But the Marpet’s arrival helped ease the sense of isolation, for the boat had a two-way radio. As soon as they learned of the situation in the village, George Borodkin and Mark Selanoff radioed to Cordova to alert authorities to what had happened and ask for help.
As the night wore on, it became clear that most if not all of the villagers who survived were now together on the hilltop. There were about fifty of them—which meant, by some quick, sad math, that about two dozen Chenegans were missing.
Timmy Selanoff was among the missing, but he was still alive. He had made it fairly high up on the steep hillside he’d been climbing and had seen the destruction of the village. He’d even heard Margaret Borodkin calling from out in the water. But he’d sat there, dazed, as the day grew dark.
After a couple of hours Timmy got up and started walking. He could see the bonfire above the school, so he headed toward that. He was cold—he was walking through snow, and somewhere along the way he’d lost a shoe—and frightened. He began to call out, hoping someone would hear him. Eventually he heard a voice responding from down where the village had been. He followed the voice downhill and found himself in the arms of his father, Charles, the village chief.
Charles embraced his son. “You seen Buttons and Gula?” he asked of Timmy’s younger brother and sister. They had been down at the beach playing; Timmy had lost sight of them when he had ventured down to the far end of the cove. It was clear now that they had vanished, taken by the tidal wave.
—
The screeching was the worst thing. Gloria Day didn’t recognize the noise, but later she realized what it was: the sound of her house, just a few blocks from the waterfront in Valdez, struggling to stay in one piece. The sharp shaking of the earthquake was warping the wood frame, so much that studs were bending away from sole plates and joists were being pulled from ceiling beams. The whole house was being bent out of shape, and the steel nails that held the lumber together were taking the strain. The screeching noise Day was hearing was the sound of those nails being pulled through wood fibers.
She and her husband, Walter, ran outside. McKinley Street was rippling and cracking, the waves running from north to south through the property next door and on down the street. Gloria looked down McKinley toward Alaska Avenue and the center of town. The buildings on the corner seemed to rise and fall as they rode the waves. At times they almost disappeared from sight.
Then she turned and looked to her right, toward the waterfront. The stern of the Chena, the 441½-foot-long cargo ship that was being unloaded at the main dock, was rising at a sharp angle, its bow pointed down. The stern was so high Day could even see the ship’s large brass propeller above the houses.
Down at the dock itself, the world was ending.
When the quake began, the Chena’s captain, Merrill Stewart, and its pilot, John Carlson, were eating in the dining room below-decks. They felt a shaking at first, followed by sharp shocks. The ship seemed to be hopping about. Stewart instinctively knew it was an earthquake, and the two headed toward a ladder that would take them to the bridge, three decks up. Stewart had been aboard ships most of his life, and at age sixty-one he was still pretty nimble. He made it up to the bridge, he estimated later, in about twenty seconds.
Among the crew were a couple of shutterbugs—Ernest Nelson and Fred Newmayer. With little to do during the cargo operation, they had been out on the deck with 8mm film cameras, shooting the scene at the dock to while away the time. With its beautiful snow-draped mountains as a backdrop, Valdez was one of the most photogenic of the ports they visited.
Less than half a minute after the shaking started, that port disappeared, as land turned to liquid. A long slice of the seaward edge of the plain that Valdez sat on—a section nearly a mile long and as much as six hundred feet wide—compacted, slumped and then slid into the bay. When it did, it took the two docks with their warehouses and canneries with it, as pilings and decking and buildings tilted and twisted and finally broke apart and descended into the maelstrom. It nearly took the Chena.
In grainy frames from Newmayer’s and Nelson’s films, the main dock can be seen collapsing and the roof of one of the warehouses starting to fall. A few small boats are in view, looking as if they’ve been tossed about in turbulent water. But eventually most of the frames are filled with what appears to be a dark, churning mass of water, thick with debris.
The film frames give little idea of the human horror during those moments. The people on the dock who had been working or watching were doomed. Those onboard the Chena were witnesses, however, and what they saw they would not soon forget.
From his perch on the bridge, Stewart saw the dock—the dock that his ship was firmly tied to with giant hawsers—start to collapse. It appeared to fold up first, he thought, and was accompanied by a tremendous noise. He saw men, women and children running around in panic, trying to keep their footing as the dock heaved, unsure of what was happening or what to do.
From the deck, Chester Leighton, the ship’s chief engineer, saw men running out of one of the warehouses. His initial thought was that something must have exploded inside. Carson Dorney, the second engineer, watched as some of those on the dock ran for safety along the earthen causeway that led to shore, only to be stopped when a huge fissure opened in front of them. As the land they were on collapsed, men tumbled into the water, grasping for anything—timbers, boxes, debris—to stay afloat. One clung to the side of the fissure before he, too, fell in. In the water, some of the victims were caught in a whirlpool of water and debris. Two were sucked down immediately; a third lingered for a while on a floating piece of debris before disappearing.
To Dorney, it was as if the earth were swallowing everyone.
