Earthquake territory

In the wake of the recent rattling in Fallon, a backward glance at our earthquake history is in order. The year was 1954. The earthquakes were quite large, all three of them sending the Richter scale over 6.5. The first occurred on July 6; the second, on August 23; and a third, on December 16.

The July 6 quake (designated online as the Rainbow Mountain earthquake) left quite a trail of damage in Churchill County. It measured 6.6 on the Richter scale. Several people were injured and scores of businesses damaged. On Maine Street, the upper story of the Bank Club fell into the Glad Shop below, and stones from the Woodliff building tumbled onto First Street. The back wall of the I.H. Kent Company was moved outward. The Fraternal Hall suffered damage to the masonry. Throughout the valley, chimneys toppled and irrigation canals cracked, spilling water onto fields and roads. Coleman Dam was put out of commission altogether for a while. Twelve sailors were injured at the Naval Auxiliary Air Station when heavy steel lockers fell on them. President Eisenhower declared the Newlands Project a Federal Disaster Relief area, opening the door to federal funds for reconstruction. 

Reactions in the community ranged from panic to laughter. One man in the Island District reported that his first thought was, “At last, the Russians are here.” A Fallon police officer reported that following the quake, the streets filled up with people without any clothes on. The owner of a bar at Salt Wells said, “The last time I saw my bar, it was headed toward Hawthorne.” (“In Focus,” Volume 13, p. 99)

As with the recent swarm of quakes, the number of recorded aftershocks (or, in the case of the 1954 cluster, foreshocks) was high. A news article printed on July 31 reported that 108 separate shocks had been recorded in Stillwater following the July 6 “big one.” Then, on August 23, another one, designated as the Stillwater earthquake, hit, measuring 6.6 on the Richter Scale. By then, the earthquake damage in the county had exceeded one million dollars. The new quake also totally wrecked much of the repair work done after the July quake. But earthquake season was not yet over. 

On December 16, yet another major quake struck the county, this time centered about 30 miles east of Fallon, in Dixie Valley. It has been designated the Fairview earthquake and was the largest of the three quakes, measuring 7.3. The shaking intensity, as measured on the Modified Mercalli intensity scale, reached X (extreme). The quake was felt strongly in Reno, and in Carson City, plaster fell from the State Capitol Building. Fault lines could be seen for about twenty miles along the eastern slope of the Stillwater Range and in regions around Fairview Peak. Artesian waters welled up from the depths of the earth here and there throughout Dixie Valley, and dry springs were given new life. The dramatic visual aftermath of the earthquake still attracts geologists and visitors to the area.

On March 23, 1959, what is categorized as an aftershock to the earlier Dixie Valley quake, reached 6.3 on the Richter scale.

I have always bragged that in Fallon, we don’t have to live with the fear of hurricanes or tornadoes. But we do live in earthquake territory. 

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