Convenient proximity had attracted another of Bob Atwood’s neighbors, Dr. Perry Mead (the city’s only neurosurgeon) and his family. At 5:30 P.M. Dr. Mead was just finishing the day at his clinic on the south side of the downtown area, while his wife did some last-minute shopping and four of their five children remained in their new Turnagain home. Penny, nine, Paul, four, and two-year-old Merrill Mead were under the supervision of their twelve-year-old brother, Perry. According to plan, within the hour the family would be together for a relaxing Friday evening.
Six miles east of Turnagain in a neighborhood tucked up against the foothills of the Chugach Mountains, Baxter Rustigan walked angrily over to his brother’s stereo and cranked the volume up to glass-shattering levels. Robert, the twenty-three-year-old senior brother, winced in the next room at the wave of sound. “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” the latest release from the new British group the Beatles, blared from the speakers, and Baxter didn’t care how loud he got it. An argument with his sister, Bonita, and his mother’s intervention had left the teenager in a royal huff. Little sister had been into his things again, and he had overreacted. He was softening already, though. Baxter resolved to apologize when his mom and Bonita got home from shopping.
At the same moment several miles to the west, Mary Louise Rustigan was slowing the family car and looking for a parking space with Bonita sitting beside her. She stubbed out another of her omnipresent cigarettes before choosing a space along the curb near the Rustigans’ downtown business, City Cold Storage, a food locker and freezer company they had built up from nearly nothing. Their destination was the new J. C. Penney’s store several blocks to the west, but they would check in with Baxter senior first.
Baxter Rustigan, Sr., was a hard worker, and Marie understood both hard work and compulsive behavior. For three years she had been free of a disease which had almost killed her, alcoholism, a byproduct of years as a headlining rodeo trick rider on the southwestern circuit. Finally, many years after meeting Baxter in Paris, Texas (where he was stationed in the Army), she had overcome her disease with much help and love from family and friends, and her life was quite different now. She was enthusiastically productive, running a restaurant by day and helping other people lick alcoholism by night.
Mary Louise Rustigan had founded a local group, called Alateen, to help the teenagers of alcoholic parents, and through Alcoholics Anonymous had become one of those people who would get up in the middle of a sub-zero night to spend the next eight hours sitting with someone struggling to stay sober, drinking gallons of coffee until dawn. It had given her renewed purpose, and she felt she had helped, and was helping.
Her husband, the son of a prominent merchant family of Armenian descent in Providence, Rhode Island (the grandfather had changed the name from Rustigian to Rustigan to confuse it with the Irish names in the area), had been destined to follow in the family grocery business when he returned from the Army with his new western wife. Several years of trying to carve out their own existence in Providence had not worked well, however, so Baxter had given up, packed up, and in 1957 had taken his family as far west as he could go, arriving in Anchorage after a jarring five-thousand-mile trip (in part over the primitive Alcan Highway).
Mary Louise and Bonita had left the City Cold Storage office and headed west down Fourth Avenue to J. C. Penney’s a few minutes after 5:00 P.M. Now her watch read 5:30 as they browsed through the upper floors of the elegant new store. It was supposed to close in thirty minutes. They would need to hurry.
Five blocks away in All Saints Episcopal Church, Father Norm Elliot reached the twelfth Station of the Cross in the Good Friday services. The last quotation from Matthew was in front of him now as he read the familiar words:
“But Jesus cried with a loud voice, and gave up his spirit. And behold, the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom; and the earth quaked, and the rocks were rent.”
It was exactly thirty-five seconds past 5:36 P.M.
Chapter 4
Prince William Sound, Alaska
The breaking point had been very near for some time. The tortured layers of rock beneath the landmass of Alaska had been under growing stress for decades, and though no one knew it, the dam that held back that growing reservoir of potential seismic energy was about to shatter.