The Stuarts’ car disappeared into the water, taking the entire family with it. Jim Growden, the popular high school basketball coach and teacher, vanished with his two preschool-aged sons, Jim Jr. and David, whom he’d brought down to watch the unloading. Dan Boddy, a trucker from Fairbanks who was on the dock to pick up a load from the Chena, went down with his truck. Dennis Cunningham and Stanley Knutsen, who had ditched Dan Kendall a short while before, disappeared, and Dorney watched helplessly as a couple of other youngsters who had just gotten some oranges from the cook tried to make it to safety. A man picked up one of them, a young girl who was moving slowly. None of them made it.
In all, in a matter of a few minutes at most, twenty-eight people who had been on the dock were gone. Among them was Jerry Zook, the young man who was to be married in a week.
In town, the earth was fracturing as the shock waves rippled through streets and yards. The biggest crevasse, found north of the Richardson Highway, was six feet wide and four feet deep and ran nearly the length of a football field. As elsewhere in the earthquake zone, the waves rippling through the ground pulled the cracks apart and then pushed them together. In Valdez, with the water table so close to the surface, and with pipes from the town’s relatively new sewer system breaking left and right from all the ground movement, the result was a squalid spectacle. Geysers of liquid—a cocktail of water, mud and sewage—spouted into the air, some reaching heights of twenty feet or more. Much of the mixture ended up in the streets, where it was trapped between snowbanks on either side. Residents found themselves trying to drive or walk through pools of mud and sewage up to two feet deep.
Charles Clark, who worked for the state highway department, watched as shock waves roiled the ground and fissures opened and closed near his house. Some opened just a few inches, others as much as three feet. His son was standing some four hundred feet away and rising and falling as the waves passed by. The boy was six feet tall, and Clark used him as a kind of measuring stick: he was fully visible when a crest reached him, but then as he sunk into a trough, his legs disappeared. Clark calculated that the land was rising and falling about three to four feet with every wave that passed through.
In the center of town, drivers were having the same problem they were having elsewhere—cars we
re bouncing and sliding and not responding at all to steering or braking. More than a few cars ended up with their front or rear wheels in fissures. Utility lines swayed back and forth and the power went out. At Gilson’s food store, the owner, George Gilson, and a few customers were inside as the building started to shake and goods crashed off shelves. At the Pinzon and other bars, liquor bottles toppled from shelves and broke. The Glacier Bar in particular was awash in whiskey; the proprietor and two customers had been transfixed during the quake and had watched, unable to react, as bottle after bottle cascaded to the floor.
Despite all the screeching and twisting, the Days’ home remained intact, as did most of the other houses and other wood-frame buildings. But many of the commercial buildings in town, made of concrete blocks or other masonry, suffered severe damage. Gilson and his customers experienced this directly: as they made their way to the door, the front wall of the building was heaving and appeared ready to collapse. Nearby, the facade of the Alaskan Hotel did collapse as the shaking continued. Other buildings, including Harborview, the state hospital for the mentally disabled out by the highway, suffered severe cracks. In many cases it seemed that where a horizontal ground fissure met a building, the fissure had just continued vertically, up a wall.
At young Gary Minish’s home outside of town on the Richardson Highway, most of the family was in the kitchen as his father, Frank, finished the meal he’d decided to have before eventually heading to the dock. When the shaking began he told Gary to stand in the doorway and the others to get under the kitchen table. Frank had built the table himself, out of heavy timbers, and he figured it was one of the safest places to be should the house start to come apart.
From his position in the doorway, Gary could see into the yard. The ground was rippling along, fissures were opening and closing and the trees were flapping back and forth. He was entranced by the power of it all. Yet despite the crazy scene outside, the house itself seemed to be holding together.
Just then they heard a loud noise, a combination of whooshing and splintering, from the living room. Gary looked over. A fissure had apparently opened up directly beneath the room, and then it had closed up again. In doing so it squeezed water, and who knows what else, out and up against the underside of the house. The force of the water had been so strong that it had broken through the floorboards. There was now a geyser of water shooting straight up into the living room. A rug that moments before had been on the floor was now pinned against the ceiling by the water.
Gary and the others watched in amazement as the living room quickly began to fill with water. That was enough for Frank Minish. It was clear now that the house was going to break apart. He ordered everyone out the door. They staggered across the yard and into the family car.
Closer to the center of town, most of Dorothy Moore’s family was in the kitchen, getting ready to sit down to a Good Friday dinner of spaghetti. When the quake began, Dorothy, who had been ironing her dress in one of the bedrooms, ran to the kitchen to be with the others. But then she remembered that she’d left the iron on, and what if with all the shaking it fell to the floor and started a fire? She’d never forgive herself if they made it through the quake only to have the house burn down because of her forgetfulness. So she struggled back to the room to turn the iron off. Then she decided it was probably a much better idea to leave the house.
Outside, the ground was shaking so much it was as if it were alive. Moore could hardly believe her eyes. Then she heard the sound of a ship’s horn, blaring repeatedly. She knew that a cargo ship had come into port that afternoon, just an hour or two earlier. Now it sounded as if the ship was leaving. But it was far too early for that.
