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

by Henry Fountain

  McAlister had first come to Alaska just after graduating from high school in Snohomish, Washington. He’d gotten on a boat bound for Valdez, found a job and stayed the summer. He’d come back for good two years later, in 1959. There he met and married Gloria Dewing, whose family had come to Valdez a few years before. They were home in their house on McKinley Street with their first child, a boy who was just six weeks old, when the quake hit. They’d made it through the disaster, and while Gloria took the infant and went Outside for a while, Tom had stayed and helped with the recovery. Later, when the family was reunited, they had moved into a trailer, as their house on McKinley was uninhabitable. The trailer was moved over to the new town; they lived in it for another six years until they bought a house. “We learned about wind,” McAlister said. Old Valdez, with its mature willows and spruces and other trees, had been largely protected from the winds that came rushing off the water or down from the glacier. But the new town was practically bare. Another trailer on their block rolled over in one particularly fierce windstorm that first winter. But the McAlisters learned to cope.

  By 1967, there was no one left in the old town. New Valdez was full of people—the population was about what it had been prequake—but it was struggling. Even before the move was completed there were efforts to increase tourism, as that seemed to be one of the few activities that held any promise for improving the town’s economic prospects, since what little shipping was left had been effectively killed by the earthquake. There was even a proposal to make the old town site into a tourist attraction, a historic park that would preserve some of the buildings and focus on the town’s role in the Klondike gold rush and, of course, the earthquake. Plans were drawn up, but the idea didn’t get very far. Cost was an issue, but there was a more fundamental problem: the land was still unstable. How could anyone in good conscience invite tourists to a place that might at any moment be shaken apart? With those plans dead, old Valdez was left to rot—and occasionally burn, as it became a prime target for arsonists—until the town voted to raze the remaining buildings and clear the land.

  Prospects for the new Valdez weren’t all that much better. In 1968, however, the same event that changed the lives of native Alaskans changed Valdez forever. With the discovery of oil on the North Slope came a crucial question: how would it be delivered to an oil-hungry world? In the summer of 1969, with much ballyhoo, Humble (now ExxonMobil) sent an icebreaker-tanker, the SS Manhattan, through the Northwest Passage across the Canadian Arctic. But a later attempt at a second transit in winter, with more and heavier ice, proved impossible. That, and environmental concerns about the risk of a spill to the pristine Arctic, killed the tanker idea, but there were others, including a scheme to extend the Alaska Railroad north from Fairbanks and ship the oil by tank car, with Anchorage or Seward becoming an oil port. But the logistics of such an operation were daunting at best.

  The best possibility, and one eventually favored by the oil companies, seemed to be a pipeline. But where to put it? A proposal to run it down to Fairbanks and then along the railroad right-of-way had many backers. But Valdez officials had their own ideas. Their town was closer than Seward, and it had a deepwater port that was, as they would proudly tell anyone, ice-free all winter long. As for earthquake concerns, there was enough stable land for a terminal and operations center on the southern side of the bay, across the Lowe River, where Fort Liscum had been built at the turn of the century.

  The oil companies sent in their own geologists and soon were developing a proposal to run the pipeline along the Richardson Highway, over Thompson Pass, to Valdez. Environmental organizations sued, holding up construction for more than three years, but a federal law approved in 1973 allowed the project to proceed.

  There had been some funny business: pipe for the pipeline had begun showing up in Valdez long before construction was given the go-ahead. But the town was happy to have the project. Thousands of workers came to Valdez, where the population swelled to more than eight thousand. The now-cleared old town site turned out to be the perfect place to stage pipe and other materials for the construction work.

  It was almost too much of a boom. There were so many construction workers in Valdez, some of dubious character, that residents felt that in some ways their town had been taken away from them. They stayed away from the bars, restaurants and other places that were now inundated with workers from elsewhere. There were a lot of house parties those years, one old-timer recalled.

