Voices from a rattled region

In the juror lounge on the seventh floor of the King County Courthouse, Nancee Poole, a Kirkland saleswoman, was waiting to perform her civic duty when the building began to shake.

"I thought, 'That's a big guy walking past me,'" Poole recalled.

For a few seconds, Poole froze. Then a fellow juror came to her aid.

"Next thing I know," she said, "I had a hand on my shoulder and this guy was guiding me under a desk."

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As the building rumbled, a lot of people started to cry.

"They were shocked and they couldn't move," said Monique Porter, who works for a research contractor in the clerk's office. "They needed to be pushed."

Luckily, she said, "there were more calm people than nervous people."

Outside the Central Building at Third Avenue and Marion Street, people huddled and hugged one another. Several cried. One man clapped his hand over his mouth.

Some of the old building's walls cracked from floor to ceiling, and plaster dust filled the halls.

"This was my first earthquake. I'm from New Orleans," explained Rebecca Fenton, who was in the building at the time.

"My boss is from L.A. and she just started screaming at me to get under the doorway," Fenton said. "But stuff kept falling off the wall and the wall started cracking and she said let's just get out of here."

At Fourth Avenue and Cherry Street, Kelly Kramer and her friend Jessica Hasson were handing out free samples of Pepcid antacids.

"Everything started shaking. But we didn't know what to do because we were standing out here," Kramer said. "So me and my friends just held on to each other."

On the 50th floor of Two Union Square, reporters and photographers were waiting for the start of a news conference about a major cocaine bust involving a Canadian fishing boat.

Suddenly, the building began to sway as if it were a small boat in heavy seas. A white powder falling from shaken ceiling tiles began dusting the conference room.

A Canadian reporter cursed. "I'm from the prairies," he said. "I'm not used to this."

Reporters, Coast Guard officers and other federal law enforcement officers huddled under a door jamb as the building quivered.

Charles McLeod, acting special agent in charge of the Customs Service in Seattle, joked that "the federal government will be accused of engaging in cheap theatrics for the press."

Then, the shaking stopped, and photographers and reporters rushed to the windows.

Outside, office workers were waiting on sidewalks; a chimney had fallen on an old apartment building; and traffic on Interstate 5 ground to a halt.

Many tried to call their offices on cellular telephones, but none of them worked.

At the Seattle Aquarium, the shark-feeding hour was about to begin when the ground rumbled.

Tourist Ragan Izzarelli, visiting from Carson City, Nev., immediately huddled over her 4-month-old son, Trevor, who was in his stroller.

Water in the fish tanks started to slosh sideways and splash on the floor, and the fish swam toward the bottom of their tanks. Two groups of schoolchildren were evacuated from the building.

"It was so dark in there," Izzarelli said. "The kids were screaming, the adults starting running. There was panic. But they did a great job getting people out."

Fewer than 100 visitors were inside the aquarium during the quake. Once they were evacuated, the aquarium closed for the day.

A main saltwater pipe broke, but workers quickly rerouted another pipe to fish tanks. No fish were injured.

"It's an incredibly scary experience because the things you grab onto are moving," said Bill Arntz, the aquarium's director. "It's clear that there's nothing you can do, and you keep hoping it will stop."

A few miles north, at Woodland Park Zoo, some animals sounded warnings seconds before the quake hit.

Chai, the elephant who gave birth this winter, was just about to have a blood sample drawn when she bolted upward, startling her handlers.

During the rumbling, the elephants trumpeted and Chai's nearly 4-month old baby took shelter under her mother's belly, where she gave a frightened roar.

The giant glass windows in the elephant barn rattled and shook.

Moments before the earth began to shake, the gorillas screamed and ran for shelter at the back of their exhibit. During the earthquake, orangutans climbed as high as they could into the trees of their exhibits.

No zoo animals or visitors were injured, and all the buildings remained intact.

At Double Bluff off Whidbey Island, nobody on Gary Krein's fishing boat noticed the quake. But oddly enough, the salmon quit biting just before 11 a.m.

"It could have been anything," Krein said.

"But we had a good little bite going, from 9:30 to 11. Ended up with four fish, but we didn't get a thing after 11."

From 220 feet above Seattle, Howard Cooley, a crane operator for McCarthy Construction, watched the ground shake below

"It was a long shake," he said. "I could see the columns of the building shaking. I didn't really look around when I was up there, I was concentrating on what was going on right under me."

Cooley, who was at Western Avenue and Cedar Street helping erect an apartment building, has spent more than 40,000 hours operating cranes. Although yesterday wasn't his first earthquake in a crane, it was definitely the biggest.

