By
The Associated Press
SEATTLE - A day after the region's strongest earthquake in a half-century, most western Washington residents headed for work, school and their daily business as usual yesterday, grateful at their close call.
Still, the cost of Wednesday's 6.8-magnitude quake continued to climb as crews checked roads, bridges and buildings for damage. A preliminary damage estimate reached $2 billion, said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash.
"I'm so glad there were minimal injuries," she said as she toured the state with Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Joe Allbaugh.
Earlier, Gov. Gary Locke had told the NBC "Today" program the damage could go into the billions of dollars"when you calculate not only property damage and the cost of repair but also the economic impact of lost wages."
But like Murray, he stressed that things could have been far worse.
"We're just really, really lucky,'' Locke said after surveying the region by helicopter.
The earthquake, centered about 35 miles southwest of Seattle, was felt as far away as southern Oregon and Canada. Because the quake was 33 miles underground, the Earth's crust absorbed much of the shock, scientists said.
The state Emergency Management Division tallied 272 people with injuries directly linked to the quake, but all but a few were minor and none was considered critical.
A woman in her 60s died of a heart attack at about the time of the quake, but it was unclear if the death could be attributed to the quake.
Two minor aftershocks - a 3.4 and a 2.7 - were recorded early yesterday at the same location of the initial quake, said University of Washington seismologist Bob Norris. Neither was widely felt and no additional damage was reported.
Seattle began yesterday morning with most businesses and schools open. Some roads remained closed as crews checked for damage, complicating the morning commute.
Boeing, the region's largest private employer, reopened most of its offices and factories, though its facilities at Boeing Field south of Seattle were closed due to damage to the airport.
Locke, his wife and two children were among the relatively small number of residents forced out of their homes. Cracks appeared in the brick walls of the Governor's Mansion in Olympia - just 11 miles from the epicenter - and books and pictures flew off the walls, he said. The state Capitol also sustained damage.
But officials said the millions of dollars of investments the state and cities put into stabilizing buildings and bridges apparently paid off. While brick and shattered glass littered the streets, there was no widespread structural damage.
Most buildings constructed in Seattle since the mid-1970s were built to a uniform code designed to withstand strong earthquakes.
Seattle's Space Needle, where more than two dozen people rode out the quake from 600 feet above the city, was built to handle a 9.1-magnitude quake. Twenty minutes after the shaking stopped, the elevators and structure, a landmark dating from the 1962 World's Fair, were declared safe.
"It was like a rolling ship in the ocean," said Daryl Stevens, who was on the observation deck. The tower's facilities director, Rick Harris, declared it "the best ride in town."
"The code worked, but it wasn't tested to the full extent," said Bill Steele, a seismology lab coordinator at the University of Washington.
The earthquake hit at 10:54 a.m., 35 miles southwest of Seattle, according to the National Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colo. It was the largest quake to hit the region since a 7.1 quake near Olympia that killed eight people in 1949. A 6.5 earthquake hit in 1965, injuring at least 31 people.
"The ground felt like it was Jell-O, cars were swaying, trucks were swaying," said Tim Jacobson, who works at Seattle Air Cargo.
In Seattle and in Portland, Ore., 140 miles from the epicenter, the shaking sent people diving under desks and running into streets. Showers of bricks crushed cars, and three people in the Seattle area were seriously injured when they were struck by falling debris.
Hundreds of thousands of people across the region temporarily lost power. Seattle-Tacoma International Airport was closed for several hours, and U.S. Highway 101 buckled in several places.
However, the state Department of Transportation said there were no reports of major damage to bridges, as San Francisco faced after the deadly 7.1-magnitude World Series quake in 1989. In Washington state, a $65 million retrofitting program that began in 1990 improved more than 300 bridges.
"We would look at the retrofit program as having paid for itself and shown a success," said Ed Henley, a bridge management engineer. Though there were no collapses, some highways and bridges sustained lesser damage and were being checked for damage.
The earthquake struck the day President Bush proposed to kill a federal program designed to help communities protect themselves against the effects of natural disasters.
Bush's budget recommends saving $25 million by ending the Project Impact disaster preparedness program, saying it "has not proven effective." Seattle was one of the nation's first Project Impact communities.
Vikram Prakash, an associate professor at the university's architecture department, said the devastation from January's 7.9-magnitude quake in India was partly due to contractors skimping on materials. Nearly 20,000 people died in that earthquake, and entire cities were leveled.
Building codes here require structures to be able to withstand certain amounts of movement. If they hadn't been followed, Prakash said, "I'm sure we would have seen a lot more (damage)."