  The construction crush eventually ended, and oil first flowed from the pipeline in June 1977. The town shrank somewhat, but not completely, as people stayed on to work at the pipeline control center and at the terminal where the supertankers were loaded. The Exxon Valdez spill in 1989 brought more people back as Valdez became the center of cleanup operations.

  The pipeline jobs changed the town. In the past—certainly before the earthquake—there hadn’t been many full-time, year-round jobs. People scraped by, working for the highway department in the winter and building homes in the summer, fishing part of the year and longshoring when they could—the men who perished at the dock during the earthquake, after all, had been part-timers picking up extra cash. That same year, Tom McAlister recalled, when it came time to do his taxes he’d had seven W-2 forms from the various jobs he’d held.

  But the pipeline changed that, with steady jobs that paid good wages. Valdez was less of a catch-as-catch-can sort of place, and neighbors were less reliant on one another than they once had been.

  Of course, the oil will run out someday, probably sooner rather than later, and those jobs will disappear. The town is already on something of a downward trajectory, as flow through the pipeline has steadily declined from its peak of about two million barrels a day in the late 1980s to about one-quarter of that now. The writing is on the wall, and town officials are trying to boost tourism again.

  That’s the nature of Valdez, though, McAlister said as we continued the house tour. It’s always been boom or bust. He’d lived through all of it and still loves the town, although he acknowledged that it wasn’t the same place it had been in the days before the quake.

  We’d reached Egan Drive, named for the town’s favorite-son governor, and what passed for downtown Valdez. The vast parking lots that residents had insisted were needed as a place to dump snow stretched out before us. Old Valdez hadn’t had much of a downtown either, but it was compact, with cheek-by-jowl businesses like the Pinzon Bar and Gilson’s grocery and Woodford’s dry goods. New Valdez was tidier, but it didn’t have as much character. “That’s one of the things we lost,” McAlister said.

  —

  A few days before we visited Alaganik Slough, Plafker and I headed out into Prince William Sound with Peter Haeussler, a USGS geologist based in Anchorage. Haeussler has spent much of his career studying the 1964 earthquake—among other findings, he and colleagues identified the likely source of the undersea sediments that collapsed and caused the waves at Chenega. A great admirer of Plafker, he arranged for a boat, and we left from Whittier, bound for Montague Island. We anchored in a spot on the island’s southwestern side that Plafker had named Fault Cove because one of the splay faults passes through it. We ran our skiff onto shore and started hiking through a tangle of alders toward higher ground in the distance.

  These splay faults are still a subject of great interest to geologists. Haeussler and some of his colleagues had recently published a paper about them, showing how, in addition to their sudden movement during the 1964 quake, they were slowly uplifting over time. It was now known that there were more than two of them, but where we were hiking was between the two that Plafker had identified in the summer of 1964—the scarp formed by the Hanning Bay Fault when it lifted up was immediately to our left, and the Patton Bay Fault was perhaps four miles to our right.

  The high ground we were headed for was, in fact, the back side of the Patton Bay Fault, where some of the highest uplift from the quake was measured. As we turned uphill, the alders gradually gav
e way to spruces and an understory thick with vines and the pernicious shrub called devil’s club. The two geologists had warned me about this: the plant’s thick stems tempt a hiker who is looking for something to grab on to to help scramble up a slope, but they’re covered with tiny spines that will cause a rash and take forever to remove from the skin.

  Soon we emerged from the spruces, whacked our way through another narrow thicket of alders and found ourselves on a less overgrown slope covered in rocks and carpeted with moss. I bent down and examined the rocks. They were cobbles, made smooth, obviously, by the action of water. This, I realized and Plafker and Haeussler quickly confirmed, was a cobble beach. Rather, it had been a cobble beach, until 5:36 p.m. on March 27, 1964. Then, in the course of a few minutes, it had risen up more than thirty feet, and the sea had bothered it no more. I’d seen a lot of signs of the earthquake—the old sites in Valdez and Chenega, Portage and its drowned trees, Earthquake Park in the Turnagain neighborhood in Anchorage where the tortured land is still visible—but this was the most impressive evidence yet of the forces that were unleashed on that day.

