The Night of Terror — 1959 Hebgen Lake Earthquake

Just before midnight on August 17, 1959, a magnitude-7.3 earthquake dropped eighty million tons of mountain into the Madison Canyon, dammed the river, and killed twenty-eight people. This demonstration tells that night on a map and then asks the question a resident would ask next: what would it mean for my property?A presentation that is data, not video. The opening sequence flies the live map through the night's chronology — the epicenter, the fault scarps tearing the surface, the slide, the campground where most of the dead were, and Earthquake Lake rising behind the debris dam as an animated fill. It is scrubbable and pausable, and because the timeline is a data file rather than a rendered clip, adding a stop to the story is a content edit the client can make without the contractor.Evidence you can interrogate. Three maps over the same corridor: first-hand accounts placed where they happened, the Forest Service interpretive signs with their full inscriptions, and a then/now swipe between 1950s aerial photography and current imagery. The historical layer is 47 public-domain USGS single-frame aerials, georeferenced and mosaicked for this project.A hazard check that answers a personal question. Address or parcel lookup against live Montana Cadastral…