Earthquake Stories

Last week I wrote about the dates and sizes of Fallon’s 1954 earthquakes. Since then, I have dug up a few firsthand memories of the quakes, preserved in Oral Histories held in the Churchill County Museum and Archives. 

During the 1950s, Margaret Estlow was employed at the Naval Auxiliary Air Station, now NAS (Naval Air Station) as a fiscal accountant. Later, in the 1960s, she became Welfare Director for Churchill County. When the July 6, 1954 quake struck, she was living in Fallon: “It was in the middle of the night…And it was a-rolling; it was like the ground did this (up and down waving motion with hand). …I came to work at NAAS on the morning after the earthquake, and NAAS was a mess because those sailors didn’t know anything about earthquakes and a lot of the lockers had fallen over and there were sailors with broken legs and what have you. [Twelve sailors stationed at NAAS were injured in the quake.] And I went to work and had to have a physical before I went to work. And the doctor was a young physician who had been at sea. And he had to give me a physical examination, so the secretary to the captain had to sit in on it…because he couldn’t examine me without a woman being there. So he starts into giving me this examination and I got tickled because I could see he was so embarrassed and I said, ’You hate this worse than I do, don’t you?’ And he said, ‘I haven’t seen a woman for two years. I’ve been at sea. You look healthy. I’ll pass you.’ …So, I went to work the day after the earthquake.”

Cousie Nelson, music teacher in the local schools for many years, was at her home at 727    Williams Avenue (now Just Country Friends) when the July 6 quake struck: “I had my nephew visiting there at the time. And he was only five years old so I rushed in and picked him up out of the bed and stood in a doorway…my son had to fend for himself. However, we had no structural damage in our home. I did have to go over and hold on to the guppy aquarium because the water was sloshing out of it, and the standing lamp was waving around, and some ceramic figures on the fireplace fell off and broke.

…I found out that the fire walls on some of the buildings were gone. I can tell you better what had to be replaced. The second story of the Elks Club had to be replaced. The second story of the Overland Hotel had to be torn down to the first story. …the Fraternal Hall front building had to be replaced, and the back end of the Fraternal Hall fell off twice and you can see to this day where it was replaced.

We took a ride out in the country, and there was a crack right down the middle of the Stillwater Road going down toward Stillwater. …The Bank Club had to be torn down on Maine Street, and the Corner Bar had to be torn down…. Most of the chimneys in town that did not have a flue lining had to be replaced.” 

Ruth Walker worked for many years in the office of the Churchill County Sheriff: “The San Francisco paper called the sheriff’s office to see how bad it [the earthquake] was, and I answered. They said, ‘Did you feel it?’ And I says, ‘Yes. I couldn’t tell whether I was afloat or afoot. The mortar from between the rocks and this building is clattering down behind the safe.’ I could hear the rocks and there was a couple of places where you could see daylight between the rocks…. One bunch of juveniles—we had four or five boys in there, and they were going to escape. They were picking the mortar out from between the rocks and then they were flushing it down the toilet.” 

William “Bill” Boman was a well-known local banker: “We had all those shelves filled with canned fruit. Peaches, pears, apricots, and it [the pantry] has a concrete floor. Even the roof was concrete, and those shelves were emptied…. The canned food just kept [hitting the floor], the glass, everything was broken. It took us a good day shoveling up the glass. It was a very pungent odor in there. Canned fruits a total loss.

Let’s hope the end of the current swarm of quakes is in sight.

Please send your stories and ideas for stories to [email protected].