What he saw froze him in his tracks: The maze of pipes was beginning to come apart, the first streams of fuel already shooting urgently, threateningly toward the ship, others straining at their attach points.
Lamberson turned on instinct and ran back into the office, picking up speed as he entered the warehouse, running through the building toward the town, weaving over the bucking floor and emerging on the western side, picking up speed again as he hit the railroad tracks and prepared to dart around the south end of a moving freight train. As he calculated his trajectory—pacing his footfalls so as to get over the rails and ties without tripping or breaking stride—a fissure opened, snaking its way from left to right dead ahead of him, opening up the ground exactly where he had planned to step, throwing him off-balance, into confusion, and into the widening crack—with a line of heavily loaded tank cars on the other side.
Seward Police Officer Eddie Endresen and his brother Andy had been in deep discussion about the family fishing boat when the first compression waves arrived. The boat was out of the water and inside a large shed at the head of the small-boat harbor, just north of the Texaco tank farm on the northeastern shoulder of the town.
Both brothers decided to wait it out at first, but when the building began shaking violently and threatening to collapse, the two streaked out of the door—just as the walls and roof came down, crushing the boats inside.
Some forty seconds had passed since the first waves reached them on the north side, microseconds before they coursed under the Standard Oil dock, the Seavey residence, Brown and Hawkins, and the railroad dock on the south end, less than four thousand feet away.
Both men were alarmed; Andy’s son, Frank, was on another of the family boats, this one tied up at the foot of the ramp below the shop. As Andy Endresen ran in that direction, his son clambered onto the ramp, which was starting to gyrate violently, forcing him to crawl, inching his way up toward his worried father.
Ed Endresen had turned to go run to his car when the chimney of the boat shop joined the rest of the structure in collapse, flattening his car in the process.
The son, Frank Endresen, had almost reached the head of the ramp, which was swinging crazily. He reached out, inching along, grabbed his father’s hand, and pulled over the top to safety just as the ramp gave way and crumpled into the turbulent sea water.
Frank Endresen dashed ahead of his father toward higher ground, but the surface was rupturing in lateral cracks everywhere as the surface continued to buck and bounce in wild motion. Frank and Andy Endresen had almost reached the pickup when a fissure opened beneath its rear wheels, and the truck began sliding slowly, inexorably, into the maw of the trench, now filling with water.
The two men watched in horror and fascination as the fissure ate the pickup. They would have to escape on foot—if at all.
Ed Endresen had already tried escaping, and was failing. After the chimney flattened his car, the policeman dashed for the railroad crossing, which had been blocked by the freight train, which was now slowing. Cracks were opening up everywhere, brown, muddy water filling them, spurting and spilling over on the adjacent gyrating ground, making everything extremely slippery.
Sixty seconds had passed since the shaking started, and Ed realized all his escape routes were gone, cut off, or blocked. With a sickening feeling and a knot in his stomach he saw his last path to safety blocked by the line of boxcars moving and shaking ahead of him on the vibrating tracks. The train was still in motion. He couldn’t get past it unless he went under the cars, but if he fell beneath those wheels …
The sounds of cracking wood and screeching metal, roaring water, and the incessant rumble of the quake itself filled his ears and seemed to come from directly behind him, gaining on him, leaving him no other choice but to get past the train. He could barely stand up on the lurching ground, which seemed to be in motion in all directions at once. His brother and nephew had disappeared, he had no idea where.
Precisely what made the decision for him was unclear, but suddenly Ed Endresen was in motion again. The policeman began running toward the moving train, diving in one incredible, frantic motion behind the heavy wheels of a boxcar, hoping to roll out on the other side in time to stay out of the path of the heavy wheels, reaching, grabbing for the stretch of ground on the other side of the tracks.
“Oh my God, I’ve got to go back in and get Mother!”
Why she hadn’t thought about her before, she didn’t understand, but Virginia Darling had to get back in the Brown and Hawkins building. Her frail mother was on the second floor of this building, which was now beginning to lurch and bounce as much as the street.
