In 1949, Don Bearwood was 21 and already a Navy veteran. He worked as a draftsman at Seattle Lighting in the city’s Pioneer Square area. One spring day, the place started shaking.
He heard glass breaking as lamps in a display room crashed to the floor. Outside, bricks were hitting sidewalks and cars as parts of buildings collapsed.
“I thought this was surely the end of the world,” said Bearwood, 87, who lives in Gold Bar.
He saw a receptionist dash for the exit, but she fell and stayed flat on the floor. Other workers ran onto Second Avenue. Bearwood braced himself in an office doorway.
“I was trembling so bad I could hardly breathe,” he said Friday. When the shaking stopped — “after what seemed like an eternity,” Bearwood said — sirens began to wail. He went out to see the damage.
The 7.1 magnitude earthquake Bearwood experienced on April 13, 1949, was centered in the Olympia area.
It killed eight people. Victims included an 11-year-old crossing guard in Tacoma and Castle Rock High School’s senior class president, according to the HistoryLink website.
Bearwood, who lived on Seattle’s Queen Anne Hill in 1949, said his memories were stirred by recent coverage of the 7.8 magnitude earthquake in Nepal. About 6,000 people were killed in the monstrous April 25 quake, which also caused a deadly avalanche on Mount Everest.
Bill Steele, a University of Washington seismologist and spokesman for the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network, said the 1949 quake was centered close to where the Nisqually earthquake occurred on Feb. 28, 2001. No one died in the 2001 quake, although about 400 people were hurt.
The 1949 quake was “substantially stronger” than the 6.8 magnitude Nisqually earthquake, Steele said.
Although both were centered south of Seattle, many dramatic photos from the 1949 and 2001 quakes show damage in Pioneer Square. Steele said that’s because of the age and construction of buildings there.
“There were a lot more of those buildings in the 1940s than in 2001,” Steele said, but added that Everett, Seattle and Tacoma still have old construction in need of seismic retrofitting. “The ones with unreinforced masonry are the worst. In Nepal, they didn’t even have masonry. They just collapsed. It’s terrible,” he said.
When the 1949 quake happened, Bearwood’s father, Herb Bearwood, was at work on the Seattle Lighting building’s third floor as shop foreman. Once Bearwood found his dad was safe, they went up another floor and saw that all that was supporting part of the roof were cartons of light fixtures. The building’s north wall was leaning outward by about a foot.
“Needless to say, we got the heck back down,” Bearwood said. The old building at Second Avenue and Main Street was repaired, and still houses Seattle Lighting.
After the 12:55 p.m. quake, Bearwood spent the rest of the afternoon in Pioneer Square with his Kodak Brownie box camera taking pictures of damage.
He wonders if it’s only a matter of time before our region is struck by a devastating quake. Sixty-three people died in California’s 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, which damaged the Marina District of San Francisco and caused the collapse of a section of double-deck freeway. Much of San Francisco was destroyed in the 1906 quake that killed thousands.
“I think we’ve been lucky historically,” Steele said. Since settlers populated Washington Territory in the 1850s, “we’ve had only one big crustal earthquake, and that was near Lake Chelan in 1872,” he said. Close to a magnitude 7, that quake caused landslides and dammed up the Columbia River, he said. “Drunk trappers provided the closest records,” Steele added.
Here’s another worry. There’s potential for another huge earthquake off the coast of Washington. It’s been 315 years since the Great Cascadia earthquake of 1700. It ruptured the Cascadia subduction zone — the overlap between the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate and the North American plate. “It’s locked and loaded, but it might not happen for another century,” Steele said.
The 1964 Alaska earthquake, magnitude 9.2, was also a subduction zone event. Along with the tsunamis it caused, it killed about 140 people.
Bearwood has his memories and snapshots. He has his old Brownie camera and the certainty that in 1949 he was a lucky man. “I was really terrified,” he said.
Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460; jmuhlstein@heraldnet.com.
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