At least two earthquakes centered 89 miles northwest of Juneau on Friday night were felt by residents in town, although there were no immediate reports of significant damage or injuries.
One earthquake at 7:01 p.m. registered 5.1 on the Richter scale, with a second at 7:44 p.m. registering at magnitude 5.3, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Both were located in the vicinity of Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve.
Juneau residents on social media described various degrees of shaking in different parts of town, from walls shaking and items moving to not noticing it occurred. Some residents in Haines, closer to the epicenter, described the shaking in stronger terms.
Billy Venables, a downtown Juneau resident, said in an interview he was at home when the earthquakes occurred and, while he felt them, “they weren’t intense at all.”
A map shows the center of two earthquakes Friday night near Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve. (U.S. Geological Survey)
At the other end of town at the University of Alaska Southeast the shaking was also noticeable, but not severe, to Joseph Cook, a student assistant in the library.
“I could feel the second one a lot more than the first one,” he said. “I just noticed the (book) carts were rattling a little bit.”
About 150 people were attending an event in the library when the earthquakes occurred. Afterward, among a group of five attendees, only one said he felt the earthquake during the presentation. Colin McGill, visiting the campus to interview for a job, said he’as “hyper-sensitive” to earthquakes because he was in Anchorage when a magnitude 7.1 earthquake struck in 2018.
“I believe we felt it as a mid-three,” he said about the shaking he felt during the two Juneau earthquakes, describing it as more of a rocking than a jolting sensation. “It was a soft one.”
Brian Barth, who moved from the Lower 48 to Juneau in July to become an assistant professor at UAS, said he hasn’t been rattled by an earthquake before and “I didn’t feel anything” during Friday night’s event.
More than three dozen small aftershocks occurred in the region during the weekend, according to the USGS.
Similar earthquakes have been felt in Juneau over the years, including a similar magnitude 5.0 quake northwest of Juneau in 2019 that also caused no reported damage.
A series of stronger earthquakes occurred in 2017, including two exceeding magnitude 6.0, which were centered north of Haines. Some people in that community reported minor damage such as items falling off shelves, but no major incidents.
“That area is kind of riddled with faults,” said Chastity Aiken, in an Empire interview at the time, when she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics and lead author of a 2015 scientific paper that examined the Eastern Denali Fault’s behavior during major earthquakes.
• Contact Mark Sabbatini at mark.sabbatini@juneauempire.com or (907) 957-2306.
