ANCHORAGE — It’s a natural landscape unlike I’ve ever—and I suspect you’ve ever—encountered. Large and angular chunks of land pushed up in a confusing manner, with birch and spruce trees and other vegetation growing up and out of the ground fractures.

It’s a bright and warm mid-April evening and there’s still some snow on the ground, but not too much to prevent me from exploring an unusual municipal park. Pools of water, some iced over, make navigating the fractured land challenging.

If you didn’t know you were in a place called Earthquake Park, you might not necessarily realize you’re in a landscape that was radically and suddenly reshaped in the span of five minutes during a massive disaster more than 50 years ago.

During the magnitude 9.2 Good Friday Earthquake on March 27, 1964, the largest seismic event ever recorded in North America, part of Anchorage’s Turnagain Heights neighborhood was destroyed when a bluff deteriorated and slid toward Cook Inlet, a few miles from downtown.The land here dropped as much as 40 feet and slid as far as 2,000 feet away from its original location.

For being so large, that megaquake and tsunami only killed 139 people thanks to Alaska’s low population density. But it shows just how ferocious and destructive the forces of nature can be.  

Following the 1964 disaster, the municipality left the land that would become Earthquake Park as is to be reclaimed by nature. An interpretive side trail, with detailed signs explaining how and why the ground failed, allows you to better appreciate the reality that the ground we stand on is not always stable.

It also serves as a reminder that disasters big and small can strike without warning and that state and local governments, working with federal partners and community stakeholders, have to be ready to respond.

— Michael Grass

ANCHORAGE — While Anchorage and the rest of southern Alaska would recover from the 1964 Good Friday earthquake, it won’t necessarily take a disaster of the same size and scope to cause major hardship again.

“We are one small earthquake away from a major disaster,” according to Mayor Ethan Berkowitz, in this video produced by Cities of Service, a Bloomberg Philanthropies program which has been working on resiliency issues in Alaska’s most populous municipality, specifically food security. Anchorage is one of 10 cities participating in the Resilience AmeriCorps program.

About 90 percent of Alaska’s goods come into the state through the Port of Anchorage, which relies on an aging and corroding pier that sits atop pilings that are now 30 percent of their original wall thickness. There’s a modernization effort underway. But Anchorage and most of the state will have to rely on Band-Aid repairs until a replacement pier is fully funded and built.

“We’re incredibly dependent on logistics to make sure that we get our food here in Anchorage. We have food supplies on the shelves of three to four days. If there’s a disruption. We have a major problem,” Berkowitz says in the video.

ANCHORAGE — Driving around Alaska's most populous municipal jurisdiction, community gardens and backyard greenhouses are not unusual features to see. They're one way local residents can bolster their food security.

“Alaska Grown” isn’t just a source of local pride, it’s a reminder of the necessity to cultivate local food sources when when you live in an isolated place that regularly experiences major earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, in addition to often cold and bitter winters.

Anchorage’s Mountain View neighborhood, which is home to the most diverse census tract in the nation, has been an area of focus for the municipal government due to its high unemployment and higher percentage of residents who don’t have access to a personal vehicle.

Cross-sector collaborations in Anchorage have focused on community development and resiliency issues in Anchorage

Cities of Service, for instance, has worked with Mountain View Elementary School to build a community greenhouse, a collaboration that’s helped educate children about the importance of cultivating local food sources.

A neighborhood farmers market, which launched last year on a two-acre property along Mountain View Drive controlled by the Anchorage Community Land Trust, has become an area of focus for community development as well.

Anchorage is one four U.S. cities the Daniel Rose Center for Public Leadership is working with this year in its annual fellowship program, along with Grand Rapids, San José and Washington, D.C. Each city is working on its own land-use challenge and in Anchorage, much of the Rose Center’s work is focused on Mountain View and better leveraging the farmers market site as a “community hub and garden” while building better, more walkable connections with neighborhood assets, including a new health clinic, grocery store, boys and girls club, middle school and library.

When building a more resilient community, you often think of strengthening physical infrastructure to withstand natural disasters and disruptions. But as the work to make Mountain View and Anchorage more resilient shows, it also means about strengthening the ability of the community to help sustain itself the next time Alaska’s primary port is knocked offline.

— Michael Grass

PORTAGE, Alaska — Driving along the Seward Highway south from Anchorage, there’s a lot of stunningly beautiful scenery to look at going by out the window. Snowcapped mountains flank Turnagain Arm, a narrow waterway that separates most of the Kenai Peninsula from the North American continent. There are plenty of turnouts to stop and take photos.

At the far eastern end of that waterway, the Seward Highway makes a big U-turn curve crossing the vast mudflats where the Twentymile River, Placer River and Portage Creek meet saltwater.  

Off in the distance, you can see the Whittier and Portage glaciers up in the mountains. But closer to the water level, you might be able to see the legacy of North America’s largest-recorded earthquake while zooming by at 55 mph.

This is where the settlement of Portage once stood. On March 27, 1964, the magnitude 9.2 Good Friday Earthquake struck south central Alaska, devastating the 49th State’s most populous region.

While Portage was never a large town, it was an important junction for transporting goods and services between Whittier, a port on an arm of Prince William Sound, and some of the local mining settlements that began to pop up in the 1890s.

But that important junction sat on soft soils that not only liquefied during the quake, but also sank about 8 to 10 feet in the process, which took less than five minutes.

According to this account of the earthquake’s impacts on Portage:

An eyewitness who was in a service station on the west side of the highway said he and a companion ran out the east door of the building as the concrete floor began to crack. They got about three feet out of the building when a crack about three feet wide opened between them. He said that cracks formed about each of them, leaving each man on a small island about three feet wide that moved up and down. He said it was like riding an open elevator. As he went down, the other man went up. And then they’d pass each other going in opposite directions. He said that the earth all around them broke into similar pieces and that as the blocks of frozen earth moved up and down, the cracks also opened and closed causing muddy water to spout as high as 50 feet. He said after the shaking stopped, water filled the open cracks.

Today, you can still see the remains of a few buildings going by on the Seward Highway.

Additionally, there are also “ghost” forests—ashen-looking tree trunks that rise out of the marsh and mud. When the ground sank, the root systems were exposed to saltwater, killing the trees.

While Portage wasn’t totally erased by the quake, it was submerged at high tide and had to be abandoned. In the recovery from the quake, Alaska had to raise a portion of the Seward Highway, which sank into the mudflats along with Portage.

Fifty-three years after the Good Friday earthquake, this unusual corner of Alaska is a reminder about just how vulnerable certain places can be for human habitation, and how quickly they can vanish from view.

— Michael Grass