Massive layers of rock miles thick—layers which years later would be referred to as tectonic plates—were being shoved in opposite directions by continental forces beneath the state as one plate plunged in slow motion beneath the other. Yet those layers, or plates, refused to move past each other easily, and became snagged by friction and uneven areas where they came together.
These were sheets of unnamed and unseen rocks of almost unimaginable height and breadth, thousands of cubic miles of them, hundreds of miles wide, forever hidden from daylight, lying under increasing dynamic tension of incredible magnitude—tension which had been building for untold years against a single snagged area 12.5 miles directly beneath the eastern shore of Unakwik Inlet in northern Prince William Sound. That deserted shoreline, the epicenter of what was about to occur 66,000 feet below ground, was a mere 40 miles west of Valdez, 80 miles east of Anchorage, and 130 miles northeast of Seward.1
Though geologists and seismologists had not yet realized it—could not observe what was happening so far down—the 12.5 miles of rocks and mountains and water directly above the snagged area were still being pushed to the south and southeast by a little-understood process of movement basic to the earth’s crust. At the same time the 30 or 40 miles of earth’s lithosphere below the snag were being shoved northwestward by the same process. One gigantic layer was riding over the top of the other one, both in continuous (if very slow) motion along a meeting place geologists called a fault plane.
However, only the movement had been stopped by the snag, not the forces propelling the plates. These were immense forces of planetary magnitude which embody energy that is difficult to express in ordinary terms, energy that on normal scales would require a staggering array of zeros between the first numbers and the decimal point. Such forces are not stopped; they are merely absorbed to be released later on. The energy continues to build, storing itself in twisted and compressed rock, creating a reservoir of power which will one day, inevitably, unavoidably, be released.2
In 1964 no one really understood the planetary engine which propelled such systems. No one fully realized that when the strain in such opposing layers builds to great levels, its release will eventually come in a break or a rapid series of breaks tens or hundreds of miles in length as the snagged rocks finally fracture, releasing the mammoth amounts of stored energy behind them, which in turn causes sudden, rapid movement and creates massive seismic waves. When a great break occurs, millions of tons of rock are suddenly displaced many feet as the plates rumble past each other, seeking some form of equilibrium once again. Equilibrium is not to be found, however. The pressures continue and begin to build again immediately. Where snags have developed before, snags will develop again, starting the cycle all over.3
Of course, such movement does not—cannot—go unnoticed. When massive volumes of rock move suddenly beneath the surface of the earth, they cause waves of energy to radiate out in all directions, seismic waves that travel around the planet and undulate every molecule of the earth through which they pass.
And, in certain circumstances, when large areas of rocks snap fairly close to the surface (ten to twenty miles being “fairly close” geologically) and massive tectonic plates move against each other, spending pent-up energy, hundreds of square miles of ground can be raised or lowered permanently in a matter of seconds, and great sea waves (tsunamis), or harbor waves (seiches), can result, pummeling sea-level cities and towns and industrial installations with waves as high as forty feet.4
At exactly fourteen seconds past five thirty-six on the peaceful afternoon of March 27, Good Friday, 1964, a very small event miles deep in the earth pulled the trigger on what had become a loaded tectonic gu
n. An otherwise insignificant increase in the pressure on the snagged rocks beneath Unakwik Inlet went a few pounds too far, and the breaking point was reached. The snag disintegrated in a cataclysmic release of stored energy, suddenly moving rock surfaces which were many miles in length along a northeast to southwest fault plane, unleashing a spherical wave front of compression waves—P waves—to race from the source of the break at more than fourteen thousand miles per hour, followed instantly by the slower-traveling S waves, massive undulations of side-to-side movement which chased the primary waves to the west toward an unsuspecting Anchorage, to the southwest toward an unprepared Seward, and to the east toward their first municipal victim: Valdez.
