Steve Quayle News Alerts

November 3, 2002

New Orleans -- People here saw water in ponds, bayous and pools slosh about from what geophysicists say was caused by the awesome power of an earthquake in Alaska Sunday, over 3,000 miles away.

A 7.9 magnitude earthquake rocked a remote area of interior Alaska early Sunday afternoon, cracking highways and roads, knocking over fuel tanks and shaking rural homes.

"When you have an earthquake of this size, it generates what we call surface waves which are energy that travel through the earth's crust and these waves cause disturbances that can be looked upon as ripples or disturbances" in water, said Dale Grant, a geophysicist with U.S. Geological Survey's National Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colo.

In Mandeville, across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans, Carol Barcia, 47, was sitting with neighbors on the deck of her house around 5 p.m. when she saw boats bounce around.

"We were just sitting outside on our back deck, just relaxing, and we noticed the sail boats started leaning over, going back and forth, and the boats' lines were just banging up and down. My boat was banging up against the dock. My neighbor's boat broke a line," Barcia said.

"One poor guy across the canal from us fell off his sail boat," Barcia, a pharmaceutical representative, said.

She said a neighbor rode a boat over Bayou Castine and helped the man out of the water.

Similar stories were reported in other states, Grant said.

It was a shallow earthquake ÷ centered about 6 miles underground -- and such earthquakes are generally felt over a wider area, Grant said.

"This earthquake was shallow and the energy went directly into the surface and that is what causes these affects so far away," he said.

Grant said he received calls from nuclear power facilities in various states -- including Minnesota and Washington -- that reported unusual water movement.

He said an Oklahoma state geologist also reported that farmers there noticed water in ponds sloshed about.

And throughout the New Orleans area people were baffled and frightened by what they saw.

"My neighbors whistled -- they've got a pond right on the levee on the Mississippi River -- and that thing was churning, swirling and splashing out," said Dan Musmanno, a 51-year-old program manager at Northrop Grumman Corp.

"And they said my pond was doing the same thing. And it was. The water looked like it was coming up 7 or 8 inches, and the pool was splashing out as well," said Musmanno, who lives in Belle Chasse, a New Orleans suburb.

"My neighbor actually thought there was an alligator in the pond. My neighbor's son went out there and said, 'It ain't no alligator,'" Musmanno said. "The water was going back and forth for about a half hour. It was kind of spooky."

The earthquake, centered 90 miles south of Fairbanks, hit at 1:13 p.m. Alaska Standard Time, or 4:13 p.m. in Louisiana, said Bruce Turner of Alaska and Tsunami Warning Center.

Alaska State Troopers received a report of one injury. Spokesman Greg Wilkinson said a man in Mentasta broke his arm after slipping on stairs during the quake.

The earthquake occurred on the Denali Fault and had a shallow depth, said John Lahr, geophysicist at the National Earthquake Information Center.

It is not uncommon for a major earthquake to shake waters hundreds of miles away, Grant said.

"It's just a feature of how energy travels through the earth and it goes to show how powerful that earthquake this was."

The earthquake's strength was no mystery to Paul Martin, Barcia's 59-year-old neighbor in Mandeville.

An iron cleat bolted to his pier he ties his boat to was pulled out when his boat got tossed around.

"The boat started moving, it was being tossed around, up and down, sideways, and it pulled one of the cleats out of the pier," he said.

"At first I thought it was a boat going by, but then I realized a wake wouldn't do that, and I didn't know what it could be," he said. "It was quite a sight. All the boats up and down this bayou were being tossed around like little boats in a bathtub."

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