Are you prepared for the next Big One?

Pacific Northwest
Imagine just attending this routine government hearing in Seattle, when suddenly...the earth moves.

In 2001, the Pacific Northwest had a very close call.

As a news conference that was just about to start, reporters scrambled to interrupt programming.

In Seattle that day, the only saving grace was that the epicenter was more than 40 miles beneath the earth’s surface, lessening the impact:

It was a wake-up call. 1,500 hundred miles away in Anchorage, Alaska experienced the strongest earthquake ever in this country.

In fact, it was the second strongest earthquake ever recorded on the planet.

It happened on Good Friday, March 27^th, 1964.

In Anchorage’s Turnagain heights neighborhood, KTUU-TV General Manager Al Bramstedt was 13 years old.  He was building a snow fort with a friend when it happened.

Dramatic images were recorded as the quake struck a wide area of Alaska, an incredible magnitude nine point two.

Al Bramstedt: An older woman ran out she ran down the street and she’s screaming and yelling and she says the Russians have attacked its an atomic bomb we’re all gonna die!

In the chaos of the shattered neighborhood, Al Bramstedt could not have known about his 12-year-old friend named  Perry Mead,  who lived just a few blocks away. Perry had tried to rescue his baby brother.

Bramstedt: He ran back into the house and grabbed the infant and as he was running out the front door the earth opened up right at the edge of the porch, and as he ran out down the sidewalk, the whole earth opened up and he went right down into the crevice.  And they never saw Perry or the infant ever again. 

Anchorage was in shocked disbelief.

Mary Lou Zoback, U.S. Geological Survey: There was huge devastation.  The landslide just dropped large sections of the city down under water.  It was terrible.

Out of the blue, just moments after the Quake, in the small coastal community of Seward, Alaska, a series of tsunamis created  a scene straight from hell.

Peter Haeussler, U.S.G.S.: There was a tank farm and some of the tanks broke, fuel went in the water, that fuel ignited, and subsequent tsunamis and  waves brought that burning fuel back towards shore.

But as terrible as the Alaska quake was, at least it happened in an area with a relatively small population. Increasingly, seismologists are increasingly concerned about the risk to a metropolitan area that has 200 times more people.

Los Angles, Calif.
That city is Los Angeles. Just 30 miles from the southern end of the San Andreas fault, it is crisscrossed by other dangerous faults which helped shape the mountains that surround the city. 

Seismologists now see a pattern similar to what was seen in Northern California in the decades before the great quake of 1906. Southern California has seen numerous moderate quakes in recent decades, some of which have been caught on live television.

KNBC anchor Kent Shocknek was on the air when a magnitude 6.1 quake hit in 1987.

Zoback: If we look at Los Angeles over the last several decades, there’ve been an awful lot of moderate to sometimes even large earthquakes. And this may be the beginning of—sort of a preparation for a much larger earthquake.  And the largest earthquakes, of course, will be on the southern San Andreas Fault.

And that’s not the only fault that there’s concern about that’s because in 1999 researchers discovered a highly dangerous formation, called the Puente Hills fault, that cuts right under downtown Los Angeles.

If that one breaks loose, estimates are between 3,000 and 18,000 could die and economic losses could reach $250 billion.

That result would be  far worse than the  magnitude 6.7 Northridge quake that struck directly underneath the area in 1994.That was the most costly earthquake in American history, with more than $20 billion in damage. More than 60 people died and nine-thousand were injured.  

Incredible scenes played out in some of the area’s most densely-populated neighborhoods.  Civilians and emergency workers worked side by side attempting to rescue trapped neighbors...

One couple died as their home crashed down this hillside...

But the toll could have been much higher if the city’s earthquake building codes were not some of the best in the country.

Zoback: They actually had mandated that all un-reinforced masonry, brick buildings, un-reinforced brick buildings, be either removed or strengthened.  And they gave the building owners ten years to do that.  And, fortunately, that was done.  And those buildings were corrected or removed just prior to the Northridge Earthquake in 1994.

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