’QUAKE ONE OF HEAVIEST

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30739, 1 May 1965, Page 15

’QUAKE ONE OF HEAVIEST

(N.Z.P.A.- Reuter—Copyright) SEATTLE, April 30. One of the heaviest earthquakes ever recorded in the Pacific North-west jolted four States and British Columbia yesterday, killing at least five people and injuring many others.

Salvage squads toiled through the night amid the debris. Wide-spread damage was reported from many parts of America’s northern Pacific seaboard and from British Columbia, in Canada. A worker at a flour mill in Seattle was killed when a water tank on top of a building collapsed and sent part of a wall hurtling down on him. Another man was killed in Seattle when he was struck by falling debris. Several other deaths were reported in the city but these were not immediately confirmed.

Most of the injured reported in Seattle were people battered by falling rubble when stones were dislodged from the top of some of the city’s older buildings. Three elderly women died of heart attacks in Seattle. Tacoma and Olympia, in Washington state. The ’quake was felt in a belt some 600 miles long and 400 miles wide. Reports poured in of swaying buildings, broken windows and shattered power and water lines.

In Vancouver, British Columbia, panic-stricken people fled into the streets for safety

as the buildings rocked above their heads. The earthquake knocked the seismograph out of commission at the University of Washington, but seismologists elsewhere said the 'quake read 6.5 to 7 on the Richter scale. This would make it the strongest in this area since

one on April 13, 1949, which registered 7 on the scale, killing eight people and causing property damage estimated at 25m dollars. Although there were no immediate estimates, it did not appear that the damage from yesterday’s shaking would be that extensive.