"It was a real shaker."

At 26th Avenue Northwest and Northwest 57th Street, on the construction site of a Ballard duplex, 27-year-old contract painter Kilian Wicks was 40 feet up in the bucket of a "Snorkelift" cherry picker painting trim when the quake slammed him repeatedly against the siding.

"I was pretty scared. And I slopped some purple paint where it wasn't supposed to go," he said. "I lowered myself to a second floor balcony and jumped onto it."

At the University of Washington, faculty members at Sieg Hall --sarcastically dubbed "Pride of the UW" -- have been complaining about falling bits of masonry for years.

In 1999, the department even started sending pieces of the building home with prospective students.

So the fact that Sieg weathered yesterday's quake was a source of both pride and disappointment.

Ed Lazowska, chairman of the Computer Science and Engineering Department, received an e-mail from a colleague at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology:

"I'm sorry to hear that Sieg is still standing. Better luck next quake."

On the top floor of Seattle's tallest building, Kent Minaker quickly decided he wanted out.

So Minaker, a waiter at the Columbia Tower Club, took the stairs -- all the way down from the 76th floor.

Minaker heard plates crashing as he slipped into the stairwell, then clutched both railings to balance against the "whipping effect" as he made his way to the ground floor

"I felt like I was in a giant tree, the way the building was swaying," he said. "It didn't slow down until we got to about the 60th floor."

The quake even frightened Jean Campbell, who in 1949 experienced one of the biggest quakes in Seattle history.

Campbell was in the West Seattle senior center when yesterday's quake struck.

How did it compare to the 1949 earthquake?

"Pretty significant -- because of the length of the quake and severity," she said. "It felt like it was never going to stop."

At Whittier Elementary School in Ballard, the shaking had barely stopped when parents began arriving to check on their children.

They found ashen-faced students lined up in rows behind their teachers on the playground. Although parents were told they could take their children home if they wanted to, only one parent did.

Most of the students were talking loudly, releasing energy after huddling under their desks during the quake.

"I thought it was the end of the world," said one second-grader. "Or God snoring."

In Tacoma, as people scurried for cover, one Pierce County Jail inmate spotted the perfect chance to slip away.

Authorities were still looking late yesterday for Robert Kleest, who faces charges of child rape, assault and attempting to elude police. The 44-year-old Tacoma man was among a group of prisoners being arraigned yesterday morning at Tacoma's County-City Building.

When the earthquake hit, inmates were taken into a stairwell, then into a fenced courtyard of a jail annex.

"In the confusion," said Pierce County Sheriff's Lt. Dave Hall, "this guy managed to go in the opposite direction he was supposed to go."

When officials stopped to count heads, they realized they were one man short.

A deputy prosecutor saw a man fitting Kleest's description leaving through the front of the County-City Building. The man was pulling off his shirt -- a prison uniform with the PCDCC on it, standing for the Pierce County Detention and Correction Center.

Kleest was not wearing handcuffs, Hall said.

He said police called in the K-9 unit in an effort to pick up Kleest's trail, but it was too late.

Kleest is described as 5 feet 10 inches, between 180 and 200 pounds, with midlength brown hair. He has a tattoo on his right arm of a snake with a dagger through it.

On his left arm, officials believe, he has a tattoo of Yosemite Sam.

Back in Seattle, several Seattle businesses capitalized on the opportunity for a little mirth.

On First Avenue, the Lusty Lady strip club posted the invitation: "Come Feel the Earth Move."

At Roxy's Diner at First and Union, a window sign advertised "Earthquake Burgers."

Roxy's owner Peter Glick said the culinary offering was simply a modification of his everything-on-it regular burger "with the everything all shook up."

Construction workers had the most harrowing tales to tell.

Janine Purdue, a plumber with Magnolia Contractors, was working on the roof of the new football stadium when the quake hit. "I thought it was going to come crushing down. I thought I was going to die," she says.

Purdue said one worker was left hanging by his safety harness when the scaffolding beneath him gave out. A crane was used to bring him down.

Another stadium worker, who identified himself only as Craig, was on a hydraulic lift underneath the steel, when it hit.

"I thought the girders had given way," he said. "I panicked. I hit the kill button and the lift stuck. I thought it was my last day."

Darrell "Tyke" Melhart, with Baugh Construction, was in a construction crane, 175 feet off the ground when the ground began rumbling at the Butler Garage Building on Second Avenue and James Street. He said he noticed three waves of strong movement around him and knew immediately what was going on. "I just thought 'Hold on.' I couldn't do anything else," says Melhart.