Stucco repair costs in Anchorage

Under Anchorage, the ground itself is the hazard to watch. Federal geologists say the landslides that came with the 1964 earthquake showed that earthquake-triggered landslides are one of the greatest geologic hazards in the city, and they have mapped them. Deep slides like 1964's come only with great subduction-zone quakes, roughly every 300 to 900 years. Shallow slides are mapped for strong shaking with about a 10 percent chance in any 50 years. If your house sits near a bluff, look at those maps before you spend money on the walls.

The 1964 quake set that bar. That March, a magnitude 9.2 earthquake struck about 75 miles east of the city and shook for about four and a half minutes. It remains the most powerful earthquake recorded in U.S. history, the USGS says, and Anchorage took heavy property damage. Landslides wrecked homes at Turnagain Heights and destroyed the Government Hill elementary school.

Most homes here came after the big one. Nearly half the houses in the metro were built in the 1970s and '80s, Census estimates show, and fewer than one in two hundred before 1940.

They have been tested since. On November 30, 2018, a magnitude 7.1 earthquake struck near Point MacKenzie, just across Knik Arm from the city.