Disasters In Alaska
Recently, our country has been rocked by images of huge disasters that ripped families from their home and cause loss of life and property. Tornadoes in the Oklahoma. Wildfires in Southern California. Floods along the Mississippi river. The hurricane damage and flooding caused by Hurricanes Rita and Katrina.The taking of many lives by a terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York.
But Alaska is not immune to disaster and has its own list of disasters that have impacted families and communities.
Earthquakes and Tsunamis:
During the evening of March 27, 1964, the area of Prince William Sound, in Southeastern Alaska was struck by a moment magnitude 9.2 earthquake, the largest ever recorded in North America. This vertical displacement generated a major tectonic tsunami that struck the southeast coast of Alaska, the Pacific Coast of British Columbia, and west coast of the United States. As one might expect, damage from the 1964 tsunami was greatest along the southeastern coast of Alaska. Many of the coastal communities along Prince William Sound and Kodiak Island were completely wiped out. In all, tsunami waves generated by the 1964 quake killed 119 people and caused approximately 300 to 400 million dollars in damage to Alaska alone.
On June 15, 1996, Alaskans in the Mat Su Valley experienced the Miller's Reach Fire, which destroyed more than 400 structures and
burned 37,000 acres of land. Recent fires like the Caribou Hills fire on the Kenai Peninsula in 2007 and the Tamarack Fire in Central Alaska in 2006 burned cabins and threatned to evacuate larger communities and filling them with breath threatening smoke..
In the summer of 1967, unusually heavy rains swelled the Chena and Little Chena rivers six feet above their flood stage in Fairbanks. The resulting flooding of downtown Fairbanks and the outlying regions, drove residents to their rooftops and displaced nearly 7,000 people from their homes.
In 1994 the Koyukuk and Kobuk Rivers flooded, causing
significant loss of personal and public properties for hundreds of
people. The Kobuk flooded again in 2006.
In each situation, Alaskan families and their children had to respond to an emergency, sometimes with little warning. Would you know what to do? More importantly, would your children know what to do?
