The Great Quake: How the Biggest Earthquake in North America Changed Our Understanding of the Planet

by Henry Fountain

  Copyright © 2017 by Henry Fountain

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  crownpublishing.com

  CROWN is a registered trademark and the Crown colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 9781101904060

  Ebook ISBN 9781101904077

  Maps by Mapping Specialists

  Cover design by Michael Morris

  Cover photography: Associated Press/AP Photo

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Maps

  Map of Alaska

  Map of the Alaska Earthquake of 1964

  Chapter 1: Altered State

  Chapter 2: Under the Mountain

  Chapter 3: An Accident of Geography

  Chapter 4: Clam Broth and Beer

  Chapter 5: The Floating World

  Chapter 6: Spiking Out

  Chapter 7: Before the Storm

  Chapter 8: Faults

  Chapter 9: Shaken

  Photo Insert

  Chapter 10: Stunned

  Chapter 11: The Barnacle Line

  Chapter 12: Rebuilding

  Chapter 13: Deep Thinking

  Chapter 14: Acceptance

  Chapter 15: Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes and Suggestions for Further Reading

  Additional Sources

  About the Author

  To George and Doris

  Riding shotgun beneath the clouds in a rattling De Havilland Otter, George Plafker gazed down upon an Alaska he’d never seen before.

  A geologist with the US Geological Survey, at the age of thirty-five Plafker was already something of an old Alaska hand. Though he was based at the Survey’s offices in Menlo Park, California, south of San Francisco (and with his wife, Ruth, had a modest house nearby where they were raising their three children), as a field geologist with its Alaska branch Plafker had spent many summers in the forty-ninth state. He was accustomed to exploring the backcountry for days at a time with little more than a rock hammer and a field notebook, some C rations to stave off hunger and a gun to ward off bears, studying and mapping rock formations to better understand, describe and catalog the state’s immense mineral resources. To a degree Plafker even looked the part of an Alaskan sourdough, lean and solid with a shock of wavy black hair swept behind half-moon ears, brown eyes and a large nose above a nothing-fancy mustache. His huge hands looked as if they’d be more at home holding a lumberjack’s ax or prospector’s shovel than a compass and hand level.

  In his time in Alaska, Plafker had come to realize he didn’t much care for the vast tundra of the central and northern parts of the state. Much of this land was what the Russians had named taiga: the boreal forest, thick with conifers and willows and birches and, to his mind at least, essentially impenetrable. Even if you could somehow get around the terrain, interior Alaska was boring, geologically speaking. You could search across an entire quadrangle—about fifty square miles—and never find a rock outcropping, he said. To Plafker, that was a colossal waste of time: outcroppings were a geologist’s bread and butter, the key to understanding what the land was made of.

  Southern Alaska—the grand arc of land from the Alaska Peninsula in the southwest, up through Cook Inlet and Anchorage and southeast to the Panhandle, encompassing Kodiak Island in the Gulf of Alaska and the smaller islands of Prince William Sound—was more to his liking, and it was here he had done most of his work. The region was alive with rocks that a geologist, or anyone, could see. These were rocks that had been pressure-cooked for millions of years, shoved down, lifted up, ground and muddled and re-formed and folded over and under and this way and that. Some of them—the dark, slaty ones that were so jumbled as to lack much of what a geologist might consider character—Plafker and others affectionately referred to as “black crap.” Together with other kinds of rock they formed the region’s signature feature—its steep-sided mountains that, where they met the sea, formed deep, narrow fjords. What’s more, the mountains were draped by glaciers and laced with rivers, all of which wore at the rocks, grinding them into coarse gravel and fine silt and carrying it all down toward the sea in vast washes of sediment.

  Bush pilots had flown Plafker across this geological wonderland too many times to count, dropping him off at some remote lake or beach or God-knows-where location with instructions to pick him up a week or so later. But in all of his time looking at southern Alaska from the air, he had never seen anything like this.

  Plafker had arrived in Anchorage, the state’s biggest city, from the Lower 48 the day before. In the late afternoon of the day before that—March 27, 1964, Good Friday on the Christian calendar—Alaska had been rocked by an enormous earthquake. No one knew precisely how strong it was. Of the state’s two seismographs, one, in Sitka, had been disconnected at the time and the other, in Fairbanks, had gone haywire, the fury of the quake proving too much for it. But there were reports that the shaking had lasted the better part of five minutes, which is an eternity for an earthquake. In the great San Francisco quake of 1906—a defining catastrophe in the history of the United States—the ground had shaken for perhaps sixty seconds. The duration of shaking is an imprecise measure of a quake’s power, but the longer the ground shakes, the greater the likelihood of widespread destruction.

  Anchorage, from what Plafker had heard, had been hit hard. Whole blocks of the downtown were in shambles, with buildings and the streets they sat on torn apart by the tremors. One of the city’s best residential neighborhoods was a jumble of tortured earth, toppled trees and splintered houses. The count of dead and injured in the city was unclear, but at first brush the numbers did not seem staggeringly high. Anchorage residents, though, had clearly been through quite a ride and had been terrified. Soldiers were patrolling a swath of downtown to keep the city from descending into panicked chaos.