Her husband, however, was restraining her—holding her arms.
“We’ll both go,” he told her.
But he wasn’t moving.
Her frame of reference rattled, her eyes glued to the family store, the booming and bouncing and thunderous roar of the quake still increasing, she wondered for a fleeting instant if he’d lost his mind. He said we’d both go, she thought, but he’s holding my arms. I’ve got to get back in there!
Memories of the 1933 quake in Long Beach fluttered across her mind. Memories of all the small shakers they had lived through replayed in her consciousness. Why hadn’t this subsided?
There was another sound now, another noise, the sound of glass. That was it, glass breaking, exploding, somewhere behind her. The waterfront was behind her, and she was facing west, feeing her storefront, listening to the sound of windows exploding sequentially behind her, getting closer and closer. It would be, she thought, merely a matter of seconds before hers went. She had to get in that building!
Dan Seavey saw it at the same time the spectacle filled the eyes of other shell-shocked citizens: a tremendous explosion to the east, flame and smoke shooting vertically hundreds of feet, seemingly at a forty-five-degree angle canted north along the eastern shoreline, balls of flame and heat and light roiling into the air. To Dan Seavey it was amazing—fascinating. As he looked back at the railroad dock, Seavey realized the gantry crane he had been watching was gone, and he felt cheated. Damn, he said to himself, I missed the show!
To Seward veterans the explosion held its own set of imperatives. The one most feared occurrence in the city was the specter of the Standard oil tank farm exploding—and now it had happened.
And as everyone knew, that meant Seward would burn.
The flames from the exploding fuel tank behind reflected off the glass of the Brown and Hawkins front window seconds before the glass collapsed in a million shards. With the ground still bucking and shaking amidst horrendous noise, there was no time for explanations or entreaties. Virginia Darling yanked herself free of her husband’s grip and ran toward the frantically shaking frame building, disappearing into the hallway leading to the upstairs section as her husband raced to catch her—to keep her out of what he knew any second now might be a collapsing pile of rubble.
And in the middle of town, heard by only a few, the old bell in the tower of one of Seward’s older churches had begun to ring thirty seconds into the quake. It was now a frantic, maniacal, maddened series of clangs and rings, the striker hitting all sides of the bell, the bell itself flailing around. To one who heard it and would later remember, the sound could only be described as hysterical. Seward was starting to come apart at the seams.
The first surface waves from the point of the great underground fracture 130 miles away beneath Prince William Sound had undulated into Seward from the northeast, shaking the town and the mountains from north to south, back and forth, finally imparting a different and deadly kind of motion to the water-saturated mound of sand and gravel and small clay particles on which Seward was built—the alluvial fan (or delta) leading from the western wall of Resurrection Bay to the waterline, sloping some 500 feet beneath the water down to the floor of the bay.
The entire waterfront was built on the outer edge of that gravel mound where it met the water, but forty-five seconds after the seismic waves ha
d begun yanking it back and forth, the weight of the gravel and sandy material into which a hundred pilings had been sunk, on which a thousand railroad ties had been laid, and around which the entire economy of the Seward community had been based began to sink.
The cracks were the first horrifying indication that something catastrophic was about to happen. The cracks and fissures formed north to south, alongside the railroad tracks and between them and the waterline, opening and closing, spewing muddy water and liquefied sand, marking the beginning of a migration toward the bay. As the entire surface of Seward’s waterfront above and below the waterline began to flow like a viscous liquid down the underwater slope, it pulled with it the Standard Oil dock, the new San Juan cannery dock, the railroad marshaling yards, the Army dock, the breakwater and moorings of the small-boat harbor, and the economic base of the town. All of it began to move toward the bay, stretching and dropping slowly at first, the massive, moving underwater landslide displacing thousands of tons of water instantaneously, and causing a mound of seawater many feet high to begin forming a mile out in the bay—a mound of water which would not treat the battered remains of the Seward waterfront kindly.
