On Shaky Ground

by Nance, John J. ;

  Something was sucking the water out of Valdez Harbor. Captain Merrill Stewart, his first mate, and numerous other horrified members of the Chena’s crew could feel the ship rising slowly before all of them simultaneously realized that the water was retreating in torrents to the port side—the dock side—of the ship and from the small-boat harbor in the distance as well.

  The shaking and lurching seemed to increase with each of the sixty seconds that had passed since the first P waves had shuddered beneath the dock and the ship.

  Captain Stewart realized what was happening before his mind could embrace it: The docks were collapsing. The warehouse roofs were descending even as he watched from the port wing of the bridge. The families and the dockworkers who had been streaming out of the warehouse entrances all were running in ragged disorder up the causeway, toward the distant shore, away from what was becoming a sloping dock surface that had begun to tilt toward the ship as it descended in slow motion.

  The ship’s steward had stumbled out to the port rail with his movie camera and pressed the button, pointing the lens in the direction of the warehouses while almost losing his footing, the camera aiming skyward for a second before the frantic crewman could get it back under control and pointed toward the unbelievable scene below.

  Captain Stewart saw Jim Growden grab his younger son and head away from the gangplank with both his boys, away from the safety of the ship. He could see them trying to run on the undulating surface of the dock’s planking even as it began to give way. Not thirty minutes before, Stewart had patted the youngest boy on the head and had given him an apple.

  And there was something else. Ahead of those tiny figures running futilely against time and against the seismic waves in the wooden structure toward the causeway, a black chasm had appeared, growing wider in seconds as the causeway split open, a huge, ugly, gaping line with turbulent water and mud underneath. The running figures saw it at last, braking themselves, stumbling to a halt, confused and unsure what to do, the realization of what it meant not quite hitting them yet.

  The men on the ship watched in horror as a number of the longshoremen who had passed the break in the causeway and had turned back to help the others were unable to stop their momentum. In a flurry the men plunged headlong into the widening gap at the same moment that those they were seeking to reach wheeled and began running back toward the dock and the ship, children in tow or under arms, several wives trying to keep their footing, none of them realizing that there was nowhere left to run.

  A deafening report—a bang—louder than all the roaring and screeching, the ship’s bells, or the deep-throated horn which had begun to blow in staccato bursts at the hand of the terrified third mate, filled the air around the Chena as one of the largest warehouses on the dock suddenly collapsed downward, the muddy, turbulent water below washing into the entrance while waves simultaneously began devouring the disintegrating timbers.

  Several people lunged at the gangplank hanging over the port side of the Chena; but they were too far away, and the ship was too far up, the ramp hanging uselessly twenty feet above them as they descended helplessly with the dock. The Growdens, father and sons, pitched headlong into the water as the Stuart family, having reached their Travelall, were catapulted into the waves along with the dozens of others who tried to turn and head once more for shore, losing their footing and being tumbled backward toward the fragmenting edge of the planking and the rising hulk of the Chena.

  The ship had rolled to fifteen degrees before Captain Stewart realized fully what was happening. Wherever the water was going, it was rising in the form of a huge surge on the other side of the ship, and the Chena was rising and rolling violently to port at the same time. It was heeling inexorably toward the disintegrating dock in slow motion: twenty degrees … twenty-five degrees … thirty degrees and still going, still rolling over.

  Captain Stewart lost his footing and smashed against the left wing of the bridge, trying to hang on to something as the roll increased. On top of the noise and the shaking and the screeching—and the sounds of people screaming in the distance below him—he knew in an instant that they wouldn’t make it. The Chena was too old to take this kind of abuse. They were on their way to capsizing, and he was powerless to stop it.

  In the number three hold the world was beginning to come apart. The ship had been shaking for nearly a minute, the startled longshoremen finally realizing they were facing an earthquake and hoping that like all such quakes, it would be over soon.

  Now the walls were moving, tilting, farther and farther, and the steel vault, full of heavy cargo, including the twenty-five-ton bulldozer, was in motion, as was the cargo. Barrels began falling and rolling, the D-8 Cat was threatening to move, pallets of boxes and nets and chains began slithering, falling, clanging, and sliding to the port side as the tilt increased.

  The men on the starboard side tried to hang on, those on the port side tried to dodge; but within seconds the Chena had rolled over thirty-five degrees to port, toward the disintegrating dock, and the cargo was in rapid motion, tons of material shifting toward the port wall of the hold, where a handful of men had been trapped. Longshoremen such as Jack King and Howard Krieger saw the mass of material in the artificial light of the hold, saw it accelerating, felt themselves pinned by gravity and circumstance, and felt the entire process shift to slow motion as adrenaline coursed into their bloodstreams, quickening their heartbeats, readying the primal human capabilities for using every available ounce of strength and instinct to escape from a mortal threat.

  But their backs were quite literally to the wall that formed the port side of the hold. There was nowhere to run.

