ANCHORAGE, Alaska — An earthquake sent some coastal Alaska residents running for higher ground in fear they would be swamped by a tsunami, a disaster that never materialized after the shaking that did little more than knock pictures off walls.
The magnitude-6.7 quake struck at 11 p.m. Thursday and was centered in the Pacific Ocean about 35 miles beneath the seabed and some 400 miles southwest of Anchorage, the U.S. Geological Survey said. It hit a remote and lightly populated Aleutian Island region.
The temblor was felt on the Alaska Peninsula and Kodiak Island, more than 100 miles away.
“We got shook up pretty good,” said Alvin Pedersen of Chignik Lagoon, an oceanside community on the Alaska Peninsula.
He said the quake, which lasted about a minute, was the strongest he had felt since Alaska’s Good Friday earthquake of 1964, the second-strongest ever recorded at magnitude-9.2. That quake and the resulting tsunamis killed 131 people.
“It was pretty violent,” Pedersen said.
He saw a few of the community’s 72 residents drive uphill to avoid a possible tsunami.
Pedersen, an assemblyman for the Lake and Peninsula Borough, said many of the 96 people living in the adjacent village of Chignik also moved to higher ground. Chignik faces the ocean, while Chignik Lagoon is a little more sheltered.
They returned home after no tsunami danger was found, said Jeremy Zidek, a spokesman for the state emergency management department. He called their actions “prudent” because the danger is high in Alaska of quake-generated landslides pushing debris into the ocean and triggering big waves.