Third mate Ted Pedersen had been all alone on the end of the Standard Oil dock by his tanker, the Alaska Standard, when the shaking began to reach alarming proportions. He never saw L. C. Lamberson momentarily emerge from the Standard Oil offices before heading back for higher ground. What Pedersen did see was the explosion of one of the storage tanks. As fellow townspeople turned to see the rolling fireball ascending into the clear, blue sky, they were looking from the relative safety of land. Pedersen’s vantage point was different. With a fire storm beginning at the head of the docks and fuel gushing everywhere along the shore, the realization came fast: He was cut off.
At that point the feeling of wooden pilings and dock planking sinking beneath his unsteady position joined the bouncing and shaking of the seismic waves. The image of the town moving upward registered in his mind a split second before the explanation of what was really happening: The office, the storage warehouses, the tanks on the waterline, and the dock on which he was trying to stand were slipping down, sliding—to where and for what reason he had no idea, and no time to consider.
Pedersen was already in motion, turning abruptly and beginning a dash toward the ship and the boarding ramp, which hung tantalizingly close to the bucking surface of the wooden dock. His feet seemed to move in slow motion, the heat and light from the petroleum conflagration behind him burning hot on the back of his neck. The ship was close, yet still yards away. He tried to keep moving in a straight line on the bouncing surface, but it was more a frantic wobble toward the gangway than a run. Unseen by the crewmen on board, who themselves had been startled to feel the tanker dropping, Pedersen ran with every ounce of strength he could muster.
But suddenly his target—his haven of safety—was in motion, too. The boarding ramp was off the dock, swinging up and away from him. The ship itself had begun to roll slightly, throwing the ramp out of reach. Now, however, the edge of the boarding ramp had disappeared as the ship dropped in front of him faster than the dock.
Pedersen realized he wasn’t going to make it. He saw it was futile. Perhaps there was another way.
The veteran crewman turned around and started back toward the inferno of the dock, trying to make himself believe that he could find a safe path to the shore. But the planking of the dock in front of his wobbly steps was beginning to come apart. The earthquake was still gripping everything. It seemed as if it would never stop. Exactly how much longer he could continue to find a place for his frantic footsteps and his pathetic attempt at running was uncertain. He was frantic yet calm, full of adrenaline yet running harder than he had ever run in his life—right into the chasm that suddenly opened in the dock before him, a rush of water and wood and steel passing his confused field of vision in such a blur that it was unclear what was happening, where he was falling. One thing seemed certain, however: He wasn’t going to make it. That thought coursed through his brain as he lost consciousness.
Although gantry crane operator Dean Smith didn’t see the Standard Oil facilities sinking into the bay, he was very aware of the explosion of the storage tanks. But Smith already had a tiger by the tail, trying to get down the fifty-foot ladder from his control cab with the huge machine swaying and walking along its tracks. Hand over hand, holding on to cold metal with what could be called a true death grip, Smith somehow managed to hit bottom and race over the lurching and bucking surface out of the way before the crane reached the deepwater edge of the wildly gyrating railroad dock.
The dock was breaking apart. Smith had seen the cracks in the paving deck a foot wide and getting wider. The coffee shop and offices were settling toward the water, and smoke—or steam—was shooting from broken windows.
Finding a fellow dockworker, Smith stumbled out the front gate onto higher ground before thinking about the possibility of fire from loose power lines. Someone had to cut off the main power supply to the dock, and he would have to do it. It was a futile and dangerous mission since the dock and all the buildings on it were already disintegrating, but Dean Smith turned anyway and started running back through the gate toward the collapsing dock.