  Clambering over crates and boxes, loose boards, and anything else that might provide a handhold, scores of frightened men and women and several children struggled to find a way out of the maelstrom as the water reached them, inundating the disintegrating dock, which was being dragged along with the supporting mudbank in its quickening slide down the underwater slope, itself now in full collapse. The struggling people in the churning waters looked up at the faces of the Chena’s crew as they looked back with horrified expressions of abject helplessness. The Chena had become a wall of metal and barnacles rising above the shattered dock, offering no hope of deliverance, heeled so far over toward them that the sailors hanging on to the bridge and the various decks of the ship seemed close enough to touch.

  But not close enough.

  As Carson Dorney, the ship’s second engineer, watched with a death grip on the main deck railing, three men in the water below labored to hang on to some floating debris while being swept into a whirlpool. It was a piece of roofing from the warehouse which had been behind them, a warehouse which was now below the water-line, sucked into the bay, creating the vortex of swirling water that had captured the three longshoremen, two of whom disappeared as the engineer watched.

  To his right other heads could be seen in the water, disappearing one by one, some seeming to be yanked beneath the hull of the ship as she continued over, now at least forty degrees to port. With sickening clarity Dorney realized his ship was doomed, too. Obviously they were going to capsize right here.

  The last man in the whirlpool was still holding on to his piece of roofing, his face upturned toward the engineer as he made a last cycle, helplessly making eye contact, not realizing what had happened below, what was happening to the entire underwater slope.

  It seemed an eternity filled with mental desperation as Dorney watched the man rotate in the whirlpool before the wooden debris and its passenger were yanked suddenly from the engineer’s view. Within seconds he was gone.

  Finally, the Chena stopped rolling. But she was heeled over now to forty-five or fifty degrees and rising rapidly, her bow down, her stern coming out of the water, rising over the point where the roofs of the dock warehouses had been just sixty seconds before. The buildings onshore bounced and lurched while the roaring and squealing of protesting timbers and nails and metal, the slamming of the
hull, and the sound of unbelievable volumes of moving, foaming water remained constant. But the sounds of agonized voices—the yells and screams and other human noises Captain Stewart and his crew had heard with such shattering clarity—had been there one second, and gone the next.

  The ship seemed to stop for a moment, caught in midair with what Stewart was sure would be a fatal list to port, its stern high up, as a gigantic wave created by the upwelling of thousands of tons of water displaced by the collapse of the underwater slope of the harbor (along with the dock) came rushing back in, beneath the ship, beginning to shove it toward shore a thousand feet in the distance.

  Tom Gilson was near panic. He had run—wobbled, really—up Broadway to its intersection with McKinley Street after leaving Ed Irish’s car. He didn’t know what he was running from. Maybe the water. Maybe not. The thirteen-year-old simply knew he had to get away, and as the shaking increased and his legs turned to rubber, he could hardly stand up, let alone run.

  There was ice on the road, and he was hitting patches of it, trying to put one foot in front of the other. Power lines overhead were snapping back and forth, and people were yelling to look out for them. He could hear the voices, but he didn’t know where they were coming from or what they wanted him to do.

  And finally, the middle of an intersection was beneath his feet. It was moving and bucking and lurching, but he was as far away as he could get from the buildings all around and the wires overhead.

  Tom Gilson stood there feeling completely cornered, not even realizing he was almost yelling the same phrase over and over again:

  “We’re trapped! We’re trapped!”

  It was quite obviously the end of the world.

  For some reason Tom looked back at the bay, taking in a sight which at once made no sense and confirmed his worst fears.

  The huge freighter, which had been at the end of the dock, was in midair. That was what it looked like. The giant ship was above the bay, above the place where the warehouses should have been, her stern high in the air, canted over at a crazy angle in his direction.

  But he could still see beneath her. He could see the single propeller and the huge rudder and look right down on the forward deck at the flailing cargo booms.

  The ship seemed to hang there for a second. It was moving on the crest of a gigantic wave which was approaching what seemed to be a perfectly dry harbor with a missing dock. None of it made any sense, but even at age thirteen he knew the ship he had seen was doomed. Thirty feet out of the water and leaning at such an angle meant it would go straight in and sink. That was, quite simply, the end of that.

  Tom Gilson turned around and looked up Broadway, a port of refuge now in his mind as he tried to figure out how to reach his father in the bank about one block away. The realization that the street before him was undulating and cracking as it rolled over a storm sea of ground waves did not deter him. He might not know from what he was running, but he now knew where he needed to run.

  It wasn’t a bomb; it was an earthquake. Marion Ferrier was sure of that now. With the house gyrating and rolling, the rattling and crashing sounds blending with the incessant chiming of an old mantel clock which had fallen over with the first great undulations of the quake, she knew no bomb attack could create such shaking.

  But why hadn’t it stopped? She had never heard of earthquakes lasting so long. It seemed forever since it began, and here they still were, she and her son and daughter, braced in an interior doorway with Red’s shotgun hanging precariously overhead, her other daughter at work in another part of town, her husband and older son out on the bay somewhere.

  The thought of Red and Delbert on the water brought an instant flash of cold fear.

  “Do you suppose we’re going to get a tidal wave?”

  Her son and daughter considered that for a moment, and in unison broke away from the door, moving over the bucking floor to the window that looked out on the harbor.

