-central part of the state, closer to the epicenter in Prince William Sound. The tsunami generated by the earthquake killed 122 people.

The quake and the tsunami destroyed nearly every building in Valdez, then a village of about 1,000 people. Deep underground, it liquefied the soil on which Valdez stood, making it so unstable that engineers determined it would not be safe to rebuild. As a result, Valdez was reconstructed on more stable ground about four miles south.

The town now has a population of about 4,000 and is the center of a vibrant fishing industry, attracting both commercial and sports fishermen.

It is also the end of the 800-mile Alaska pipeline that brings oil from Prudhoe Bay in the north to Valdez, where it is loaded on tankers. I had hoped to see the end of the pipeline, but, since 9/11, it has been locked and guarded.

In 1989, the Exxon Valdez, a tanker filled with oil from the pipeline, hit a reef and spilled nearly 11 million gallons of oil into Prince William Sound. Oil from that spill still comes ashore in Valdez, a sobering thought considering what is going on today in the Gulf of Mexico.

Displays in the small Valdez museum shows the devastation from the earthquake and the oil spill.

The museum also includes an 1886 Gleason and Baker hand-pump firetruck that the town bought secondhand in 1902. A sign states that it was restored to its original state by Firefly Restorations of Hope, Maine. As I signed the museum guest book, I noted that my wife and I were not the only visitors from Maine.

Larry and Carolyn Ricker of Vassalboro signed the book on June 1; and we missed George and Karen Howe of Wade by only a day.

Other highlights of our trip, which began in Homer, a city of about 5,000 people on the Kenai Peninsula about 600 miles south of Fairbanks:

• Homer: Seeing sport fishing charter boats unload 50- or 60-pound halibut, pretty good sized for close-to-shore day trips. Trophy-size halibut can be 300 pounds or more. Businesses clean, wrap, freeze and ship whatever fishermen catch. The result can be wonderful — and very expensive — fish arriving at your home.

• Seward, 165 miles east. Stopping for ice cream, we were served by a young woman wearing a Boston Red Sox cap and a University of New England T-shirt. I didn’t get her name, but she said she lives in Connecticut, loves going to school in Biddeford, and was enjoying a summer working in Alaska.

• Alaska SeaLife Center, which rescues injured or abandoned marine mammals such as seals and sea lions. We got up-close-and-personal with Woody, a 2,100-pound sea lion.

 • Anton Anderson Memorial Tunnel — at 21⁄2 miles, the longest highway tunnel in North America.

• Whittier: Departure point for six-hour ferry trip across Prince William Sound to Valdez. The ferry captain chose a route that took us through a field of icebergs — some bigger than a car — that calved off Columbia Glacier.

• Denali Highway, back to Fairbanks. Fodor’s says this is one of the most beautiful routes in Alaska, but rain and fog hid the view.

That was disappointing, but in our year here, we have been on five of the highways Fodor’s says are the most beautiful in Alaska — the Dalton Highway north to Prudhoe Bay; the Glenn Highway in south-central Alaska, the Parks Highway between Fairbanks and Anchorage, and the Richardson Highway, with its breathtaking waterfalls, from Valdez to Fairbanks.



David B. Offer is the retired executive editor of the Kennebec Journal and the Morning Sentinel. He has completed a year as the C.W. Snedden chair in journalism at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and will return to Maine this fall. E-mail davidboffer@ hotmail.com.

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