On Shaky Ground

by Nance, John J. ;

  As the telephone wires transmitted Robert’s voice at nearly the speed of light toward downtown Anchorage, the primary wave front chased behind, passing beneath the steel tracks of the Alaska Railroad and the concrete of the Seward Highway, rippling beneath the main runways at Elmendorf Air Force Base and Merrill Field, shivering the Anchorage Westward, where Bob Reeve was just sitting down with a martini in his hand.

  Simultaneously the wave front began to rattle the fancy new J. C. Penney’s store, where Mary Louise Rustigan and her daughter, Bonita, were shopping, flashing past the nearly completed Four Seasons apartment building ten blocks distant, shooting on westward, where it began to vibrate the polished hardwood floor beneath Bob Atwood’s feet in Turnagain Heights and to rattle the kitchen window of the Hines house next door—while some fifteen feet below, the long-ignored layer of waterlogged sand and clay underlying Turnagain began to shake, and quiver.

  Robert Rustigan’s friend in downtown Anchorage had felt something now, a vibration, a movement, probably an earthquake. He didn’t have time to form the words before the senior Rustigan brother yelled half in excitement and half in concern, and replaced the receiver. The Rustigan residence was beginning to make noise as the vibrations increased, then quieted a little, then increased again—all in the space of a few seconds.

  Baxter had a nervous grin of amazement on his face, the sounds of a low rumble, almost a deep-throated roaring noise beginning to drown out the strains of the Beatles’ song on the stereo, the jangling and clanking of plates and dishes, figurines and lamps from the kitchen to the living room filling their ears.

  It was exciting—almost a break in an otherwise ho-hum afternoon out of school—but these things were always unsettling, too, even though they were usually over in a few seconds.

  The volume of the noises from the area of the kitchen increased as the boys realized simultaneously that they were hearing dishes hitting the floor.

  Eighteen seconds after the first wave had flashed beneath them, the first of the massive secondary waves—the side-to-side, up-and down motions which had chased the P waves through the eighty miles’ distance—took hold of the Rustigan house, now groaning and straining, trying to keep up with its foundation, which was being yanked north, then south, then seemingly in all directions at once.

  The fun was over. Robert and Baxter realized the walls were moving in on them. The front door seemed miles distant, their legs were rubbery, but somehow they were in motion almost simultaneously—scrambling, feet falling on moving wooden floors, shoulders banging against the hallway surfaces as the roar and rumble from beneath them reached incredible levels, like some malevolent monster giving voice to a rising growl of warning. What they had to do was clear: They had to get out. How to do it was becoming the question.

  One second after arriving at the Rustigan household, the secondary waves yanked the foundation of downtown Anchorage to the north, then to the south, the rather gentle shaking of the first waves giving way to startling gyrations of concrete and masonry, linoleum and steel.

  Mary Louise Rustigan and other shoppers in Penney’s had been surrounded by the sounds of jiggling merchandise on glass counter-tops. Now the entire counters were in motion as the proud new store began to move sickeningly, dancing out from under the feet of the customers and salespeople, the airspace filling with rumbles and roars, tinkling and cracking sounds.

  Mary Louise, with Bonita firmly in hand, began to follow others toward the exit, trying with increasing difficulty to keep her footing. These things were not unusual, but they were unsettling. She had tamed a hundred horses as a rodeo rider, but bucking buildings were something else.

  On the street in front of his office Dr. Perry Mead realized what was happening as he paused with the key in the door of his Land-Rover. He was still standing, but the Rover was beginning to bounce and lurch as if possessed. The neurosurgeon watched in fascination, wondering what to do if it didn’t stop.

  At the top of the Westward Hotel, Bob Reeve decided to hit the deck as soon as the building started to roll and bounce. Reeve lay down on the floor and hooked his arm around the brass rail at the base of the wooden bar to hang on, watching as the Petroleum Club came alive with moving tables and chairs and cascading dinnerware.

