Some Pictures and Notes/Quotes From Coverage of the 1965 Puget Sound Earthquake

A while ago I did a post on this blog about the April 29, 1965 earthquake in Puget Sound.

I recently bought the front page of the Seattle Times from that April 29 afternoon, and here is a little bit more of the paper’s coverage.

One woman, Mrs. John M. Kaiser, said she crawled under her bed with her two young daughters and wondered “Oh boy, is this going to be like Alaska? Then [after the quake] my mother-in-law called, and she told me I did it wrong. I should have gotten under a door jamb.”

The four fatalities initially reported by the Times included two heart attacks suffered by women in their mid-50s, a man at 502 S. King Street buried by falling debris, and another man killed by falling debris, at the Fisher Flouring Mills on Harbor Island.

The Times added: “Union Station in Seattle was evacuated after suffering extensive damage. The third floor of the building was sagging and there were cracked walls and ceilings. The Union Station at Tacoma was also ordered evacuated because of extensive damage.”

“The Bonneville Power Administration reported three major [transmission] lines went out of operation.” They were two lines “about 34 miles east of Everett” and a line running from Grand Coulee Dam to Olympia.

And: “Sidewalks adjacent to the old Ballard City Hall, Ballard Avenue Northwest and 22nd Avenue Northwest, were barricaded because of bricks which came tumbling down from the old structure.”

“Navy officials closed the Magnolia Bridge to traffic because of damage to the underside of the structure which resulted in substantial amount of material falling on cars parked below.”

The Tacoma Narrows Bridge was closed “after the quake sheared bolts and covered the roadway with glass from lightning fixtures. . . Cracks yawned in the highway between Manchester and Port Orchard. Puyallup reported gas mains broken.”

Power lines went down in Longview and Kelso. In Olympia, “the former Capitol, which bore the brunt of the 1949 tremor, took another severe beating today. . . On the eighth-floor balcony, high in the Capitol rotunda, columns were sheared at the base. . . . There were cracks in the walls and broken plaster covered the floors. Exterior stone columns were shifted as much as 1 1/2 inches, and cracks of up to 1 1/2 inches wide opened up in the walls. . . . There was no damage to the cupola.”

In Olympia’s Legislative Building, “there was a crack of about three feet long on the inside of the inner dome of the rotunda. The five-ton chandelier was still swinging from its 110-foot chain, like a pendulum on a clock, in a one-foot orbit, a half hour after the quake. . . . In the Temple of Justice, cracks developed in the walls of the law library.”

These notes on damage and fatalities aren’t just of historical and anecdotal interest: they give an indication of what areas of Puget Sound will be hit hardest by the next big quake.

Here are a few pictures from the Times. The top of the front page:

And three inside pictures: the first, from Seattle:

Sicks’ brewery:

And an apartment building:

For some context, on another page of the Times was this headline: “231 Reds Slain in 3 Assaults on Viet-Cong”

And, the Associated Press was applying to become the first news entity to send data to a communications satellite, to improve its news distribution operations.

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