A GIS Representation of 1964 Tsunami Damage in Crescent City, California

The March 1964 Alaska tsunami caused major damage in Alaska and also impacted the west coast of North America. Crescent City, California, 3000 km away from the source region, suffered the greatest damage outside Alaska. Twenty-nine blocks of the downtown and harbor areas were inundated and nearly 300 homes and businesses damaged or destroyed. In the aftermath of the tsunami, numerous maps, reports and photographs of the impacts in Crescent City were released, some by engineers and scientists, and much by individuals and the popular press. The Del Norte Historical Society has a large amount of archival material (photographs and eye witness accounts) from the tsunami, much of which has never been thoroughly examined or correlated with other reports. In this study, we assemble all of the available information from these disparate sources into a GIS framework in order to examine the 1964 Crescent City damage in a systematic way and provide a quantitative framework for others who are modeling tsunami impacts. Using ArcGIS 10, old aerial photos, tsunami inundation maps, and photographs were georeferenced to produce GIS layers of 'before and after' Crescent City. Hyperlinks were created to connect photos with their locations in present day. We reference damage to a layer showing Magoon's 1968 map of inundation depth and extent. Structural damage falls into four main groupings: structures floated off of foundations, damage by impact from debris, pressure differences from water infilling structures, and fire. 15 structures were moved off of foundations, all in the direction of the outgoing flow. We also create layers of the structures of the modern city and the predicted tsunami run-up from a Cascadia event. Magoon, Orville T., 1966, Structural Damage by Tsunamis, Proceedings, American Society Civil Engineers, Specialty Conference on Coastal Engineering, Santa Barbara (California), Oct. 1965, pp. 35-68