Quake baby can’t shake fame

Published 9:00 pm Thursday, April 1, 2004

Kelly Mobeck missed the strongest earthquake ever recorded in North America, but only by hours.

Forty years after the 9.2 magnitude quake devastated Anchorage and other parts of Alaska, Mobeck contacted The Herald to let us know she’s a celebrity of sorts, up north anyway.

Now living in Everett, she was twice featured in Alaska newspapers as the "earthquake baby."

Mobeck was born in Anchorage at 12:03 a.m. March 28, 1964, six hours and 23 minutes after the Good Friday quake. Fifteen people died in the earthquake, and the shock generated a tsunami that claimed another 110 lives, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

She made her entrance into a damaged landscape, but Mobeck doesn’t recall a thing.

"I know the shock from it sent my mom into labor," said Mobeck, who celebrated her 40th birthday on Sunday.

She’s heard the stories, and has Anchorage Times clippings from the 10th and 20th quake anniversaries. "The birthday party to commemorate the quake baby’s 10th year will be at Shakey’s," said the 1974 article, naming a pizza place popular at the time.

Her daughter doesn’t remember, but 75-year-old Lois Arnold will never forget.

"It was a long quake, rolling almost five minutes," Arnold said Wednesday by phone from Anchorage. The USGS estimated the length as three minutes. "Our house had little damage, but we did have a crack in the garage floor. The lawn looked like maybe a mouse under a rug, or waves on water," Arnold said.

Fearing she might have to give birth at home without lights or heat, Arnold learned from a police officer that there was room at Providence Hospital in Anchorage.

"It was scary, we had to drive over one road with a large crack," she said. Kelly, the youngest of five children, was born at the hospital by candlelight.

Everett native Gary Pedigo, 66, was a bank teller in Anchorage in 1964.

"I was working at the National Bank of Alaska on Fourth Avenue," said Pedigo, who now lives in Olympia. Fourth Avenue, a main downtown street in Anchorage, collapsed, dropping everything from lamp posts to vehicles 11 feet below the normal surface.

"I was in a walk-up teller window. I saw a marble slab come off the J.C. Penney building and crush a lady in her car," Pedigo said. "It went on and on and on. I got underneath a desk and stayed.

"Put it in Seattle, you would have lost a quarter of a million people," he said.

At the Pacific Northwest Seismograph Network at the University of Washington, Bill Steele couldn’t say precisely what the losses from such a quake here might be. He did confirm that the Alaska quake was the strongest on this continent in recorded history.

"And 9.2 is the best magnitude estimate," said Steele, the network’s director of information services. "The ways we used to determine magnitude in 1964 were inadequate, but that data has been reviewed.

"The largest recorded event in history was the Chilean quake, a 9.6 in 1960. It caused a tsunami in Japan," he added.

Steele was quick to answer the question he must get all the time. Could it happen here?

"It will happen when our Cascadia subduction zone ruptures," he said. It will? Not just maybe?

Nope, not just maybe. There was a quake in this region in 1700 or so with an estimated magnitude of 9, Steele said. "That was 300 years ago. These earthquakes reoccur about every 550 years, but a number have reoccurred in a 300- to 400-year window," he said.

"To say we’re due implies tomorrow," Steele said. "That’s not the situation. But it would certainly be possible for your Alaska survivor, that first child born, to experience one here."

The whole Northwest coast is vulnerable. "There’s about a 1,000-kiliometer fault from northern Vancouver Island all the way down to Cape Mendocino in California," he said.

"The Juan de Fuca plate locked to North America will break free. It extends off the Olympic Peninsula," he said.

Mobeck, who is married and works as a paralegal, seems shadowed by earthquakes wherever she goes. She lived in Fairfield, Calif., near San Francisco when the Loma Prieta quake hitthe Bay Area in 1989.

She was on campus at Edmonds Community College when the magnitude 6.8 quake rocked this region on Feb. 28, 2001.

Happy 40th birthday, Kelly. Have you considered moving? How about a long, long way from here?

Columnist Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460 or muhlsteinjulie@heraldnet.com.