5:36:25 P.M. Valdez, Alaska
Captain Stewart stopped in mid-sentence. He had been lingering over a cup of coffee in the Chena’s dining room with the ship’s pilot when a sudden rumble, a shudder, vibrated through the ship. In the space of a few seconds his mind considered and rejected a score of possibilities: They wouldn’t be getting under way without him … not even the bulldozer in the forward hold if dropped could cause such a shudder … and the dock was made of wood; it certainly couldn’t have caused that noise, or that feeling. So what in the world?
Just as he and the pilot felt the shuddering increase, the first S waves rippled beneath the waterfront, shaking the timbers in the dock, resonating into the interior of the ship, a banging commotion very much like something the captain had experienced several times before in deep water when he thought they’d run aground. This time around he was not fooled. He recognized it immediately.
Captain Merrill Stewart began pushing himself out of his chair, yelling a single word to anyone who could hear:
“Earthquake!”
In a microsecond he had broken for the nearby port door, pausing to yell at the first mate on the dock below, before heading on instinct to the ladder and the bridge—the place a captain belonged when his ship was in danger.
In the number three hold of the Chena the first rumble of the compression waves was confusing to the longshoremen working inside. The shudder felt as if the ship’s propeller had started to turn, as if they were getting under way—and that made no sense at all.
Jack King, Howard Krieger, and Paul Gregorioff, all longtime Valdez residents, had been rigging the cargo slings near the huge bulldozer. Now they had paused, looking through the gloom of the hold at each other as the first S waves began slamming the ship back and forth, port to starboard, and feeling the sound of the huge hull striking the wooden structure of the dock.
John Kelsey had driven off his dock ten minutes before, climbed the stairs, and was sitting at the dinner table when he felt the compression waves enter Valdez. The vibrations were short and intense, the familiar kickoff to another one of the earthquakes Valdez had always experienced. As the first of the S waves undulated beneath the Valdez Dock Company’s two-story building, which was also his home, Kelsey noticed the startled expressions on the faces of his wife’s father and mother, who were not familiar with such things.
“Don’t worry,” he said to them, “it’ll be over soon.” However, there was a rumbling now, a roaring, frightening sound which began as a low-frequency vibration rising second by second into a thunderous noise. As the side-to-side shaking of the building increased in intensity and amplitude, so did the noise. It was not a slow increase. It was sudden, insistent, and like nothing he had experienced there before.
Kelsey had been through naval battles and had survived a plane crash in which four others died. He was trained and disciplined and experienced at handling emergencies. But this was completely unexpected. Gathering his wits about him as he realized that what he was seeing on the faces of his family was growing panic, Kelsey pushed away from the table, fighting to stay balanced, motioning to them in the process.
“Let’s get into a doorway!”
In the back seat of his friend’s car Tom Gilson felt the first jolts and wondered why the driver was putting up with it. The car with Gilson and four other boys had stopped in front of Alaska Governor Bill Egan’s old house one block from the waterfront, the boys intent on talking to a friend they had seen strolling down the street. Now the car was lurching back and forth, side to side. Gilson figured the other youth was shaking the car, but if so, he couldn’t figure out how he could put so much power into it; the shaking was becoming severe.
Ed Irish, the driver, finally figured it out. With eyes wide he turned to the others and, half in amazement, half in fear, stated what was rapidly becoming obvious to the citizens of Valdez:
“It’s an earthquake!”
Almost simultaneously the five boys began grasping for door handles, only to find the doors blocked by the road. The car was rolling back and forth so severely with the north-south motion of the ground they couldn’t get the doors in sync at first. Finally, one by one, the boys managed to swing a door open at the top of a cycle on each side and leap out, scattering in several directions up the street toward what they thought was safer ground.
Of course, there wasn’t any safe ground. Tom Gilson realized that somewhere in the back of his mind as he tried to keep his footing on the surface of the street, which was now rolling visibly like waves on the ocean.
“There must be a truck going by.”
Marion Ferrier’s son Larry was wrong, and she knew it instantly.
