Karen Carlbom Strand was 9 when her raisins danced a jig on her school desk.
She was laughing at the oddity while her teacher panicked, kicked off her high heels and yelled for students at Jefferson Elementary School to line up by the blackboard.
As the ground beneath Tacoma shook, children walked down rickety wooden stairs and outside into the schoolyard.
“It was really hard to hang on because everything was moving so much,” Strand, now 79, recalled.
The earth rocked for an entire minute, starting at 11:55 a.m.
A second wave came 18 seconds later, felt across more than 150,000 square miles from British Columbia to Salem, Oregon, and over to Idaho and Montana.
Even though the needle was knocked off the seismograph at the University of Washington, it recorded vibrations for 21 minutes.
Four people in Washington state died of heart attacks brought on by the earthquake. Four others, including an 11-year-old Tacoma boy, were killed by falling rubble.
It was the largest earthquake to hit the state since 1872. Officials say the next big one could hit in the next 50 years.
“Even the deep-fault earthquakes are doing significant damage, and these are the smallest of earthquakes,” said Maximilian Dixon, hazards and outreach program supervisor for the Washington State Emergency Management Division. “When we get a big one, woooo, that’s going to be bad.”
‘Extensive Damage’
Scientists initially ruled the 1949 quake a 7.1 magnitude. About a decade ago, earthquake experts re-analyzed the data from April 13, 1949, and decided it was closer to a 6.8 temblor.
“It’s fair to say that of the three significant earthquakes in this area, it did the most extensive damage,” said Harold Tobin, director of the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network.
Statewide, damage estimates totaled $25 million.
Eight buildings at the State Capitol in Olympia needed repairs. More than 30 school buildings used by 10,000 students were rendered unsafe. At least 10,000 chimneys fell into yards.
Puyallup City Hall and Puyallup High School had to temporarily close. Two houses on Fox Island were found floating in Puget Sound. Water mains burst, railroad service had to be suspended, rubble fell on parked cars, giant cracks split open city streets and business windows shattered.
A large sandy spit jutting north of Olympia disappeared.
At the construction site where the new Tacoma Narrows bridge was going up, a 23-ton block of steel tumbled 507 feet from a tower into the water below.
Three days after the quake, a 200-foot section of a hill crumbled near Salmon Beach and caused a small tsunami.
In Puyallup, geysers broke through the surface near East 23rd and G streets through a 60-foot jagged crack and shot water and fine white sand from the old Puyallup River bed five feet into the air.
As people struggled to clean up after the earthquake, Tacoma mourned 11-year-old Marvin Klegman.
A crossing guard at Lowell Elementary School, officials knew Klegman died after being struck by falling bricks.
It would be decades before Kelcy Allen, a kindergartner at the time of the quake, came forward to tell how Klegman died while leading him to safety out of a basement at Lowell.
When bricks started raining down around them, Klegman threw himself on top of the younger boy.
Allen said he’s lived a full life and never stops thinking about the little boy who protected him.
“I have used every bit of my time,” Allen told The News Tribune in 2015. “I figured I better not waste it, because some little boy gave up his existence for me.”
A bronze statue went up outside Lowell in 2003 showing two boys holding hands and running for their lives with rubble on the ground around them.
Another Possible in 2030?
There have been two major earthquakes in the region since 1949, but neither matched its geological upheaval.
One came the morning of April 29, 1965. It rattled the ground for 45 seconds, killing seven and causing $12.5 million in damages.
That temblor was a 6.7 magnitude.
After that was the Nisqually, a 6.8 quake which struck Feb. 28, 2001 and shook the earth for 40 seconds. It injured about 400 people, but there were no fatalities.
