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

by Henry Fountain

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  As seismologists learned when they started compiling more comprehensive lists of earthquakes around the world, Alaska has more than its fair share. Not only does the state have a lot of earthquakes, it has a lot of strong ones. One study in the 1940s suggested about 7 percent of all the earthquake energy released in the world each year was released in Alaska. The quake in Lituya Bay on that July night in 1958 was one of the bigger ones Alaska had experienced, but it was hardly unique.

  Records of quakes prior to the twentieth century are sketchy, given the lack of instrumentation and the nearly complete lack of inhabitants. The first two reported earthquakes in Alaska, noted in accounts by Russian traders, occurred in July and August 1788 and created tidal waves that struck Kodiak Island and smaller islands in the Gulf of Alaska. The August quake was especially destructive, killing an unknown number of natives and drowning hogs on Sanak Island, off the Alaska Peninsula.

  Two more large quakes were reported in the mid-nineteenth century. One, in 1843 near Sitka, deflected the needle on a device used to measure magnetic field intensity. It is thought to be the first Alaska quake to be detected by an instrument, even if the instrument wasn’t a seismometer. Sitka was struck again in 1847; although there is no record of damage or loss of life, this quake was thought to be the largest of the Russian period.

  Earthquake reporting picked up after the United States’ purchase of Alaska in 1867, as volunteers with the Weather Bureau of the federal Department of Agriculture were encouraged to report any shaking going on. Many small earthquakes were reported after that time. Then, on September 10, 1899, a series of very large quakes—including two within thirty-seven minutes of each other—struck Yakutat Bay, on the southeastern edge of the Copper River delta. The shaking was felt from Fairbanks, in the north, to Sitka, down the coast, a distance of six hundred miles, and was strong enough near the epicenter to throw people off their feet, although no one was killed. The shocks also shattered Muir Glacier on Glacier Bay, about one hundred miles to the southeast. The front of the glacier was a popular destination for tourist boats, but its destruction discharged so many icebergs that the bay essentially became unnavigable for a decade.

  The 1958 earthquake was the biggest since 1899. In addition to the two people who died in Lituya Bay, three people were killed on Khantaak Island at Yakutat Bay. Jeanice Welsh, who may have been the first woman to own a cannery in Alaska, had gone to the island with two friends to picnic and pick wild strawberries. The three disappeared when the land slumped into the water.

  The five deaths serve to illustrate that while people fear the severe ground movements that can accompany an earthquake, sometimes the biggest, most spectacular and most deadly effects are only indirectly related to the shaking. But terrible as those effects were in 1958, they were only a modest foreshadowing of events that would occur six years later, when, at 5:36 p.m. on March 27, 1964, Alaskans experienced a quake unlike any that had come before.

  The motion was gentle at first: a slight rumbling and rolling, like being on a slow train ambling down a rickety track.

  It was felt across a wide swath of Alaska, a great half circle of nearly half a million square miles bordered by the Gulf of Alaska to the south, and arcing from Fort Randall, at the western tip of the Alaska Peninsula, through Bethel, on the Kuskokwim River, in and around Fairbanks, in the interior, across the Canadian border to Dawson, in the Yukon, and down to Skagway, in Alaska’s southeastern Panhandle.

  Alaskans were accustomed to earthquakes, and when the shaking started the almost universal thought was that it would soon be over. In Anchorage, where many youngsters were glued to the television before dinner, watching an episode of the sci-fi marionette series Fireball XL5, parents told them not to worry. The danger would pass, just as it had many times before. At her medical office south of downtown, Dr. Louise Ordman also thought it was just another small tremor. So did Dean Smith, sitting in the operator’s seat of a gantry crane fifty feet above the docks in Seward, on Resurrection Bay in the Kenai Peninsula.

  For some, the first thought was that it must be something other than a quake. Tobias Shugak, a young boy in the native village of Old Harbor on Kodiak Island—where Kris Madsen had taught the previous year—thought his sister was shaking the bed he was lying on. It seemed to Irving Wedmore, out fishing in Unakwik Inlet in Prince William Sound, that his boat had run aground. Other boaters thought their propellers had become entangled in something. At the city dock in Kodiak, one fisherman was sure his craft had been hit by another one.

