Forty Seconds of Fear

At five minutes before noon one day last week, the whole Pacific slope of the State of Washington, and border areas of Oregon and British Columbia, began to twitch. Seattle's 42-story L. C. Smith Tower and hundreds of lesser structures began to groan and sway. Automobiles waltzed crazily on highways. Bridges creaked. Chandeliers swung like pendulums. Dishes and bells set up a wild jangling. A million people simultaneously felt shallow-breathed fear.

Eight of them were dead almost as soon as the earth beneath their feet began to lurch. Falling bricks or masonry killed an eleven-year-old schoolboy in Tacoma, an 18-year-old student in Castle Rock, a 70-year-old man in Centralia and a 62-year-old steamfitter in Olympia. Three old men and a woman died of heart attacks. Dozens of others suffered broken bones, bruises or wounds from flying glass.

The main shock of the quake, the most violent and widespread ever to hit the Pacific Northwest, lasted for 40 seconds. When it ended, every activity of the region had been wrenched askew. Hardly an automobile, truck or bus moved; the downtown streets of Seattle, Olympia, Tacoma and other cities were jammed with motionless cars and tens of thousands of people, who had spilled out of doorways, milled between the cars, gazing fearfully upward. Some of the frantic thought of an atom bomb.

A covey of naked rookie cops bolted out of the shower room at Seattle's police training school, reached the street, and bolted back in when they realized what kind of an impression they were making. A 71-year-old woman jumped off a bridge at a hamlet named Tukwila, and had to be fished out of the Duwamish River. Cows bellowed and loped in pastures.

Then ambulance sirens sounded. A babble of scared talk sprang up, and bystanders began to eye the damage. At first the damage looked ruinous. Tons of brick and rubble had cascaded down off old" buildings near Seattle's Pioneer Square, smashing parked automobiles. Great chunks of stonework had been flipped off the state capitol buildings at Olympia. Store fronts and brickwork in dozens of towns had collapsed, a radio tower had snapped, and hundreds of buildings showed cracks in walls and floors.

But as time wore on, the first hasty $25 million estimate of damage dropped to $15 million. And the casualty list seemed miraculously light.

At week's end, from Vancouver, Wash, to Vancouver, B.C., there was only one topic of conversation--the quake. But, most agreed, the Pacific Northwest had been pretty lucky.

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