There was a statement made by a geologist by the name of Anita Harris in John McPhee's book "In Suspect Terrain". In it, Anita experienced the Hebgen lake quake firsthand and gives the following statement because of it:

The solid earth was like a glop of jelly. In the moonlight, she saw soil moving like ocean waves, and for all her professed terror she was collected enough to notice that the waves were not propagating well and were cracking at their crests. She remembers something like thirty seconds of "tremendous explosive noise," an "amplified tornado." She was close to the epicenter of a shock that was felt three hundred and fifty miles away and markedly affected water wells in Hawaii and Alaska. East and west from where she stood ran an eighteen-mile rip in the surface of the earth. The fault ran straight through Culligan's ranch house, and had split its levels, raising the back twelve feet. The tornado sound had been made by eighty million tons of Precambrian mountainside, whose planes of schistosity had happened to be inclined toward the Madison River, with the result that half the mountain came falling down in one of the largest rapid landslides produced by an earthquake in North America in historical time. People were camped under it and near it. Among the dead were some who died of the air blast, after flapping like flags as they clung to trees. Automobiles rolled overland like tumbleweed. They were inundated as the river pooled up against the rockslide, and they are still at the bottom of Earthquake Lake, as it is called---a hundred and eight feet deep.

The fault offset the water table, and the consequent release of artesian pressure sent grotesque fountains of water, sand, and gravel spurting into the air. yet the dam at Hebgen Lake held---possibly because the lake's entire basin subsided, in places as much as twenty-two feet. Seiche waves crossed its receding surface. A seiche is a freshwater tsunami, an oscillation in a bathtub. The surface of Hebgen Lake was aslosh with them for twelve hours, but the first three or four were the large ones. Entering lakeside bungalows, they drowned people in their beds.

The above is followed by some more comparisons and then Anita says the following:

"Apparently, the mountains around here are still going up." Later, she would say, "We were taught all wrong. We were taught that changes on the face of the earth come in a slow steady march. But that isn't what happens. The slow steady march of geologic time is punctuated with catastrophes. And what we see in the geologic record are the catastrophes. ... The evolution of the world does not happen a grain at a time. It happens in the hundred-year storm, the hundred-year flood. Those things do it all. That earthquake made a catastrophist of me."