  After about thirty seconds, though, the movements grew much stronger and much faster. It was right about then that Alaskans began to see and hear things they’d never seen or heard before.

  The rumbling became a violent jarring shake, and the rolling increased in intensity so that the land began to resemble the sea, as shock waves rippled through the ground, pavement, buildings. Anyone standing started to have trouble remaining upright, and many fell or were thrown to the floor by the sharp motion. Walking became nearly impossible; for those who managed to make some headway, the effect was like that of a circus clown slipping and sliding on a barrel. Ordman, staggering out of her building through the lobby, was heaved violently against a door frame, first on one side and then the other. The top of Smith’s crane started swaying back and forth like a whip; as the entire machine hopped around on the dock (“like a stiff-legged spider,” he recalled later), he scampered down to safety. In Old Harbor, Tobias Shugak watched as the small houses seemed to dance in place and as the pilings of the dock rippled in the water.

  Many heard a deep roar as the quake got up to speed. A woman in Anchorage who was heating a pot of tomato sauce for that night’s dinner thought a valve on her stove had broken, because it sounded as if the burner had jumped from simmer to full blast on its own. A young man on a ski slope next to the runway at Elmendorf Air Force Base was certain a fighter jet was coming in for a landing; when he looked up and didn’t see one, his next thought was that the army base next door was having artillery practice.

  For others, the deep sounds were overwhelmed by the sharper and closer sounds of glass breaking, nails popping and wood splintering. Away from the cities and towns, some heard sharp cracks as thick ice shattered on lakes, or loud booms followed by a distant rushing sound as snow and rocks broke and tumbled down mountainsides. This being the height of the Cold War, many Alaskans who heard a booming sound thought that the Soviet Union must have dropped an atomic bomb on their state. In his cabin outside of Cordova, one woodsman was so convinced Russian battleships were shelling the coast that he grabbed his hunting rifle, hopped into his truck and drove toward town to fight the expected invaders in the streets.

  On the wide boulevards of Anchorage, drivers thought there was something wrong with their cars. Many believed that the problem had to be a flat tire—the car was lurching and seemed out of balance. Some figured an entire wheel had come off; to others, it seemed as if the rear axle had separated, taking the whole back end of the car with it. As vehicles jumped and slid—side to side or forward to back, depending on their orientation—many drivers tried to steer their way straight. Something had happened to the steering wheel, they thought. Others jammed on the brakes, to no avail. An Anchorage taxi driver, Joe Kramer, was convinced that his car wasn’t the problem. All the drivers around him were acting crazy, he thought.

  Inside homes and apartments, kitchen cupboards opened and closed, the contents spilling out. Latched refrigerator doors broke open. Cabinets toppled over, the china within reduced to shards in seconds. Television consoles fell and books tumbled from shelves. Doors became jammed as their frames twisted and torqued. Stairways wriggled and writhed, and furniture that managed to remain upright moved across rooms. In one Anchorage house, a six-drawer dresser left scratch marks as it meandered like a drunk across the asphalt-tile floor. The markings later proved invaluable to scientists studying the ground motions of the quake.

  Those who had a vagu
e idea about how to protect themselves got under archways or in doorways, or tried to crawl under furniture. One college student somehow managed to slide under the bed in her dorm room, although it was only seven inches off the floor. The shaking “scared the curl right out of my hair,” she said.

  Inside or outside, objects swayed crazily from side to side. At one Anchorage home, a chandelier swung so violently it hit the ceiling beams. As the earth rolled beneath them, trees slapped back and forth like the windshield wipers on a car. Top-heavy trees couldn’t take the strain and snapped off high on their trunks. Telephone poles and streetlights whipped back and forth, the wires connecting them alternately going taut and slack or breaking under the tension.

  The mayor of Anchorage, George Sharrock, was driving near the airport when he saw a raven trying to land on top of a light pole. But the pole was not cooperating, swaying out of the way every time the bird tried to put its claws down. Eventually the raven gave up and flew off.