  Father Norm Elliot had felt the first waves shudder through his church as he read the line “and the rocks were rent.” Now All Saints was in motion, the chandeliers overhead swinging wildly from side to side, being watched by the wide eyes of a hundred members of his congregation as they almost in unison began lurching for the door.

  Margaret Hines had turned off Northern Lights Boulevard onto Turnagain Boulevard North when the car began acting very strangely. She was almost to the driveway; but the vehicle was rocking and bucking, and she was beginning to think the engine was coming apart. A hundred yards ahead of her, unseen in the Hines family kitchen, son Warren was running through a quick mental checklist of what to do if the undulations of the house continued to build, as seemed to be the case. Every time he thought it was ending the shaking began again more strongly. It seemed only a few seconds since the first jiggles began and the noise started. The noise! It was incredible—similar to the distant rumble of a freight train, the vibrations tumbling for miles like rolling thunder, a range of sound he could feel as well as hear. Now the foundation had begun jerking in different directions with increasing vengeance, the house trying with increasing difficulty to follow.

  Warren moved toward the hallway, remembering the safety instructions about riding out quakes inside a building.

  If this gets any worse, he said to himself, I’ll go down the hall and watch Mitzi. He began edging in the direction of his four-year-old sister’s room as the new, urgent, unsettling noises from the sunken living room reached his ears. The large, expensive Sidney Lawrence painting on the living-room wall, his father’s pride and joy, was slapping the wall. The rumble from beneath his feet was becoming overpowering, a chorus of startling vibrations from protesting wood and frozen ground, squeaking construction joints and screaming fixtures. It seemed as if the house were being picked up a few millimeters and slammed back down on the concrete foundation every few seconds, the bone-jarring shudders ripping through his entire body.

  The fact that this was no ordinary quake was becoming all too obvious. So was the fact that the entire house was beginning to move in wholly unnatural ways.

  Not just shake, but move!

  He couldn’t believe it at first, but Warren was watching the north wall of the living room begin to undulate in and out, the front doorframe forming a periodic parallelogram, and the painting increasing its arc, punctuated by the sound of breaking dishes and glasses cascading from kitchen cabinets.

  Suddenly a voice rang through his thoughts, whether self-generated or not wasn’t important.

  Get Mitzi! Get out!

  That was all he needed. Warren was suddenly aware of the panicked screams now coming from her room.

  The same thought had finally occurred to young Perry Mead, Dr. Mead’s twelve-year-old son, standing in the middle of the family home several houses away from the Hineses and the Atwoods.

  Whatever was happening, it was clear to Perry that it was getting worse and they had better get out. With neither their mother nor their father present to help, young Perry Mead III yelled to his brother and sister to run ahead, out the door, as he turned and raced deeper into the house, trying to stand up on the wildly whipping floor, struggling to get to his two-year-old brother, Merrill.

  Fifty yards from Warren Hines’s house, Bob Atwood had abruptly ended his trumpet practice and abandoned his initial intention to stand in place and do what a seasoned reporter is trained to do: observe. The walls were in motion, and this was no usual tremor. Some forty-five seconds had ticked by since the first wave had passed.

  Atwood headed for the front door of his beautiful house, the sounds of family possessions hurling themselves to the floor ringing in his ears. Nails were screeching inside the
walls and wooden beams, his huge ship’s wheel chandelier was swinging wildly, threatening to pull itself loose from the ceiling, and he was having trouble standing.

  Bob Atwood gripped his trumpet tightly in his right hand and grabbed for the doorknob with his left—at approximately the same moment that the formation known as Bootlegger Cove Clay, which underlay the entire Turnagain Heights area, suddenly reached the limit of its endurance. With water molecules combining with the molecular structure of the clay in what a chemist would describe as a type of colloidal suspension, the clay changed character, no longer able to support the weight of the landscape above it. In less than sixty seconds it had turned to a liquid, and the instant that happened, Turnagain Heights began to travel.