  But there were reports of greater death and destruction elsewhere. Much of this appeared to be due, not to the shaking per se, but to tidal waves that the quake had spawned. A coastal town in Northern California, two thousand miles away, had been hit by waves that had drowned an untold number of people. Closer to home, radio reports from Kodiak Island in the Gulf of Alaska suggested that more than one tidal wave had hit the island. The ports of Seward, on Resurrection Bay, and of Whittier, on Prince William Sound, were both said to have been severely damaged. But the most haunting news was coming from two other places in the sound: the port of Valdez, which sat in relative isolation at the head of a long fjord, and the small native village of Chenega, on an island of the same name.

  The radioed reports about Valdez (pronounced val-DEEZ) seemed almost unbelievable: a long stretch of the waterfront, including docks, canneries and warehouses, had collapsed into the bay in an instant, taking more than two dozen residents with it. Valdez appeared to have suffered the largest loss of life of any Alaskan community—far greater even than Anchorage, which was many times its size. At Chenega (pronounced chuh-NEE-gah), a tidal wave had destroyed everything except the village schoolhouse on top of a hill. Along with their homes, a third of the villagers had been swept out to sea. There seemed to be little doubt that when the full
toll of the disaster was known, Chenega would turn out to have the highest proportion of loss of life, by far, of any place in the state.

  —

  Plafker had come to Anchorage, along with two other Survey geologists, Arthur Grantz and Reuben Kachadoorian, to begin figuring out exactly what had happened. He’d had an inkling that things were going to be different when he’d flown in the day before on a Pacific Northern Airlines flight from Seattle. For one thing, the airline had announced that the plane would be landing at Elmendorf Air Force Base on the northeastern outskirts of Anchorage because the international airport southwest of downtown was closed. Its control tower had toppled in the quake, killing an operator unlucky enough to be working on Good Friday.

  That was unusual enough. But what Plafker saw from the airliner as it approached Anchorage was truly otherworldly.

  He had flown into Anchorage enough times to be familiar with the usual flight path. Approaching the city from the southeast, planes have to get over the Chugach Mountains, a string of peaks that arcs from southwest to southeast and serves as a kind of shield protecting interior Alaska. The easiest air route over the Chugach was at Portage Pass, forty miles southeast of Anchorage. Just south of the pass was the small port of Whittier.

  Like much of the coastline in southern Alaska, the area around Whittier was often covered by a sheet of low clouds, as wind-driven air picked up moisture from the water that then piled up on the seaward side of the Chugach. Today was no exception. But looking out the window of the plane as it slowly descended toward Anchorage, Plafker was amazed to see a large, perfectly round hole in the clouds where Whittier should be. It was as if someone had taken a giant paper punch to the cloud layer.

  It was only later, when Plafker saw the destruction of Whittier firsthand, that he put two and two together. Rising hot air, he realized, had created the hole in the clouds; when he’d flown over it, Whittier had been on fire.

  Plafker and his colleagues landed at Elmendorf that afternoon, less than twenty-four hours after the earthquake. They were shown to officers’ quarters—their civil service ratings made them colonels in the eyes of the military—and issued bunny boots and other cold-weather gear; although it was technically spring, southern Alaska was still blanketed in snow, and temperatures could easily hover at freezing or below. Then it was time to meet with the commanders of Elmendorf and the army base next door, Fort Richardson, to discuss the situation. The officers were happy to have the three scientists, even if they didn’t know much about them.

  When the quake occurred, Plafker and Grantz had been in Seattle, 1,500 miles to the southeast, at a two-day meeting of the Cordilleran Section of the Geological Society of America. Grantz was an older Alaska hand than Plafker. He had begun at the Survey in the late 1940s, a time when packhorses were still sometimes used for Alaskan fieldwork. He was at the Seattle conference to deliver a paper about his work dating rocks from the Chitina Valley, in the Copper River region southeast of Prince William Sound. Plafker, not scheduled to give a talk, had come to mingle and learn.

  Late in the afternoon on Friday, the first day of the conference, word started spreading among the attendees about an earthquake in Alaska. The reports were sketchy, and there was little sense at that point of the scope of the disaster. But then a couple of scientists who had taken a break from the meeting to visit Seattle’s biggest tourist attraction—the 605-foot-tall Space Needle, built for the 1962 world’s fair—came back to the conference. From the observation deck 520 feet up, they reported, they had felt the tower sway. This must be one heck of a quake, Plafker thought.

  That evening, back in his hotel room, Grantz got a call from the Alaska branch office in Menlo Park. George Gryc, the branch chief, was on the line suggesting that, given Grantz’s and Plafker’s knowledge of Alaska, they should immediately fly up to Anchorage. Kachadoorian, an engineering geologist with the branch who knew more about the impact of geology on structures, would fly up and join them. Grantz and Plafker had packed for only a two-day trip, so before going to the airport Kachadoorian would stop by their homes and pick up some fresh clothes from their wives.