  At the airport itself, Chris von Imhof, the local manager for Scandinavian Airlines System, tried to leave his second-floor office in the terminal, but the nearest exit doors were locked. He kicked on a window to break it, lowered himself as far as he could and jumped the rest of the way. As he hit the ground he looked up and saw a terrifying sight: the six-story control tower next to the terminal cracked and then crumbled onto itself. Von Imhof spent the next hour digging through the rubble with others, and managed to pull two cooks, alive, from the Northwest Airlines kitchen that had been on the first floor. Shortly after that they uncovered the body of William Taylor, the air traffic controller who had been on duty at the top of the tower. At one point while they were frantically working, a plane descended through the overcast skies toward the runway, which had heaved so much that it now had large cracks running through it. Like the raven, the plane gave up and flew off.

  Closer to downtown, Glen Faulkner, a geologist, ran out of his house and looked down the street where the Four Seasons, a six-story apartment building, was under construction. Just an hour earlier it had been crawling with workers. The structure was being built using a technique called “lift-slab”—the concrete floors had been poured on the ground on top of one another, like a stack of pancakes, and then jacked into position one at a time. Faulkner saw that the building was shaking severely, in a north–south direction. After a minute or two it tilted slightly, slid a bit to the north and collapsed, the floors falling one onto another as they had been raised, one by one. A concrete elevator shaft was the only thing left standing, and it leaned precariously at an extreme angle.

  The ground was still moving. A driver in Anchorage saw a hundred-foot-wide variety store rolling up and down as the seismic waves passed through it. It looked like a caterpillar, she thought, and amazingly, it remained intact. Another driver rode her car as it bounced up and down on a street that was, as she described it, “writhing like a snake.”

  The seismic stresses caused cracks to open in the ground all over southern Alaska. Some of these grew larger and larger as the shaking continued. They opened and closed as the waves rolled through, forcing liquids into the air as they did. The effect in some places was like a choreographed fountain—curtains of mud up to fifty feet high and one hundred feet long, spewing for a few seconds as the trough of a wave passed and the ground closed up, then stopping as the crest followed and the ground opened up again.

  In Portage, along Turnagain Arm, the postmaster reported afterward that the average crack was a quarter mile long and six feet wide. But there were many smaller cracks as well, and as the ground in some places split into a crazy-quilt pattern other bizarre effects were noted. Two men at a service station in Portage ran out of the building as the quake began, and once they were outside, a three-foot crack opened between them. Then smaller cracks formed around each of the men, so that in a few moments they were both standing on isolated islands of earth. As the seismic waves kept coming, the two islands began moving up and down. One of the men described it as like being on an open-air elevator: as his block of land went up, his friend’s went down.

  On frozen Portage Lake, a long and deep body of water that was formed and fed by the nearby Portage Glacier, Ruth Schmidt, a geologist and lecturer at Anchorage Community College, had been making depth measurements with four other researchers. She was on skis about four hundred feet from the northeast shore of the lake when there was a jolt and the ice—two and a half feet of it, topped by more than three feet of snow—began to move. She started skiing toward her colleagues in the center of the lake, and felt the ice undulating beneath her the whole time. Her ears were filled with loud roaring and creaking sounds. As the quake wound down and the five researchers headed together toward shore, they saw a six-foot-high ridge of broken ice near what had previously been a flat shoreline. The whole ice sheet on the lake—two miles long by nearly a mile wide—had moved back and forth, colliding with the land, and the fractured ice had had nowhere to go but up.

  In downtown Anchorage, Blanche Clark had just left the J. C. Penney department store on Fifth Avenue. She worked part-time as a courier for a photo processor, and Penney’s was one of her usual late-afternoon stops. The store, opened just a year before, was a retailing marvel, full of clothing and just about anything else that a modern Anchorage family might need on five floors connected by escalators. From outside, it was an imposing structure, windowless save for the street level. Like many modern buildings, it had a facade made from decorative prefabricated concrete panels attached to the building’s steel frame.

