June 24, 1970

At just after 6 am, Alan Woodbury and I were awoken by a massive shaking that almost knocked me out of bed. Alan was quicker than me and I still have an image (faded over the years thank goodness) of him streaking by in his jockies on the way out from our second floor bedrooms! I started to vacate soon after but it was pretty much over by the time I reached the hallway. We had a large crack in a sidewalk at the operational level but other than that there wasn't any damage. Alan ended up talking to the Province newspaper on our radiotelephone while we were having an aftershock later that day. The story made the front page on next day's issue!

Here is a technical disussion about the quake:

This M 7.4 earthquake occurred on June 24, 1970, at 6:09 a.m. It was felt with Modified Mercalli Intensity IV (i.e. rattling dishes, windows and doors) throughout the Queen Charlotte Islands and was felt to a distance of about 350 km on the adjacent mainland and on northern Vancouver Island (Horner et al. 1975). The epicentre was beneath the ocean about 30 km south of the southernmost point of the Queen Charlotte Islands. Observed aftershocks indicate it ruptured the Queen Charlotte Fault in a southerly direction for about 35 km. The faulting mainly involved right lateral strike-slip motion; however, analysis of seismic data revealed that this was the first earthquake in the region to show a significant component of thrusting, which is consistent with the convergent motion between the Pacific and North American plates. A slight swell was observed in Tasu Harbour, 100 km north of the epicentre and about 10 minutes after the earthquake, but no tsunami was observed on tide gauges. The position of the earthquake relative to the great 1949 earthquake to the north (see next section on ‘Destructive Earthquakes’) reveals the existence of a ‘seismic gap’ along the Queen Charlotte Fault that has not ruptured in the past century (Rogers 1986).