Down at the harbor, the Chena was leaving, though not in any controlled fashion. The ship—all 10,812 tons of it—was in deep trouble.
When the waterfront first compacted and slumped and the main dock began to collapse, it forced the Chena seaward. Either the ship slipped its mooring lines—not hard to imagine given that the dock and pilings were giving way—or they broke under the strain. So now the Chena was adrift, at the mercy of whatever happened next.
When the entire waterfront then slid into the bay, it displaced a huge volume of water, which had to go somewhere. Where it went was up, forming a bubbling mound of liquid directly beneath the Chena and lifting it twenty to thirty feet. The ship heeled sharply over on its left side.
Stewart sounded the alarm and ordered the engine room to raise steam. The ship had been in port for only a little more than an hour, so Leighton and the engine-room crew didn’t need much time; they got the engine going in about ninety seconds. But until then the ship was without power, and the mound of water was moving toward land as a wave, carrying the Chena with it. The ship’s bow pitched crazily into the air, then it dipped and the stern rose high, exposing the propeller to Gloria Day and others who happened to be looking toward the waterfront. Then the Chena came down onto the water at the spot where the dock had been, hitting with such force that Stewart couldn’t comprehend how it stayed in one piece. This was the ship, after all, whose hull had cracked under far less stress more than a decade before, when it was the Chief Washakie. “I thought she was done for,” Stewart wrote later. “No ship can withstand that kind of battering.” But though the Chena shuddered as it thudded into the mud, rocks, broken pilings and other remains of the dock, it stayed intact.
Stewart saw people in the water, flailing about, as the ship was coming down on top of them. The image would keep him up at night for weeks afterward.
The Chena was now on the back side of the wave, rolling sharply on its right side and still heading toward the town. Forest L. Sturgis, an engineer with the state highway department, watched the unfolding scene from his apartment in the Valdez Hotel on Alaska Avenue. To him it looked as if the ship were jet propelled, it was riding so fast on the incoming water.
Nine Valdez men had been working on the ship itself—two on deck and seven in the holds, putting the cargo on pallets so that it could be lifted out. The steep rolling and other movements of the Chena during these first moments of the quake spelled doom for some of them.
Down in hold no. 3, barrels of asphalt broke loose and rolled into Howard Krieger, killing him. Almost simultaneously a heavy steel hold cover broke and fell from above, first striking and killing Paul Gregorieff, who was the foreman of the crew in the hold. The cover then hit Jack King, crushing his chest and legs. He survived but had to have both feet amputated.
The Chena was still at the mercy of the roiling water, which had moved into town, two blocks inland from McKinley Avenue. The ship was pushed farther toward the shore, between what remained of the two earthen causeways, where the small boat harbor was. The water had already wreaked havoc on the harbor, swamping most of the seventy boats and sweeping them from their berths. For a brief moment, the harbor was empty; the wave had passed inland and the Chena was high and dry. But soon the water started flowing out of town, the backwash from the wave. By now the Chena had regained power and was floating again—or at least part of it was. Its stern was stuck in the mud, pilings and other debris that remained from the main dock.
The outflow, though, proved a lifesaver. It gently pushed the bow of the ship away from the shore, enough so that the Chena, its propeller now slowly churning through the debris, was able to push past the remains of the smaller dock. The ship kept slowly moving south, hugging the shore, trying to get enough speed to overcome the water that was forcing it inland.
Aiming his camera back toward town, Nelson recorded an astonishing sight. Where the docks had been there was now a cliff. Water flowing back from the town was cascading over it. It was as if, in the few minutes of the quake, a gaping chasm and waterfall had formed. No one had ever seen anything like it.
After a few more minutes of wallowing in the mud near the shore, the Chena was finally able to turn into the bay. The water intakes for the steam engine were now clogged with debris and mud, and the engine was in danger of overhea
ting; Stewart had it shut down. He then ordered Neal Larsen, the chief mate, to do a quick damage survey. After a few minutes, Larsen reported that the ship was not taking on water; it appeared to have survived the rough ride. Stewart, who had had the lifeboats manned and ready to go at a moment’s notice, couldn’t believe his good fortune.
The Chena raised steam once again and headed into the bay to take stock of the dead and injured. They badly needed a doctor for King and for Ralph Thompson, a crew member who, amid the panic, appeared to have suffered a heart attack. Perhaps the town doctor could be brought out if a skiff could be found. And there were surviving longshoremen from Valdez who needed to get back and check on their loved ones.
A little while later, as the Chena cruised slowly along, the crew saw something astonishing: there were dead fish everywhere, completely covering the surface. They appeared to be red snappers.
Alfred Wegener, who developed the theory of continental drift, during an expedition to the Greenland ice sheet in 1912–13. Courtesy of the Alfred Wegener Institute
Harry Hess, a Princeton geologist who came up with the idea of seafloor spreading, made measurements of the ocean floor while on active duty in the navy during World War II. The Department of Geosciences, Princeton University
The Great Quake: How the Biggest Earthquake in North America Changed Our Understanding of the Planet Page 15