Earthquake rocks Seattle

Thousands flee buildings as tremor is felt 700 miles away

Special report: natural disasters

A state of emergency has been declared in Seattle after a major earthquake shook the US Pacific north-west yesterday, causing one death, serious injuries and widespread damage in the city. Tremors were felt as far away as Salt Lake City, Utah.

A man died of a heart attack north of Seattle as a result of the quake, Washington state Governor Gary Locke said. Twenty-five people were injured in the Seattle area, five seriously, according to Jim Mullen, Seattle Director of Emergency Services. Across the state, 163 people were reported injured, three seriously.

Mr Locke said losses could run into billions of dollars. Seattle's corporate pride - Boeing, Microsoft and Starbucks - all sustained damage.

The earthquake, which was measured at 6.8 on the Richter scale, closed the Seattle-Tacoma airport, prompted searches for people trapped in buildings, sent thousands of office workers scurrying into the streets, and brought a technology conference being addressed by the head of Microsoft, Bill Gates, to a dramatic halt.

It struck just after researchers in California had announced that the risks of major damage from a quake in the area were greater than had been expected.

The new assessment was prompted by findings in the wake of last month's devastating earthquake in Gujarat, India, which killed about 20,000.

The epicentre of yesterday's earthquake was about 36 miles south-west of Seattle and 11 miles north-east of the state capital, Olympia.

One of the most powerful quakes in the area for more than half a century, it caused extensive damage in central Seattle and elsewhere in the city.

Flights in and out of the city were immediately halted, as were all train arrivals and departures, while the damage was assessed.

Twenty-five people were injured, four seriously, but the initial reaction was that the city's earthquake preparations had proved largely effective, particularly considering the force of the earthquake.

The tremor began at 10.54am and lasted for about 45 seconds. It caused alarm in Seattle's highrise office buildings which swayed visibly.

"I work downtown, in one of those 'new and earthquake-improved' buildings on rollers or whatever they are, and boy, this thing moved," a local resident, Alicia Kamenick, said.

"I'm still a little freaked out, but it sounds like we were lucky. It was deep enough so there wasn't as much damage as there could have been."

President George Bush described it as "a serious situation" and said he had contacted the federal emergency management agency (Fema), which handles such events, and had been assured that everything was under control.

It emerged yesterday that one of the budget cuts proposed by the new administration is $25m (about £17m) from a Fema programme which prepares communities to deal with earthquakes.

The mayor of Seattle, Paul Schell, said that the preparations made for such eventualities appeared to have paid off. "The city's infrastructure seems to have come through this in pretty good shape," he said.

About 20,000 people lost power as a result of the shock, according to the local utilities board. It was also felt south of Seattle in Portland, Oregon, and picked up by siesmologists in California.

A strong earthquake also shook the capital of El Salvador yesterday. It was reported to be of a magnitude of 5.4.

Tim Radford writes: The Seattle earthquake should not have come as a shock: researchers calculated 10 years ago that while the US north-west seemed fairly stable, it could be subject to the worst seismic violence of all.

The earth's crust is broken into huge plates of rock, grinding and bumping against each other, and most earthquakes and volcanoes are at the spots where they meet.

Seattle, with Vancouver, Canada, and Portland, Oregon, is where a plate of ocean basalt meets the plate bearing the American continent.

Further south, around San Francisco and Los Angeles, two plates slide past each other with an almost continuous rumble of shocks.

Seattle and the cities near it are subject to different forces. Under Seattle, the ocean basalt dives deep into the earth's mantle, throwing up the Cascade mountain ranges, and several volcanoes.

One of these, Mount St Helens, exploded with awesome force in 1980.

But even then, Cascadia was thought to be a relatively safe place. Then seismologists began to ask themselves why there were huge layers of peat buried beneath dunes of sand far inland. The only sensible answer was that tsunamis - so called tidal waves - had repeatedly inundated the coast.

Japanese scientists looking at a sequence of tsunami damage found written evidence of one that washed over their main island, Honshu, 300 years ago.

They calculated that it could only have come from a massive earthquake which must have occurred along the coast near modern-day Seattle on the night of January 26 1700.

Their US colleagues calculated that this quake must have been a magnitude of 9 - an intensity that would release thousands of times more destructive energy than anything seen in history in California.

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