  Clark came out of the store with a bag of film for processing and got into her 1963 Chevy station wagon, which was parked on the street along the north side of the building. She started the engine and was waiting for the traffic to clear before pulling out into the street when the ground began to shake. She thought about getting out of the car but saw that a woman crossing the street was having trouble walking. Clark decided she’d ride out the quake in her car.

  Inside the store, Carol Tucker was on the third floor, browsing the bedding and china departments. The lights quickly went out, leaving the floor in almost complete darkness. Things were falling from the ceiling around her, so Tucker crawled to where she thought the escalators were, and found one. Barely able to stand up, keeping her hands over her head to protect herself, she started down the metal steps—and promptly fell most of the way to the second floor, tearing ligaments in her leg. The second floor was heaving up and down, so despite the pain, Tucker kept going down the next escalator. When she reached the first floor, she made her way toward daylight and the exit. But rather than hobbling outside, she hesitated. Looking back later she could not explain why she paused, but by doing so she probably saved her life.

  As Tucker stood there and the severe shaking continued, the building’s exterior panels started to break off and fall. One landed on the sidewalk just outside the door where Tucker stood. Another struck the woman on the street whom Blanche Clark had been watching just moments before, cutting her in half. Others fell onto empty cars parked up and down the street. Then one landed on Clark’s station wagon, flattening its roof under several thousand pounds of concrete. Clark was wedged into the seat, her shoulder and chest screaming in pain. But she was alive.

  One block over, on Fourth Avenue, a different kind of hell was breaking loose. The street, at the crest of a hill that slopes northward down to Ship Creek, started to slide as the shaking continued. That caused Fourth Avenue to crack down the middle for several blocks. The north side of the street then dropped about ten feet, taking businesses with it, including the Anchorage Arcade, Mac’s Foto, Pioneer Loans and three bars. At one of them, the D&D Café, several regulars had been playing cards when the shaking began. They rode the building down and then, when the sinking and shaking stopped, put their cards down and crawled up and out to safety.

  That was one of several slides in Anchorage. But it was far from the worst.

  In the living room of his log home in Turnagain-by-the-
Sea, a subdivision built on a bluff overlooking Cook Inlet near the airport, Bob Atwood was practicing the trumpet when the quake began. The owner and publisher of the Anchorage Daily Times, the state’s largest newspaper, Atwood, fifty-seven, was one of Alaska’s power brokers. He’d used the pulpit of the press to push for statehood (and had been appointed chairman of the Alaska Statehood Committee when it was formed in 1949), for more military spending, for the expansion of Anchorage’s airport and for any number of other state and city causes. He and his wife, Evangeline, were major contributors to the arts in Anchorage as well.

  Atwood had just gotten home from the newspaper’s downtown offices, and Evangeline was off shopping for groceries in Spenard, across Chester Creek from Anchorage proper, for the dinner party the couple had planned for that evening. It was a perfect time to practice, since he could blow the trumpet loudly without disturbing anyone.

  No sooner had he put the instrument to his lips, though, than the house started rocking. A chandelier, hanging from a beam in the living room, began to sway. Soon the whole house was lurching about, as if it were being heaved to and fro.

  It was obvious to Atwood that the house wouldn’t stay in one piece for long; the large roof, in particular, seemed in danger of caving in, given how every other part of the structure was bending at odd angles. He ran out the door and down the driveway.

  When he stopped and looked back, the ground under the house was moving, stretching the structure apart at one moment and compressing it the next, as if it were a giant squeezebox. But that didn’t last long, as the forces of the roiling earth soon became too much for the house. It broke apart to a terrible noise of glass cracking, huge logs splitting and the house’s contents being crushed and crumpled.

  Getting out when he had had saved his life. But Atwood didn’t have much time to think about that, or about the loss of his worldly possessions. Around him trees were falling over. Worse, the ground itself was starting to break into strange, angular blocks, some rotating up and others down. It was as if swarms of organisms were inside the soil, giving it life. Atwood began to wonder if he would be able to stand anywhere.