The 9.2-magnitude seismic shocker known as the “Great Alaska Earthquake” that struck on the evening of March 27, 1964, was the largest recorded earthquake in U.S. history. More powerful than the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906, it crumpled roads and toppled buildings in Anchorage, sent shock waves and a tsunami south toward the U.S. Pacific coast, and caused the Space Needle in Seattle, Wash., to sway ominously. According to a recent U.S. Geological Survey reexamination, it was powerful enough that it “caused the entire Earth to ring like a bell.”
The earthquake, despite its seismic significance, never attained the same historical repute as the one that had devastated the bustling city of San Francisco a half-century earlier. Alaska in the mid-1960s was sparsely populated and had been a state for only five years. But the quake deserves recognition for the disaster policies cobbled together in its aftermath, policies that would have a profound effect on the trajectory of American disaster policy into the 21st century.
The earthquake hit at a moment when federalism still dictated the contours of disaster responsibility. State, local and private agencies (most important, the American National Red Cross) were still the front line of response and recovery. Though the federal government had robustly mobilized for big events such as the 1906 earthquake and the 1938 New England hurricane, the ongoing federal role was limited primarily to reconstruction of public facilities and providing low-interest loans through the Small Business Administration to homeowners and business to rebuild.
Even those policies were relatively recent, dating to the 1930s and codified in the 1950 Disaster Relief Act. The presumption remained, at least on paper, that the federal government would remain a secondary player in meeting disaster needs.
In Alaska in 1964, however, the earthquake thrust together a young state government and federal officials with expansive views of national power and responsibility. Four days after the quake, President Lyndon B. Johnson was informed in a phone call by Kermit Gordon, the Budget Bureau director, that Alaska would struggle to recover: “As you know, it’s a very weak state government that just doesn’t have the tools and the skills and the expertise that other states have, and I gather the leadership in the state government is not very good.” In an era when the federal government was energetically compensating for states’ inability or unwillingness to meet national standards, from civil rights to pollution, an expanded federal effort in Alaska was a no-brainer.