6.8 Quake Hits Seattle, Northwest

A powerful 6.8 earthquake rumbled deep beneath Puget Sound on Wednesday--sending Seattle’s high-rise office towers into a terrifying sway, unleashing landslides, damaging roads and crumbling building facades. Early damage estimates were in the billions of dollars.

More than 250 people were injured but, defying expectations, only one person died in the strongest temblor to hit the Pacific Northwest in 52 years. That, experts said, was due to the fact that the temblor’s epicenter was buried in solid rock 30 miles underground. Tremors from the quake, which was centered 35 miles southwest of Seattle near the state capital of Olympia, were felt as far away as Salt Lake City and British Columbia.

The violent pitching and rolling began at 10:54 a.m. and lasted nearly 45 seconds--long enough to send old brick building facades crashing down onto cars, trigger a landslide that blocked a major river in Seattle’s eastern suburbs, open fissures in roads and puncture gas and water lines.

“It almost felt like an intense boat ride, with motion sickness. I can tell you, I was afraid,” said Meredith Russell, a receptionist on the 50th floor of the downtown Bank of America building. “There were window washers creeping up to the top of the building, and they looked scared. It was an intense feeling.”

At Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, air traffic controllers ordered an inbound passenger jet to “pull up” before touchdown as windows in the control tower shattered. At least 1,000 passengers were stranded at the airport as inbound flights throughout the day were diverted to Portland, Ore. A makeshift control tower was set up in a trailer, and limited operations resumed within a few hours.

Nearby Boeing Field, the base of much of the region’s general aviation and corporate air traffic, was closed indefinitely after the runway crumbled in several places and the control tower lost power, along with at least 200,000 homes from Olympia to Seattle. Power has been largely restored.

Ferry traffic and Amtrak passenger service were halted for several hours and at least 30 people weretemporarily stranded atop Seattle’s landmark Space Needle as it shuddered violently. Members of the Seattle City Council--meeting to discuss, in part, a Mardi Gras riot Tuesday night that left 70 people injured--had to dive for cover under the council table.

Late into the evening, traffic backed up for miles as people struggled to get home to check on their families, navigating roads blocked by landslides and crumbling support posts. Traffic on Interstate 5 south of Olympia was diverted to allow for inspection of a damaged bridge.

At the University of Washington’s seismic center, some monitoring equipment pegged out at maximum readings, and one instrument picked up only part of the temblor because of the severity of the shaking. “It shook so hard the pens broke off,” center coordinator Bill Steele said.

Gov. Gary Locke, estimating damage in the billions of dollars, declared a state of emergency Wednesday, and President Bush dispatched Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Joe Allbaugh to inspect the damage.

“We will assess whatever damage and we will provide whatever resources are necessary to help the people,” Bush said. “My administration stands ready to help in any way we can.”

Officials in King County, the largest in a metropolitan region of 3.1 million people, credited stringent earthquake building standards and repeated emergency response drills for the minimal casualties. The only death was that of a 66-year-old woman from Burien who succumbed to a heart attack.

“For an area that’s as populated as we are, with an earthquake of this magnitude, we handled it incredibly well,” King County Executive Ron Sims said. “Any other place with a magnitude of 6.8, there would have been far more damage, far more injuries.”

Government Officials Shaken by Temblor

Still, government officials were clearly shaken by the temblor. Several state legislators began praying out loud as a crack split through the massive state Capitol dome, and Locke ordered those attending a meeting with him to seek cover.

“I first felt the floor vibrating very hard. I thought at first, this is a lot of construction, what’s going on in this building? I immediately realized this was a lot more than construction. I told everybody, ‘Let’s get under tables, under desks.’ Then the floor started sliding back and forth, a wave motion,” Locke said.

“I was here in ‘65,” Locke said, recalling the 6.5 magnitude earthquake that struck the Seattle-Tacoma area that year, killing seven people. “And this was longer, much more intense and much more frightening,” the governor added.

‘That Building Really Rocked’

Sims, who also was at a meeting at the state Capitol, said: “Wow, you talk about being tossed around. That building really rocked.”

The aging brick-clad buildings of southern Seattle’s Pioneer Square industrial district--many of them home to trendy dot-com businesses--took the brunt of the damage. At the corporate headquarters of Starbucks, the signature mermaid placard toppled into the parking lot below.

As the temblor hit, glass began popping out of windows, roofs collapsed and bricks and portions of walls began crashing to the sidewalk--some crushing cars below. “Get out! Get out!” some people began shouting as folks started pouring into the streets.

At Old Timer’s Cafe, several bottles fell off the bar. But 10 minutes after the quake, owner Kathy Norega was open for business. “Someone has already come in for a tequila shot,” she said.

Added Patrick Moynihan, the owner of a small software company nearby: “The inside of our building looks like a bomb went off.”

But it was the large skyscrapers in the heart of downtown Seattle that took much of the most frightening energy of the quake, swaying steeply back and forth and sending many workers frantically looking for safety.

“I commute from L.A., and as soon as it started banging around here, I knew exactly what was going on. But I don’t think anybody here had been through one. We had some pretty upset people. We had some hysterics,” said Steve Barrett, head of client relations in the 49th-floor offices of the Perkins Coie LLP law firm in the Washington Mutual Tower.