  Prince William Sound

  As the layers of subterranean rocks (the opposing plates) rumbled into new positions under Prince William Sound, adjacent sections of the two great plates to the southwest were suddenly placed under new pressures—greater pressures than the snags which had been holding back their movement could handle. Snags which under ordinary circumstances would not have reached their breaking point for decades could no longer contain the stored energy. Within seconds another snag to the southwest of the first one shattered, causing additional massive movement of millions of tons of rocks more than twelve miles deep. Several seconds after that, still another snag failed, and the layers lurched forward again. With each movement the focus of what was becoming a massive tear in the fault system beneath Alaska moved farther to the southwest, each additional snap of the layers sending massive pulses of compression waves out in all directions along with the damaging S waves, which chased the compression waves at a slightly slower rate, but at a speed still measured in thousands of miles per hour.

  There were no strong motion seismographs in Alaska capable of staying on scale long enough to track the increasingly complex wave arrivals, but as the wave fronts jiggled distant seismograph needles all over the globe, they left the jumbled and confused signature of what was becoming one of the most amazing earthquakes ever recorded. A series of massive breaks and sudden readjustments were occurring over hundreds of miles of buried fault plane and creating a confusing cascade of P and S waves, reflecting, refracting, canceling, and reinforcing each other in odd ways, seemingly coming from different places as the hypocenters—the foci—of the breakages migrated southwest in the course of several minutes, maintaining a seemingly endless chain of elastic waves of seismic energy coursing through a dozen Alaska communities that were suddenly in shock with the horrifying realization: this was not stopping!

  In fact, it was just beginning.

  Anchorage, 5:38 P.M.

  The two Rustigan brothers had run as fast as they could from the house, threading themselves in a dive through the moving target of the front door with high-pitched cries of alarm, their feet moving far too slowly, the goal of safety unattainable even outside with the whole world in motion. A fleeting glimpse of the den as he moved out to the front yard confirmed to Baxter Rustigan that the heavy metallic art piece hanging on the den wall had been making some of the noise; it was swinging out far enough with each wave for them to see the underside.

  The complex seismic waves had been buffeting Robert and Baxter for nearly two minutes by the time they reached the yard, half stumbling, half crawling the short but seemingly impossible distance to the fence, where the plan was to grab on and cling for dear life. The front yard, though, was hardly better than the house. In the driveway Robert’s car was bouncing and bucking all over the place, moving back and forth, acting like an angry wild animal snarling to slip its chains. Their neighbor’s house was in a weird frenzy of motion, bulging, bouncing, moving left and then right, the walls seeming to stretch, the awful sound of tortured wood and cracking masonry joining the rumbling beneath their feet, the sharp report of frozen ground cracking punctuated by the staccato sounds of the tall fir trees overhead slapping together as one grove was whipped to the left while the other whipped to the right. The feeling of inescapable power gripped them both as the whole world rumbled around them and time became an elastic thing, stretching the nightmare out, seemingly forever.

  In the heart of Anchorage, J. C. Penney’s new store was starting to come apart. Ceiling tiles and shards of glass from exploding display cases were raining down on the small group of people trying to make their way over the lurching floor to the main exit on Fifth Avenue. Just when the noise had reached deafening proportions, the electricity went out, plunging the bucking, screeching interior of the multistory department store into gloomy blackness, the filtered gray light from the ground-floor windows the only beacon left to guide them outside.

  Mary Louise and Bonita Rustigan had managed to avoid injury so far, but it was like dodging live ammunition on an obstacle course—like the nightmare that everyone has at one time or another in which you try to run from something awful, but your feet won’t move.

  Now the light from outside was in front of them as mother and daughter struggled toward it, feet crunching broken glass every inch of the way, survival instinct suppressing the terror in the pits of their stomachs.

  It was beginning to seem as if the world were ending. The shaking had gone on and on for more than two minutes now, the sickening waves and swaying walls like nothing they had ever seen or experienced before.

  In the middle of Fifth Avenue in front of Penney’s, the managing editor of Bob Atwood’s newspaper was clinging to a woman he had never met, trying to help her stand up.

