"The Place Is Coming Apart"

"Hold on a second," came the voice over a long-distance line from Renton, Wash., to Wichita, Kans., one morning last week. "The building is shaking." Dutifully, Boeing Aircraft Co. Employee Art Malever in Wichita held the receiver and waited. Then Otis Loyles, an employee at Boeing's Renton plant, and the man to whom Malever had been talking, came back on the line. "The place is beginning to oscillate pretty heavily," Loyles said in his best aerodynamic terminology. "Art, I'm getting out. The place is coming apart."

For the next few minutes, Malever listened in horrified fascination from 1,500 miles away while an earthquake shook Renton and nearby Seattle. "It sounded," recalled Malever later, "like someone was in there with a tractor, running over the tops of the filing cabinets and crushing them."

It was far worse than that. In Olympia, 60 miles south of Renton, Washington's Governor Daniel Evans had just finished a cup of coffee at the governor's mansion with Senate Majority Leader Charles Moriarty, and was about to start across the street to his capitol office, when the quake hit. "All I could hear," he said, "was the raining of crystals from the chandeliers in the ballroom." Evans raced to the kitchen, where his two sons, Mark, 1 1/2, and Daniel Jr., 4, were eating breakfast, hustled them and the mansion's other occupants out onto the lawn. Said he: "If it had lasted another 30 seconds, I think we might have had a major disaster."

Worst hit was Seattle, where seven people died in the quake's only fatalities, four from heart attacks. One man was killed by flying bricks and mortar; two others died after parts of a shattered 50,000-gal. water tank fell on them. Elsewhere in the state, chimneys toppled, power lines snapped, roads buckled and bridges swayed. At the capitol in Olympia, the 37-year-old dome cracked, pillars shifted, and fragments of glass skylights crashed down on the legislators' empty chairs.

All told, the damage in Washington ran to $12.5 million, including $2,500,000 in school buildings and $3,500,000 in Boeing Co. facilities, one of which was the Renton plant.

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