“I’ve never seen one that rocked back and forth like this one. It was moving a lot. We had books falling off shelves, and as soon as the quake proper stopped, the building sort of pendulumed for about 10 minutes,” Barrett said.

In the 76-story Bank of America tower, the tallest building in the Pacific Northwest, workers shouted and shot under desks.

The 605-foot-high Space Needle, Seattle’s premier landmark, could be heard loudly banging as the temblor shook its long, tall metal frame. About 30 people were stranded on the observation deck and restaurant as officials shut down the structure’s glass elevator for inspection. “We definitely did some swaying, but everything was OK,” said Space Needle employee Heather Wellik. “They held everybody up here, but just temporarily.”

In Belltown, on the north end of downtown, resident Sally West said: “It was like a helicopter landing on top of the roof” of her condo.

Hospitals throughout the region suffered power outages and damage, but continued to admit patients. Seattle’s main trauma center, Harborview Medical Center, sustained significant damage as a crack up to 5 inches wide in places opened up between the new and older wings of the hospital. But the main damage occurred in an outpatient clinic and research wing, and the hospital was able to accept casualties throughout the day.

“Everything worked very well. The employees who were with patients remained with their patients. The operating rooms continued to function, and everything just moved the way it was supposed to move in a disaster,” hospital spokeswoman Tina Mankowski said.

3 Patients in Serious Condition

Of 32 patients treated at Harborview’s emergency room, six were admitted. Three were in serious condition, including an 84-year-old man with pelvic fractures, a 30-year-old woman with a head injury and a 51-year-old man with multiple injuries.

Curtis Johnny, a 49-year-old fish processor and forklift operator, had his back broken when the chimney on his apartment building collapsed and bricks rained down through the ceiling.

“Curtis was reaching for the door and our ceiling collapsed right above him. All the bricks came crashing down on him, and I kept screaming his name,” said his girlfriend, Darlene Saxby. They were able to escape after two neighbors kicked in the door.

Dozens of others were admitted to hospitals in Tacoma, Olympia and the suburbs east of Seattle. In Tacoma’s Pierce County, there were at least three people in critical condition, all of them elderly people who fell, state emergency management officials said.

The fact that there was not more damage or loss of life was likely due to the nature of the quake. It would have been much more devastating had it occurred on the well-known Seattle Fault, which runs directly under the center of downtown and for 15 miles in each direction.

Quake Deep in Subduction Zone

Instead, it occurred deep beneath the earth in the Cascadia subduction zone, an area between Mendocino, Calif., and British Columbia where the offshore Juan de Fuca tectonic plate rubs up against the main North American continental plate.

“It occurred at a depth of 30 to 35 miles, which is deep for California but not all that uncommon around here,” said University of Washington seismologist Tom Yelin.

In fact, Washington state’s two largest previous quakes--the 7.1 temblor in 1949 that killed eight people and a 6.5 quake in 1965 that killed seven--both occurred in the same zone and relatively near where Wednesday’s quake occurred. (The most recent previous quake, a 5.5 temblor, was centered farther south near Grays Harbor in July 1999.)

Yelin said Wednesday’s quake was not a classic subduction earthquake resulting from an actual collision of the two continental plates--an event that might have produced a devastating quake with a magnitude of 8 or 9; instead, this was a secondary effect of the movement of the offshore plate as it sinks below the North American plate, he said.

“A piece of the Pacific Ocean floor is forcing its way beneath the North American continent, and as it sinks slowly down in the depths of the Earth, it is subject to stresses that want to tear the plate apart because it’s denser than the surrounding rock. It’s those stresses that caused the earthquake,” Yelin said.

Aftershocks Unlikely, Experts Say

The nature of the quake makes aftershocks unlikely, experts said.

A quake less deep in the Earth, on the Seattle Fault, would easily have caused damage comparable to California’s 1994 Northridge quake that killed 57 people or the 1995 Kobe, Japan, earthquake that killed more than 6,000, Yelin said.

The Puget Sound region long has been wary of a major earthquake, with predictions that a major temblor could trigger a tsunami within the sound itself or very damaging mudflows off Mt. Rainier--the snow-capped volcano that overlooks the region.

However, nothing of the sort happened Wednesday, although breaks and slides on the narrow road that goes up to the Crystal Mountain ski area on Mt. Rainier forced a closure that stranded many skiers for hours.

A special team from Colorado was flying in Wednesday to conduct inspections for landslides and soil liquefaction, a phenomenon thought likely to occur because of the region’s unique basin geological structure and the fact that much of Seattle is built on filled soil.

“I have heard second- and third-hand reports of liquefaction near Seattle, so it seems likely some of that occurred,” Yelin said.

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Times staff writers Beth Shuster, Rebecca Trounson and Teresa Watanabe and researcher Lynn Marshall in Seattle and staff writer Edwin Chen in Washington, D.C., contributed to this story.

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Range of the Quake

Wednesday’s quake occurred deep in the ground, which generally produces less damage but is felt over a larger area, experts say. Here is the range of the quake, based on thousands of citizen reports filed to the U.S. Geological Survey and broken down by ZIP codes.

Source: U.S. Geological Survey

* EARTHQUAKE COVERAGE

The Seattle temblor may make more Californians consider earthquake insurance. C2