  Two minutes before, Bill Tobin had counted himself lucky to find a parking place in front of the store on an after-work errand for his wife. He had backed in carefully, only to feel a large bump—a lurch—as the secondary waves took hold of Anchorage. Puzzled, Tobin looked around, thinking he had been rear-ended by some dolt. The car was bouncing, and now to his left a woman appeared in his field of vision midway across the street, wobbling around and staggering. Tobin couldn’t figure out what was wrong with her. He watched for what seemed like a long time, but in fact was only seconds, his attention divided by the strange jerking his car was doing, not really comprehending what was happening. What was becoming obvious, however, was that the lady was going to fall and get hurt. Whatever was wrong with her, she was losing her battle to stay vertical.

  Bill Tobin jumped out of his car to go to her aid, his coat snagging the turn signal lever on the idling Buick in the process. When his feet touched the vibrating, jerking pavement, his mind served up the explanation for what was happening in a flash of understanding: This was a major earthquake!

  Now the two of them were like helpless drunks, holding on tightly to each other while trying to stay upright, as Tobin noticed something happening to the new tile facade of the Penney’s store: The walls were moving. Of course, everything was moving as the street undulated in continuous motion, glass breaking everywhere and the rattling and rumbling reaching unbelievable noise levels, but something else was happening: The front of the store was coming loose. As the veteran reporter watched in detached fascination, a four-story-high decorative slab of concrete and metal covered with little blue tiles broke free from the brackets tenuously bonding its several tons of weight to the outside of the building, and began a descent toward the sidewalk below, slowly at first, down a mere foot it seemed in the time it took for his mind to catch up and tell him what had happened—what was happening—what was about to happen.

  From inside the store Mary Louise and Bonita Rustigan could see the main exit. They were close now. A few more yards over the pitching floor. The plan was to get out of there as fast as possible—the building was sure to collapse, so violent were the sounds and the vibrations. The noise in the store was deafening.

  A young man ran out the door just ahead of them, then stopped on the sidewalk for some reason, losing his balance momentarily, crouching just on the other side of the glass doors. The blur of motion from above the door outside may not have registered at first. The daylight was being blocked only in one
area, but something was coming down—fast. As Bill Tobin watched from the street, the huge concrete panel descended the last few yards to the sidewalk in a horrendous crash, the full force landing on top of the crouching young man, obliterating him from view, killing him instantly.

  At that same moment, unaware of what had happened, Mary Louise and Bonita covered the last few feet to the main door of J. C. Penney’s like a pair of Olympic runners.

  Bill Tobin could hardly believe the waves—gigantic waves of concrete, in the street! The pavement was undulating in waves so high he simply could not see over them, and the sound continued to grow, an unbelievable screeching, breaking, tearing, and roaring sound, deep, physical vibrations shaking his very soul. My God, Tobin thought, this—this is the end. This has to be the end of the world!

  Never in all his years had he experienced the terror, the helplessness, the feeling of being powerless in the shadow of such mammoth energy. Everything he looked to for physical stability was in motion—suddenly there was no such thing as “solid ground” or “terra firma.” For all he knew, the whole world was dying in this same cataclysmic convulsion. Who knew how far it went? Time is meaningless in such a situation, but before three minutes of the waves had passed, Tobin knew that logic dictated it must be the end of the world.

  Bill Tobin noticed the next slab on the side of the store, noticed that it, too, was in downward motion, picking up speed, heading for the sidewalk below. This one was closer to the western end of the five-story building. It crashed into the sidewalk like the first one with a terrible noise and vibration that he could feel even among the constant rumbling and rolling of the street.

  The impact cracked the slab at about the five-foot level, and with that the top portion began breaking over toward the street.

  It seemed to fall in slow motion, like the first one, but at the moment Bill Tobin realized the concrete and tile would not reach him, he also realized that his Buick was disappearing beneath the huge piece, crushed like a tin can as it folded over the top of the car like a concrete tent, reducing it to little more than eighteen inches in height.