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Editor's note: This article is part of a series reviewing Utah and national history for KSL.com's Historic section.
SALT LAKE CITY — 1934 was an interesting year in Utah to say the least.
It remains the state's hottest year on record and its third-driest, as drought conditions crept into a state already struggling through the depths of the Great Depression. It's also when one of the largest earthquakes in state history rattled northern Utah and the Wasatch Front.
That earthquake, centered north of the Great Salt Lake, sent tremors as far south as Richfield, as well as into parts of Idaho, Nevada and Wyoming exactly 90 years ago Tuesday. Two people died and thousands of buildings were damaged, per state and federal reports. It was later determined to be a 6.6-magnitude earthquake.
As the Utah State Historical Society wrote in 1995, reviewing the earthquake's history, it also caused "panic and concern for many in northern Utah."
Morning wake-up call
Much like Utahns may remember from the 5.7 magnitude earthquake that shook the Wasatch Front nearly four years ago, the 1934 earthquake struck relatively early in the day.
It was centered within the Hansel Valley near the small — and now abandoned — town of Kelton, Box Elder County, shortly after 8 a.m. on March 12, 1934. It produced many aftershocks over the next few months, including magnitude 5.6 earthquakes in April and May that year.
"Dishes fell, plaster was cracked and furniture shifted about in rooms," the Ogden Standard-Examiner reported that day. "One woman said she was awakened when her bed rolled on its casters and bumped a rocking chair."
The outlet reported other people's reactions to the incident. One woman said she was "startled" when her typewriter slid into her lap and the doors of the file cabinets around her in the building she was working in "shook open."
Two people died in fluke incidents. The Salt Lake Telegram reported at the time that Ida Venable Atkinson, a 21-year-old Ogden woman, died from a heart attack triggered when the earthquake started shaking. State historians note that she had been bedridden by illness for nearly two weeks before the earthquake and was "affected perhaps by the shock" of the violent earthquake.
Charles Bithell, a 55-year-old pipe fitter for Salt Lake City's water department, was critically injured when the trench he was working in collapsed after all the shaking, He died a day later at LDS Hospital.
Newspapers reported all sorts of other impacts. Utah schools were closed the rest of the day after an aftershock was reported later in the morning. Children returned to class two days after the earthquake.
Civil Works Administration workers were in the middle of painting the murals at the top of the Utah Capitol rotunda when it struck, causing the scaffolding they were on to sway back and forth. But it held up and the workers weren't injured. And much like in 2020, damage may have been reported to the Angel Moroni statue atop the Salt Lake Temple.
"Opinion was divided this afternoon on whether the Angel Moroni ... had been topped and turned slightly on his base," the Deseret News reported on the day of the earthquake, adding that temple architects believed the shaking turned the trumpet "a few points south by east." The trumpet completely fell off the statue in 2020.
The Utah Geological Survey recorded over 2,300 structures with at least some damage in a final report. Many Utahns reported falling chimneys, broken windows, cracked walls and falling plaster, according to Sheryl Peterson, a former spokeswoman for the University of Utah Seismograph Stations, who compiled a history of the event for the university.
She added that it also led to "several fissures or cracks" in the land near the epicenter and it broke a water main in nearby Snowville. Two public buildings were abandoned, including a three-story brick building at Utah State University that was reportedly "split from top to bottom."
Final lessons learned
In many ways, the 1934 earthquake helped fill in several major knowledge gaps.
Researchers had started to suspect in the 1800s that there was some sort of fault activity in Utah, but they didn't know as much about the Wasatch Front in 1934 as experts know today. The Utah State Historical Society notes the 1934 earthquake became "one of the first in the Utah region to show evidence of historic faulting."
Charles Richter, inventor of the Richter scale, even studied the earthquake and used it in "defining his famous magnitude scale" that was unveiled a year after the event, state historians wrote.
Experts started placing seismograph stations around Utah to research and study earthquakes afterward, Chris Merritt, Utah's historic preservation officer, wrote about the earthquake.
Those investments back then are still yielding a better understanding of earthquakes today. For example, the 2020 earthquake helped researchers adjust the location and depth of the Wasatch Fault based on all the information collected by seismographs.
