Submitted by: Alberta Lee
Leeds, Utah
November 1995

Location at time of earthquake: Leeds, Utah

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I live in Leeds and yes, we got very shook up here.
We have a neighbor who lives on main street in Leeds who was up and in the kitchen at the time. He said he thought the refrigerator was going to fall on top of him. Other people in the area had thousands of dollars of damage done to their homes.
I thought you might be interested in the fact that our well and our neighbors' well and the wells in Hurricane and Toquerville were all affected in one way or another.
The morning after the earthquake our neighbor, Rex Montgomery called us on the phone and asked if we had run any irrigation water that morning yet. He said the water was all muddy and the flow from his well had increased almost double. So we turned on our irrigation water and sure enough, it was muddy and a great increase in the water flow. So you could say, to us the earthquake of 1992 was an unexpected blessing as far as our water supply was concerned.
The city of Hurricane water supply from existing wells was also muddy. I don't know if they had a change of water supply or not. I was told that some well or spring in Toquerville lost some water pressure, at least I heard of one that did.
We own some property on the east of Leeds. Part of this property has a mountain with a plateau on top. On the west side of this mountain facing the town of Leeds a large fissure opened up. The length of it must be 300-400 feet. We took a picture of it. You can see the line along the mountain but you don't get the real effect of what it looks like unless you climb up and see first hand.
I was told the St. George temple had damages that had to be repaired.
Some homes in Hurricane had quite a lot of damage.

Submitted by: Ora Frei
St. George, Utah
November 1995

Location at time of earthquake: St. George, Utah

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The '92 earthquake shook cans and bottles off my food shelves in the basement. The sound was roaring. I was sleeping in the basement and was sure everything was coming down on top of me. A horrible feeling.
The pictures fell off the fireplace mantle upstairs; there was a crack around one wall in the bathroom. It was a worse experience than the small quakes we felt in California in the forties.

Submitted by: Sylvian Birt
St. George, Utah
December 1995

Location at time of earthquake: St. George, Utah

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All Shook Up - September 2, 1992!

Yes indeed it woke me up. Having lived in California all my life until we moved here to St. George, Utah in 1990, one would think that an earthquake would be "old hat" with me. Wrong! I was by myself, my husband having passed away a few months before. I let out a screech and pulled the sheet over my head! Not the right way to react to an earthquake, from an "old pro" no less, but that is just what I did.

When things calmed down a little, mostly me, I took a tour of the house and found little damage, other than pictures on the walls a little askew, and a large picture, 4 foot by 2
foot, which should have been OVER the sofa, had slipped off the wall and was now BEHIND the sofa!

A few months before this happened I had gone to a ceramics class and made a Wedding Urn that I was so proud of having made myself. This is the urn that has two spouts, one on each side. The quake shook the urn off the shelf and of course one of the spouts got broken, but only on the backside, so I still have it on the shelf, only turned slightly so the break doesn't show!

Submitted by: Sara Atkin
St. George, Utah
November 1995

Location at time of earthquake: St. George, Utah

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We live one block west of Brigham Young's home in the center of St. George. We were awakened at 4:26 a.m. as were all of our neighbors by the quake of '92. I don't know if the age of the houses in this area caused more damage than those some distance from here or not. Many of these houses have rock foundations and adobe walls and they date into the last century. I was impressed by the cracked walls in the house across the street West. It is adobe, but only about 45 years old. I told everyone for the following week that they should see Herald Cox's house. About that time my granddaughter, who lives with us, asked if I had noticed the crack in her room. It went from the floor to the bottom of the window, started above the window and continued to the ceiling.
I had antique dishes thrown from china cabinets and broken, figurines fell from windows, and crockery scooted forward on shelves in a separate guest room. Several of the crocks fell, some 10 feet, but none were broken. After my granddaughter's revelation I started looking through my own house to find seven of our nine rooms had sustained damage. One crack was wide enough to emit light from the outside and another was diagonal across a 4x8 sheet of sheetrock. I have repaired all but in one room; there are hairline cracks about my kitchen window and one across the ceiling. There was enough damage, that I question what will happen the next time.
I own three other houses, two near here, and one in Ivins. As best I know nothing happened to any of them.
Our granddaughter was 12 at the time. She was the most excited about the event when it happened. Many of my neighbors had fruit cellars in their basement. Bottles and bottles of food fell to the floor where it broke. There was lots of cleaning up for several days. I have a cellar under this old house but the things stored there were in the cartons the bottles came in. They were fine.
My husband was from St. George. He moved us here from Phoenix in 1963. We purchased a small ranch on the Beaver Dam Wash, about 45 miles northwest of here. In the summer of 1964 (I think) probably in August, we felt a real quake out there. My daughter, 12 years old, and I had driven to a field a mile or so up the canyon from our house to change the irrigation water. We were out in the field when we felt the tremor. As we looked south down the canyon we could see a mushroom cloud rising. There was a vertical shale cliff between where we were and our house, and some of the face had shaken loose and fallen.

When we drove back down the canyon we could see what had happened. At the house, our boys were digging a rock out of a post hole. It loosened just when the shaking started and they thought they had caused the whole thing. My husband had a similar tale to tell.
That afternoon my husband and daughter came to town where everyone was talking about the earthquake. We had two good aftershocks that day, and they continued for 30 days. A week later a foreman and his wife from another ranch near by were in town for supplies. She saw a big old van loaded with equipment from MIT. She waited around to talk to the occupants. They told her they were looking for a disturbance near Zion Park. They were recording shocks every minute and a half. She told them what was happening out where we were. Eventually she heard that they had located the epicenter 8 miles west of our house, over in Nevada.
For several weeks especially at night when everything was quiet, one of my kids would yell "here comes one", then the house creaked, and we would all feel the motion. Our cabin was new and built of 2x6 lumber, so we heard what went on but there was nothing to see. The ranch house where the other people lived was adobe, and it cracked everywhere. We had no electricity or phones so we had no contact with other people to know how far these tremors were being felt.

Submitted by: Connie Snapp
Springdale, Utah
December 1995

Location at time of earthquake: Springdale, Utah

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We were awakened by the Sept. 2, 1992 earthquake. All the damage it did to us was to knock a jar of pickles off the shelf. It was different than the others we've experienced. Instead of a wave motion which makes one feel nauseated, this felt as if a giant were holding our house.
Most of the damage in Springdale was caused by a slide. I have pictures that I could send you, if you are interested.

Submitted by: Glen Blakley
St. George, Utah
September 1992

Location at time of earthquake: At home in St. George, Utah

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"Z"Z" 4:26 a.m. "Z"Z"
A big loud noise awoke my wife, but not me, but "Z"..a loud grinding noise was taking place as my wife asked, "What is that?" The bed shook like someone shaking it‹but a 100 x's harder. "It's an earthquake," I said. "Oh God protect us, " I prayed (very scared). 6 seconds had passed. "I hope this was not the "Big One" in California. If it is, there is nothing left," I told my wife. We turned the lights on & hopped out of bed, went to the kitchen, and picked a couple things up. By that time the kids were with us. I checked several rooms & I was concerned about an aftershock. I had been in lots of quakes in Japan, even a couple in Kentucky, but this was different. It scared the daylights out of me. I had always experienced the rolling type of shaking, not the rapid back & forth shaking. By 4:28 a.m. we had the TV on. After a couple of minutes they mentioned the earthquake in Nicaragua at 7 p.m. the night before. I believe they were connected. We went back to bed at 4:45 a.m., but not to sleep. We had one pot broken. It was from Japan & in a box. Some drawers were opened and things on the floor; paintings crooked on the walls, etc.

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