Residents in Utah and Nevada to British Columbia and from the Pacific Coast to western North Dakota felt the tremor. It was centered on two faults paralleling the north shore of Hebgen Lake, just 7 miles east of the slide. "The earthquake was the biggest in the history of the western interior of the United States,'' said Bob Smith, a University of Utah geophysics professor who operates the seismic network that checks the Yellowstone area's pulse. Two more people in the area who were hurt died later of quake-related injuries. In the end, only seven bodies were found. Forest Service campground at a speed ofĪbout 100 mph. The 8,000-foot mountain poured an estimated 85 million tons of rock on the U.S. When stillness finally returned, 26 people camped about 10 miles northwest of here were buried alive when a mountainside collapsed in the Madison River Canyon. What Schied felt was one of more than 1,300 aftershocks that were to occur over the next two months. "I fell flat on the ground and grabbed it in terror, trying to stop it.'' "The darn horizon was moving back and forth,'' Schied recalled. "One man kept asking me, 'Do you feel it, do you feel it?' '' Pat Schied, a smoke jumper who parachuted into the Madison River Canyon the morning after the quake, recalled in a recent interview.ĭuring his search 40 years ago, Schied took a break from looking for people trapped in a 400-foot-deep slide of rocks and debris. Three of an Idaho woman's four children and her husband died. Children were separated from their parents in the near-midnight darkness. People stumbled to safety through a landscape altered by rockslides, rising water, downed trees and broken-off roads. Survivors of one mammoth quake-induced landslide greeted rescuers with horror stories of a wild, black night after the earth ruptured with the force of a 1-megaton nuclear bomb. "In several mighty heaves, Mother Earth reshaped her mountains in violent response to an agony of deep-seated tensions no longer bearable,'' the sign reads. 17, 1959, when an earthquake measuring 7.5 on the Richter scale jerked and jolted an eight-state area for 30 to 40 seconds. A sign straddling a corner in this Yellowstone National Park gateway commemorates the night of Aug.
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