  Gryc was an Alaska veteran—he’d done some of the early geological mapping of the Brooks Range, in the Far North, during World War II—but he’d worked elsewhere within the Survey as well, including time at the agency’s headquarters in Washington. He understood the Survey’s strengths and weaknesses. He knew that the Alaska branch didn’t have any real earthquake experts. But then again, neither did any of the Survey’s other branches. Earthquake science, after all, was a young and small field. What the Alaska branch did have that was invaluable were people who knew how to get around the rugged state, who had gone up its creeks and walked its ridges, who wouldn’t be spooked by the isolation of the backcountry or the prospect of running into a bear. Grantz and Plafker were two of them. Get on the next plane, he told them.

  So here they were, listening to the military commanders’ concerns. The bases had not been too badly damaged in the quake—although one of the barracks was now uninhabitable and the roof of a hangar had partially collapsed. But the officers were worried about the impact on other installations around the state and on the communications infrastructure that tied all of them together. In 1964, less than eighteen months removed from the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union was as frigid as ever, and Alaska was the Western Front, just fifty-five miles from enemy territory across the Bering Strait. The military had spent billions of dollars on listening posts and radar systems designed to detect incoming Soviet bombers or ICBMs. Communications were largely through a series of relay towers that dotted the state, and the generals were worried. Clearly the violent shaking had caused large-scale land movement, as they could see in Anchorage, where in the residential neighborhood that had been destroyed the land had been thrust forward. Presumably this kind of movement had happened elsewhere, the commanders said, and while so far it seemed that communications were unaffected, they were worried that that might change. With further tremors or settling, the communications systems, which required precise alignments of the network of towers, might be in jeopardy.

  There were other concerns too. The only road from Anchorage to Seward, the two-lane Seward Highway, had been extensively damaged. The port was now effectively cut off to vehicles from Anchorage and the rest of the state. The military needed to know what it would take to reopen the link. The Alaska Railroad, a lifeline for the fledgling state’s economy that brought shipborne cargo from Whittier and Seward into the interior of Alaska, had been heavily damaged and was shut down as well.

  The geologists had concerns of their own, most urgently about the potential for catastrophic flooding. There were many large rivers in southern Alaska, and if one or more of them were blocked by a landslide the result could be disastrous. A landslide would act like a natural dam, blocking the river and allowing water to build up behind it. But sooner or later the pressure of all the water would prove to be too much: the water would overtop and erode the blockage and would hurtle downstream in a raging flood that could wipe out any river communities. Plafker and the others had to find out if there were any major blockages and, if so, what could be done about them—divert the water, perhaps, or, in the worst-case scenario, move people out of harm’s way.

  The scientists’ plan was to spend up to two weeks assessing the situation as best they could, with the goal of devising a full program of field research that could begin in the late spring and summer, when the ice and snow would be gone and surveying on the ground would be possible. The commanding officers asked how they could help. The geologists had a ready answer: aircraft and pilots, so they could do basic reconnaissance flights and land at affected areas, if possible, for a closer look.

  That was why, on Sunday afternoon, two days after the quake, Plafker found himself in the Otter, a workhorse of a plane that, while grimy and noisy, was more than adequate for reconnaissance work. With him were Grantz and a pilot,
an army lieutenant named Jones. Kachadoorian, with his interest in the effects of the quake on buildings and other structures, had gone off in a vehicle to get a close look at the damage in Anchorage.

  The Otter had taken off from a small airfield at Fort Richardson and was soon over Cook Inlet, the large body of water that connects Anchorage with the Gulf of Alaska to the south. The pilot banked left and the plane headed southeast down Turnagain Arm, an inlet of the inlet, toward Whittier and Seward. Along the northern shore of the arm there was just enough flat terrain between the water and the steep slopes of the Chugach for the Seward Highway and the single Alaska Railroad track.

  The road and rails were a mess. The first rockslide had occurred not far from Anchorage, and there were others along the route, as well as snow avalanches. In places debris had completely buried the road and the railroad tracks; in other places it had just pushed them toward the water and torn them up, so that the steel rails were bent and tossed about like so much spaghetti.

  Plafker had a camera, a 35mm Olympus with some high-quality lenses, to document the destruction. Between shots he took notes on what he saw. Behind him, Grantz held an unwieldy sheaf of topographic maps that he used to track the plane’s progress, marking the location of what Plafker was documenting on film.

  It soon became apparent that more than rockslides had caused the damage. Both the road and the railroad crossed bridges over small rivers and streams on their way down Turnagain Arm, and Plafker noticed that something strange had happened to them. Some of the bridges had toppled over, as might have been expected given all the shaking, but some of them hadn’t. Instead, their decks had popped up. To Plafker they now looked, in a way, like dilapidated versions of those quaint arched footbridges that are common in gardens in Japan. Some of the toppled bridges, he realized as he looked more closely, had popped up before they’d fallen over. To him it appeared that the land had shaken so much that the riverbanks had, in effect, turned to mush. The banks had moved, sliding toward the rivers and taking the bridge pilings with them. As the pilings had gotten closer to one another, the bridge decks, which were still connected to the pilings, had been squeezed. They had nowhere to go but up.