  A few days later, in Cordova, Plafker showed me another impressive sight. We had driven out of town on Route 10, but in the opposite direction from Alaganik Slough. Hugging the shoreline along Orca Inlet, the road here, too, leads to nowhere: it ends about four miles out of town at the site of an old cannery. There’s an adventure lodge there now, offering fishing, kayaking and other activities to tourists. But some of the old cannery buildings remain. They are in various states of disrepair, as are the docks where the fishing boats once tied up to unload their catch. This area was uplifted about six feet during the quake, so the docks seem oddly high in relation to the water. High tide barely reaches some of the wooden pilings; before the quake they would have been well underwater.

  We walked over and looked at one of the pilings more closely. Plafker showed me a ring of living barnacles around the wood near his feet. Then he reached up and pointed to a spot above his head. Though it was not quite as obvious, there was another ring there, the white remains of long-dead organisms still encrusted on the piling. Age and exposure had eliminated all traces of it most everywhere else, but here the barnacle line, which Plafker had so relied upon to help understand the greatest earthquake North America has ever known, survived.

  At Alaganik Slough the next day, our surveying work over, Plafker and I wandered up and down the main channel, with me struggling to keep up. We stopped from time to time to look at cuts in the banks that showed alternating layers of peat and mud. These, Plafker said, were signs of ancient earthquakes. Having studied the Copper River delta for years, he knew the earthquake sequence here well. A quake occurs and land that had been below the water line is lifted up. Vegetation, including mosses, begins to grow and a thick layer of peat starts to develop. But the land slowly sinks over time, in part because of the weight of all the glacial sediment being brought down by the river. Eventually it has sunk so much that some of the peatland is low enough that the tidal water rushes over it again, depositing sediment that compresses the peat. Eventually another earthquake occurs, the land is uplifted once again and the process repeats itself.

  The alternating layers in the channel banks represent different earthquakes, and dating the peat gives an idea of when each happened. That’s what Plafker’s cores were all about. From earlier work he already had a good idea of how often large megathrust earthquakes had happened in Alaska. But you could never have enough data.

  Plafker stopped to talk about the studies he’d done in the delta. It was similar in some ways to research that had been done in the Pacific Northwest, he said. There, they knew that major quakes could happen as little as a few hundred years apart, and that the last one was more than three hundred years ago. That’s why there was so much concern. Alaskans, on the other hand, could probably breathe easy. Major megathrust quakes happened here about every six hundred to eight hundred years, so another big one was probably centuries off. That was what his research indicated, anyway. Plafker turned to head back up the muddy channel. He wished he could be around when the next one happens, he said, to find out if his estimates were correct.

  When writing nonfiction, a cooperative subject can mean the world. In the case of George Plafker, “cooperative” is a wholly inadequate word. George spent hours patiently telling me his life story and explaining the ins and outs of geology and plate tectonics, answering every one of my dumb questions. But beyond that, George and his partner, Doris Coonrad, graciously welcomed me into their California home many times. Thanks for the hospitality, including the countless delicious meals prepared by Doris, caterer extraordinaire.

  Likewise, Kris and Drew Van Winkle warmly welcomed me when I visited them. I owe much gratitude to Kris for sharing her story and amazing photographs of her time in Chenega, and to both of them for the lighthouse tour. Special thanks to Mads Tudvad Jensen for helping me find Kris.

  Peter Haeussler of the Geological Survey in Alaska has for years been pointing out to anyone who will listen the work that George did and the role it played in the acceptance of plate tectonics. Peter’s writings for the Survey around the time of the fiftieth anniversary of the quake were what got me interested in the subject in the first place. Thanks to Peter for all that, and for taking George and me out to some of the places in Prince William Sound that George studied a half century before. And thanks to Marti L. Miller, chief of the geology office at the Survey’s Alaska Science Center in Anchorage, and her staff for the use of the boat.