“No, it’s a quake.” Nothing more. Earthquakes were common, and all this one was doing was jiggling the grease in her deep fryer. The scallops she was putting in would have to wait a minute while it calmed down. Marion and two of the kids, Hazel and Larry, were planning on a quiet evening. Now it was getting interesting—and intense.
The shaking began to increase in amplitude, jerking the house back and forth with growing force until she silently went into motion, grabbing the two of them and getting under the doorframe for protection.
Dishes and silverware rattling and moving around in the cabinets joined with the rising noise level as the house came alive, the smell of disturbed dust joining the cooking aromas.
Earthquakes just weren’t like this. They usually ended.
Marion’s blood ran cold at the thought, but a sudden, very logical explanation shot through her mind, gathering credence with every new jolt of the house, dovetailing with the tension everyone felt in the shadow of America’s northern defense zone amidst the cold war and scares like the Cuban missile crisis.
Oh, my God, they’ve dropped an atom bomb on Anchorage!
Captain Stewart had reached the bridge in fewer than twenty seconds, climbing like a scalded monkey straight up a three-story ladder, mentally recording in vivid detail sights he wasn’t aware of seeing at the time: the image of people streaming from the warehouses onto the dock looking confused, several children looking terrified several stories below his position on the ladder, and the buildings themselves beginning to jump and undulate in the growing intensity of the seismic waves.
Stewart entered the bridge at the same time the third mate came through the opposite door.
“Get the alarm bells going, now!” It was the sharpest order he had barked in weeks, and the sailor to whom it was addressed lunged for the switch. The bells would be the equivalent of general quarters, alerting everyone on board that something was wrong.
What was worrying Stewart with every passing second was the sound of his ship striking the dock. It was unmistakable, and it was getting louder, more insistent, along with a worrisome new development which seemed to be happening in slow motion as Stewart turned back to the port side and headed back to the door: The ship was rising, or the dock was sinking—or both.
He wasn’t sure. The increasing roar, the clanging of metal, and the ship’s bells made it difficult to sort out what was happening, but the tops of the buildings on the dock were going down in relation to the ship. He reached the side just as several loud snaps reached his ears—the sound of large hemp ropes breaking under tension, unable to restrain the rising mass of twenty thousand t
ons of freighter.
On the dock below the Chena all hell was breaking loose, confusion filling the minds of panicked parents, kids, and workers. The shaking had started innocently enough, building rapidly to a violent lurching back and forth, a north to south motion oriented to, then from the shore, a motion that if continued too long could shatter the causeway and the dock.
Basketball coach Jim Growden and his two sons had been talking to the first mate when the shaking started. Growden and his boys stood back from the ship, waiting it out for a minute, looking puzzled as people began spilling onto the dock from the warehouses and the first mate jumped onto the gangplank. The sounds of the Chena assaulting the dock were adding to the inherent roar of the earthquake, which was rising exponentially, and finally, the realization seemed to reach Growden that they had better run.
At that moment one of the boys broke away and ran for the gangplank, which had lifted off the dock and was hanging there, tantalizingly close, a safe passage away from the shaking, gyrating dock. But Jim Growden was in motion instantly after his son, grabbing the boy a few feet from the ramp and spinning him around, taking the other boy by the hand and trying to get them all running in the opposite direction toward the shoreline.
Ahead of him the Stuart family was also in motion, their Travelall parked down the dock. Smokey Stuart swept his youngest daughter up with his right arm as he pulled his other daughter along, Sammie Marie right beside him, holding on to son Larry. They were mere feet away from the ship now, headed toward the perceived safety of the shore hundreds of feet in the distance over the wildly bucking dock, unaware of the motion of the Chena as she rose on a swell of water and snapped her lines, at the exact moment that the underwater shelf of loosely compacted silts and muds and glacial debris on which the Valdez waterfront had been constructed turned to a liquid mass and began collapsing toward the five-hundred-foot depths of the bay—the same mud and silt and gravel which provided the foundation for the Valdez dock, and all its warehouses, and all the people standing on its surface.
On Shaky Ground Page 5