  The Chena, stern in the air, propeller and rudder visible thirty feet above the waterline, was starting to descend, the giant wave now breaking toward the town.

  Hazel turned back toward Marion, her face ashen, her voice unsteady and constrained.

  “Mother, let’s get out of here!”

  Inside the headquarters building of the Valdez Dock Company, sitting on top of pilings a block above the waterfront, the world had gone quite mad. John Kelsey was as worried about his mother-in-law as anyone else. As he and his wife and daughter stayed braced in the doorway of the violently shaking, tilting two-story building, she was trying to get through the lurching kitchen to catch the coffeepot, which had been dancing a violent mazurka on the top of the vibrating kitchen stove. Like some sort of film clip from a Keystone Kops movie, she had been thrown down, trying to wobble across the floor. If it had not been so frightening, it would have been funny. Her preoccupation with that one item was a typical reaction for someone caught in a nightmarish emergency, but he was afraid she was going to get hurt.

  The building itself was apparently going to fall over. The floor had been tilting more with each lurch, and between such worries and the horrendous noise, the repeated sound of the Chena’s horn blasting incessant short pulses from the direction of the water did not register.

  The ship was settling fast, an ungodly back roll to starboard beginning to lessen the horrible deck angle that Captain Stewart was sure would result in capsize. The docks below them were gone, with only a doomed head or two still visible above water when the back roll started. Stewart could feel the big ship shoved sideways, coming down relatively fast, the bow beginning to come up at the same time, gaining speed in her descent as the wave, now past, left them with no water beneath.

  Suddenly, sickeningly, he realized that they were over the spot where the docks and warehouses had sat moments before. As the forty million pounds of double-bottomed freighter came through the neutral roll point on its back roll to starboard, she hit bottom with unbelievable impact, the hull smashing into something below. They had sat down hard either on the remains of the dock and the disintegrating slope or just on the edge of the bay. Whatever his ship had hit, he expected her to come up in pieces. No oceangoing vessel could take such an impact and not break up. It was a jarring, horrendous, soul-crushing impact, not the least of which was the knowledge in every mind of those above deck that whatever human life might have been sucked down with the disintegrating docks had just been pulverized by twenty thousand tons of ship. The images of the men and women and children going down, clambering over debris, and trying to escape from an inescapable nightmare burned in their minds and their memories. They were obviously doomed, too, but those poor people never had a chance.

  The big ship shuddered again and began to float once more. Captain Stewart had expected to come up in pieces, but with another wave gathering to the starboard side the ship had refloated in one piece, rising slowly at first, then beginning to move forward—to surge forward—farther into the small-boat harbor area.

  Third Mate Ralph Thompson had been yanking at the horn, sounding the distress signal. Now he was ashen-faced and addressing the captain, who had regained his feet.

  “May I be excused, Captain? I don’t feel well.”

  Here in the midst of the ship’s worst crisis he was getting formal and was obviously in distress. As Stewart replied in the affirmative, Thompson slumped to the deck of the bridge.

  Stewart had the ship’s telephone to his ear, talking to the engine room, telling the engineer to get up steam as fast as possible, that he needed power. If she stayed together—if she could get water under her keel—maybe they could make it.

  “We can’t give you any steam until we get warmed up.” The voice was as shrill as his, filled with barely controlled worry and stress and emotion.

  “Okay,” Stewart said into the receiver, still holding on to the railing, “I’m going to put the [engine] telegraph on full speed ahead. Give me whatever you can as soon as you can!”

  There was still a ch
ance—a slim chance—they might get out of this.

  Chapter 5

  Anchorage, Alaska

  No one saw the ominous movement, but at thirty-two seconds after 5:36 P.M. the backdrop of snowcapped peaks standing along the eastern edge of Anchorage were suddenly in motion. Within the space of a few seconds, every molecule of the mountain range had relaxed slightly, then compressed in turn from the eastern edge to the western foothills as the first seismic wave raced through the bedrock like a shiver, bearing down on the largest of unsuspecting Alaskan communities.

  The wave front moved as a silent intruder—arriving without warning—covering the eighty miles in less than twenty-one seconds.

  The first undulation shuddered through the last mountain summit between Prince William Sound and Anchorage and across the remaining distance to the Rustigan home. It flickered like a shadow beneath the den where Robert Rustigan was engaged in a phone call, and shot westward at its inexorable, lightning pace, still undetected—a fleeting messenger of what was to come.

  Racing behind the first one, the rest of the wave train of push-pull vibrations closed on the target at fourteen thousand miles per hour, vibrating the frozen dirt beneath the foundation of the Rustigan house, transmitting the east-west jiggling motion to the footings and the mudsills, the wall studs and nails, transferring the shaking to the wallboard and doorframes, the furniture and fixtures, and fireplace bricks and ceiling tiles. Robert turned to look at Baxter, distant thunder beginning to roll through the interior of the den as the gentle sound of dishes and glasses clinking and dancing in the kitchen cabinets pushed into their field of awareness, vying for attention.

  Baxter looked up in what seemed like slow motion as Robert formed the word “earthquake” in his mind and spoke the word to his friend in downtown Anchorage five miles to the west who had felt nothing as yet.