50 years ago today: Sylmar Earthquake

[Pilawt]

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-02-09/sylmar-earthquake-1971-memories-los-angeles

I was sixty miles away in Newport Beach, and it rolled me out of bed.

The tall, skinny control tower at Long Beach had just recently been built. It was a foggy morning. The lone controller on duty found himself being thrown about in the tower cab. He could see nothing outside but flashes of light from transformers blowing. He set a new world record for the five-story downstairs run. The rest of the day controllers worked the country's fourth busiest airport with a battery-operated radio in the parking lot while the structure was inspected for damage.

 

[Tom-D]

I was at Pt.Mugu taking my shower, I grabbed the sink to hang on, but the sink came off the wall.
there I sat sink in my lap.

 

[kayoh190]

Man, and people think I'm old when I talk about the Northridge earthquake!

 

[GRG55]

Man, and people think I'm old when I talk about the Northridge earthquake!

You young pups...haven't seen nuthin' hardly.

I was in Yellowstone National Park with my parents, as a 5-year old on a driving/camping vacation on August 17, 1959. We were in a motel cabin that evening and I remember the aftershocks still going on the next morning shaking everything, and believing the cars in the parking lot were moving towards the cabin. The Park Rangers organized convoys and escorted us out of the park over some seriously damaged roads. My Dad was one of those people that never got too excited about anything, so we ended up heading east to the Black Hills to see Rushmore

The 1959 Hebgen Lake earthquake (also known as the 1959 Yellowstone earthquake) occurred on August 17 at 11:37 pm (MST) in southwestern Montana, United States. The earthquake...caused a huge landslide, resulted in over 28 fatalities and left US$11 million (equivalent to $96.48 million in 2019) in damage. The slide blocked the flow of the Madison River, resulting in the creation of Quake Lake. Significant effects of the earthquake were also felt in nearby Idaho and Wyoming, and lesser effects as far away as Puerto Rico and Hawaii...

...During the earthquake the surrounding landscape dropped as much as 20 feet (6.1 m) and shockwaves caused numerous seiches to surge across Hebgen Lake for 12 hours...Although magnitude estimates for the 1959 earthquake vary (the USGS recorded the quake at both 7.3 and 7.5 now calculated by the ISC as 7.2 Mw) the 1959 earthquake is comparable to the 1906 San Fancisco earthquake as one of the strongest earthquakes in North America, behind the 1964 magnitude 9.2 Good Friday earthquake in Alaska...​

 

[Ghery]

We still lived in Davis, CA at the time and I don't remember feeling that one. But, I was only 7 at the time.

I sure remember the Loma Prieta quake in 1989 in the Bay Area. The epicenter of that one was about 6 or 7 miles from our house. I was still at work in Cupertino when that one hit, but when I got home there wasn't much left standing in the house. What a mess. When the Cypress Street section of the freeway collapsed in Oakland one of the people killed was the architect who had designed the seismic upgrades to the building I was sitting in (saved my life, I'm sure) and one of the people pulled alive from that collapsed freeway was the wife of a second cousin of mine. That one was a 6.9 or 7.1, depending on which source you read.