Earthquake sends rattled Anchorage hotel guests to lobby in robes, underwear
When the earth started to shake the Hotel Captain Cook in downtown Anchorage early Sunday morning, Larry Cobb held onto his drink at one of the hotel's first-floor bars. So did everyone else, he said.
He didn't notice anything break, but the room that houses the Whale's Tail swayed -- back and forth, back and forth. It felt like the building glided about a foot-and-a-half to the right, halted and swayed the other way, Cobb said.
"It was smooth but it was big," said Cobb, the 50-year-old director of curriculum at Kuspuk School District in Aniak. Cobb was attending an education conference downtown along with scores of other educators this weekend, he said. He had a room on the 16th floor of the 547-room Captain Cook.
When Cobb walked into the hotel lobby after the magnitude-7.1 earthquake hit around 1:30 a.m., he said he saw people standing in their robes and underwear. It was packed, he said. The elevators had stopped working and emergency gates on the stairwells had dropped around floor 15, barring people from getting back to their rooms on the upper floors. People could only get down by using emergency stairs, he said, but to get up they would have to wait for staff with keys.
Matt and Julie Stotts, a 46-year-old couple from Wasilla, didn't leave their 14th-floor room when it started to rattle, but they both jumped out of bed. The curtains swayed. Car alarms went off on the street below. It would take too long to run downstairs, Julie Stotts said.
"It was difficult to walk." Julie Stotts said. "I was holding onto the door frame."
"It felt like a mechanical bull," Matt Stotts said. He said the building swayed in one direction before it felt like it hit something that pushed it back the other way.
Outside the room, the couple said they heard frantic yelling. It sounded like it came from a man who didn't know what to do. Matt Stotts looked out of his door's peephole and saw a woman push the man into the stairwell, he said.
Both Cobb and the Stotts said they've never felt another earthquake quite like the one early Sunday morning.
Once Cobb climbed the 16 flights of stairs back to his hotel room around 3 a.m. Sunday, he said every drawer and cabinet had opened, but other than that everything remained in place.
Hubert Rycraw, a manager at the hotel, said around 10 a.m. Sunday that he wasn't working when the earthquake hit but he heard that some guests chose to check out early. He hadn't heard of any damage at the hotel, which was built after the 1964 earthquake.
"We just rode it out," he said.
The earthquake rolled many out of bed in downtown Anchorage, but most of the downtown bars were still doing business when the shaker struck.
James Mooney, general manager at Humpy's Alehouse in downtown Anchorage, said the establishment lost power during the quake, with some glasses and dishes falling and breaking. The bar's adjacent sister businesses, Flattop Pizza and the Subzero Lounge, fared a little better.
"We had to close a little early," Mooney said. "Our computer systems were knocked out on the Humpy's side -- Flattop and Subzero still had their power."
"That was a crazy earthquake, man -- I've been here 20 years, and that's the most powerful one I've felt," Mooney said.
Damage to a transformer outside of the Anchorage 5th Avenue Mall cut power to some shops Sunday, said Kari Skinner, the mall's director of marketing.
Power was on and doors were open at J.C. Penney and Nordstrom later in the morning, but many other stores were dark with their doors locked as several people wandered the mall's common area. Skinner said she hadn't heard of any damage inside of the mall.
Elsewhere downtown, Mike Hines was at an after-party in a suite on the 13th floor of the Sheraton Anchorage Hotel when the quake hit. Hines is from Orange County, California, and is well acquainted with shakers and rollers.
"It was more of a movie experience than a normal earthquake in California, only because I was 13 floors up in the air," Hines said of Sunday morning's earthquake. He called it "an excessive swing." People had trouble keeping their feet under them. Some fell down. Some banged into things. Some cried.
"You really had to hold onto something," he said.
About 40 people were at the early morning party, extending the Scottish celebration known as the Burns supper, in honor of Scotland's national poet, that had drawn about 400 people to the downtown hotel.
"There was a private dinner and quite a lot of Scotch for quite a lot of people," Hines said.
The hotel didn't evacuate guests but his group joined masses walking down the stairwell where some people were screaming. They went outside, but quickly decided it was too cold. Back in the lobby, some people were in pajamas or robes. A couple of men were wrapped only in comforters.
The power was out. People used their cell phone flashlights.
"That was the Southern California Burns Dinner Earthquake Experience," he said.
Later Sunday, he noticed that the toilets in the Sheraton's public second floor restroom has sloshed over.
This big quake could be looked at a test, he said. People learned what falls off the shelves. Businesses learned if their systems needed improvement.
"When nobody is killed or seriously hurt, it's probably a good thing," Hines said. "The plates get a chance to settle in, maybe put off the next one for a while."
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