  More than half a century later, the Alaska earthquake is still a source of pain for many who lived through it. I’ve respected the wishes of those who don’t want to talk about what they experienced. But I’m grateful to the people who did, as well as other people who provided invaluable insight or assistance: Arthur Grantz, Peter Molnar, Dan Kendall, Gary Minish, Dorothy Moore, Gloria Day, Gloria and Tom McAlister, Avis Kompkoff, Ross Stein, Rita Miraglia, John F. C. Johnson, Nancy Yaw Davis, Steve Ranney, Suzanne Cook Taylor, Kevin Krajick and the many USGS media relations people who have helped me over the years. Thanks also to Andrew Goldstein, curator of collections, and the staff of the Valdez Museum and Historical Archive, as well as the staffs of the Alaska and Polar Regions Collections and Archives at the Elmer E. Rasmuson Library, University of Alaska–Fairbanks; Prince William Sound College library; the Archives and Special Collections at the University of Alaska–Anchorage library; Alaska Resources Library and Information Services; the Alaska Collection at the Z. J. Loussac Public Library, Anchorage; the Anchorage Museum; Alaska’s Digital Archives and the Alaska State Library Historical Collections.

  I’m grateful to my editors at the New York Times for allowing me to step back from daily journalism for a while. My editors in the science department, including the late Barbara Strauch, Celia Dugger, Mary Ann Giordano and Adam Bryant, offered encouragement and support, as did my reporting podmates. Thanks for shelter, food and moral support to Harriet Moss and Ernesto Sanchez, and to Steve and Ted Ballou, their families and Troy Crisswell for the musical interludes.

  This project began when an editor at a New York publishing house read my article in the Times about the fiftieth anniversary of the Alaska quake. That editor was Roger Scholl, at Crown, and he thought the subject of the quake and George Plafker’s work might make for an interesting book. Many thanks to him for that inspiration, and for helping guide and shape the book as it progressed. Thanks also to others at Crown, including Julia Elliott and Craig Adams.

  My agent, Gillian MacKenzie, has for a long time encouraged me to pursue book writing. For that, and for her invaluable advice and ideas about this book, I’m grateful.

  Lastly, thanks to Savannah and Walker for putting up with all of this, and for keeping the dogs at bay.

  1. Altered State

  The account of the geologists’ first few days in Alaska following the earthquake, and the conditions they found, is based largely on interviews with George Plafker and Art
hur Grantz and on the US Geological Survey’s professional papers on the earthquake (see Additional Sources).

  The bases had not been too badly damaged: Some of the damage at Elmendorf Air Force Base is described in National Research Council, The Great Alaska Earthquake of 1964, vol. 6, Engineering (Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences, 1973).

  military had spent billions: For an interesting look at the effect of the Cold War military buildup on Alaska, see Laurel J. Hummel, “The U.S. Military as Geographical Agent: The Case of Cold War Alaska,” Geographical Review 95, no. 1 (January 2005): 47–72.

  “one of the richest, most glorious mountain landscapes”: John Muir, in Edward H. Harriman, Harriman Alaska Expedition (Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences, 1910), 1:132.

  2. Under the Mountain

  The description of Chenega Island is compiled from various sources, including Kaj Birket-Smith, The Chugach Eskimo (Copenhagen: National Museum Publications Fund, 1953); Donald R. Poling, comp., Chenega Diaries: Stories and Voices of Our Past (n.p.: Chenega Corporation, 2011); John Smelcer, The Day That Cries Forever (Anchorage: Todd Communications, 2006); William E. Simeone and Rita Miraglia, An Ethnography of Chenega Bay and Tatitlek, Alaska (Anchorage: Alaska Department of Fish and Game, 2000); and interviews with Kris Van Winkle and Avis Kompkoff.