Somehow Virginia Darling managed to get up the first of the wildly shaking and vibrating steps leading to the second floor of the Brown and Hawkins building, desperate to get to her frail mother. Behind her, Oscar Darling had followed her across the street, unable to catch up with his wife until now. For some reason, this time he didn’t try to stop her. With Oscar behind her on the steps, Virginia pulled herself hand over hand up the stairwell, fearing what she might find at the top. The sound was still horrendous, and the report of things falling on floors above had met her ears the second she entered. There was fire somewhere in the building, she was sure. If their building stayed up long enough for them to get out, it was probably doomed to burn along with the rest of the town. Those were simply passing thoughts. The welfare of one of Seward’s most senior pioneers—her mother—was her only focus.
The railroad engineer realized it was hopeless. The cracks in the roadbed in front of his locomotive had been just the beginning. What he now knew was a massive earthquake had finally derailed him, he was sure. He dumped the air pressure to lock the brakes and decided to abandon his engine.
The engineer half jumped, half climbed down the left side of the big diesel, which seemed to be in sideways motion along with the disintegrating tracks. He hit the dirt running toward the west, toward the streets of the town, instantly realizing that he would have to get past an obstacle course of shaking rails and ties, fissures opening and closing, and several lines of boxcars. As he scrambled in and out of the first water-filled fissure, the engineer didn’t have time to see the growing mound of water in the bay and what it was doing. He didn’t have time to consider how fast that mound might form a wave, and how fast that wave might move back toward the waterfront, seeking equilibrium. He was focused on only one thing: reaching higher ground and getting out of this hellish railyard. The growing shadow over his shoulder remained unseen.
The mound of water began to dissipate by the third minute of the quake, forming huge waves. One growing wall of water began moving toward the Seward waterfront, where the eastern shore was now disintegrating, the San Juan and Army docks no longer visible, the Standard Oil area in flames, the dock in pieces, and the small-boat harbor partially collapsed and by all appearances devoid of water.
Dean Smith realized almost the instant he had started back through the gate of the railroad dock that the effort was fruitless. He also realized his gantry crane had disappeared, the whole thing was nowhere to be seen. That made no sense, even though he knew instinctively that it had walked all the way to the edge and tumbled in where now a wall of water was now breaking over the eastern edge of the concrete ramp. With a fascination born of disbelief he watched the east point cannery actually riding the wave, surfing fifteen feet above
the remains of the dock on the crest before sinking from view. It was moving toward him, the wave lifting several cars like corks as Smith whirled around and resumed running as hard as he could back out the gate toward the Brown and Hawkins building on Fourth Avenue, escaping just ahead of the wave before it played itself out over Railroad Avenue, the backwash pulling ruined buildings, cars, and debris back into the bay along with thousands of gallons of flaming gasoline.
L. C. Lamberson stopped by the bowling alley, two blocks up from where his Standard Oil office had been. He could see only the wall of smoke and flame and exploding rail cars now. There was no visible sign beyond that of the dock or the Alaska Standard. The terrific heat from the explosion and fire had followed him up the street, and his heart had nearly stopped when the sound and vibrations of the explosion hit him as he had stumbled out of a water-filled crack in the switchyard and over the rails to safety. The wave crashing in over the remains of the dock and the waterfront was adding insult to injury. Carrying a swell of flaming gasoline and floating railcars along with it, the wave was just a footnote to a holocaust. A great sadness pressed in on him. He was sure the tanker had gone down with all hands. He couldn’t see a trace of her.
Frank Endresen was frantic when he reached the relative safety of Fourth Avenue above the railyards and the small-boat harbor and realized that his father, Andy Endresen, wasn’t with him.
Like his brother, Ed Endresen, Andy had been blocked by the fissures and the rail cars. He had fallen into and paddled across several cracks and rolled under the boxcars only to be faced with another horror: more than a foot of spilled, menacing green aviation gasoline now covered the stretch of ground in front of him like a lethal lake, spillage from the Texaco tanks which had split open, cascading thousands of gallons of the stuff into the railyards. As he ran through the gas, the flames from the Standard Oil tanks just to the south were all too apparent. One spark would be all it would take to incinerate him—and the sounds of explosions were getting closer.
On Shaky Ground Page 9