On Shaky Ground

by Nance, John J. ;

  While Andy Endresen had been fighting his frantic battle to escape, his brother, Ed, unseen some fifty yards to one side, also had fallen victim to an opening fissure. The crack had become an instant chasm opening on the other side of the boxcar Ed Endresen had rolled beneath. Barely getting out of the way of the rear wheels of the boxcar, Ed had reached out instinctively as he tumbled into the trench and caught the far edge, his feet dangling over what seemed a thirty-foot abyss below. Just as rapidly as it had opened, the fissure began closing, belching up a cascade of muddy water, which helped the police officer get his elbows over the slippery edge of the crack. He pulled himself up, one knee first, then rolled most of his body over the top before trying to pull his right leg out of the closing crevasse.

  Too late! The ground closed around his boot and his leg, pressing hard, the shaking and undulating of the terrain still in full cry. Endresen looked at the boxcar and the swirling water on the other side and realized he had to act. With a violent lurch he yanked his foot free, wrenching his back terribly in the process, and got to his feet just as the boxcar beside him toppled over and began sinking toward the bay. Endresen stumbled, ran, hobbled, fell, and raced the remaining five hundred feet to Fourth Avenue through the same lake of spilled fuel his brother Andy had forded, worried, like his brother, that any second it could ignite.

  As the three Endresen men reached safety, the first wave reached their escape route, finishing the demolition of the small-boat harbor, washing scores of boats over the disintegrating seawall, drowning several people on board two separate vessels, washing over the spot where most of the fuel-covered railyard had stood moments before, and carrying a wave of flaming gasoline and debris toward the lagoon, which stood on the other side of the only road out of Seward.

  The engineer had cleared the last line of freight cars in his footrace to safety as the wave broke behind him. His abandoned eighty-car train was already ruined, most of it having rolled seaward off the tracks as the land beneath the loaded cars slumped toward the bay. He had heard the Standard Oil tanks explode as he struggled over the pitching, cracking railyard, and then realized with horror that the additional explosions that kept going off sequentially to his left were the tank cars at the rear of his train, exploding one by one from the rear toward his position as he wobbled toward the safety of higher ground.

  And then the line of upset boxcars was in motion again, lifted by the harbor wave as it crashed in on the remains of the switchyard, lifting the tons of metal in the air and surging them forward toward the last line of rails, where he had stopped for a second to look back.

  Adrenaline taking over, the engineer was in motion once again, moving as fast as he could toward Fourth Avenue, the sound of crashing metal and roaring water in his ears, finally reaching the relative safety of a street with no cracks.

  Standing on the still-gyrating ground, he could hear his heart pounding. Emil Elbe, a heavy-set fellow railroad worker who had run across the same obstacle course, appeared on the right side of the engineer now, trying to keep his balance, his face contorted in pain.

  Elbe grabbed his chest, panting for breath, terrible pain shooting through his body, the pounding of his heart now erratic. With ashen features the veteran railroad man slumped to the ground at the feet of the engineer, losing consciousness as the last vestige of the first wave began its backwash to the bay, carrying most of the train with it.

  He had escaped the quake and the fire and wave, but it had been too much for his heart. Emil Elbe died where he had fallen.

  The entire crew was in shock, but somehow the Alaska Standard had survived. Battered and thrown around, with one crewman missing, she was nevertheless not taking on water. The tanker kept her engines on standby and kept to the center of the bay, aware that further waves might be inbound. Back to the west there was only destruction to be seen. A wall of flame and smoke covered the city from the southeast edge to the location of the small-boat harbor, which could no longer be seen. The company’s dock was gone, as were all the other dock facilities as far as the captain could see. Just flames and smoke were visible.

  Looking at the same scene of utter destruction from several decks below the wheelhouse, the shocked radio operator of the Alaska Standard returned to his radio room and made contact with an operator somewhere in the lower forty-eight, tapping out in rapid Morse code a simple and sad chronicle.

  “Seward,” he transmitted, “is burning!”

  Chapter 7

  For nearly four minutes the Alaskan landmass had shaken, rolled, raised, dropped, and undulated with the wildly complex series of seismic energy waves emanating from beneath as the rock layers broke, readjusted, cracked, shattered, and moved again, finally reaching a point in this sequence of elastic rebound in which the stored energy was decreasing, breaking fewer and fewer snags, letting the plates finish their major readjustments. Smaller and smaller lurches of the rock occurred with each passing second. The wave fronts diminished slowly, the gyrations winding down until at last the plates had stopped moving again.

  There would be weeks and months of additional readjustments—aftershocks—as the layers shrugged and shuddered and pushed and wriggled like a large animal slowly sinking into a deep sleep, searching for the most comfortable position.

  In the meantime, as the battered residents of south-central Alaska began to despair of the seismic waves ever lessening, the last part of the sequence was just beginning.

  Valdez, 5:39 P.M.

  “Captain! Captain, over here. Fast. Please!”

  The voice from the right side—the starboard side—of the bridge finally broke through Merrill Stewart’s high-speed mental calculation of what was happening to his ship and what could be done.

  He jerked his head to the right and remembered the image of his third mate lying on the floor. The man had just asked to be relieved seconds after the Chena had thundered down on the remains of the dock. Now the helmsman was beside him, asking for help, listening to the captain’s reply.

  “Get some sailors up here, and let’s get him to his room.”

  Stewart still had a dying ship to worry about, but Thompson might be a dying crew member. He looked very ill—conscious, but obviously in shock and very weak. The man was only thirty-eight, but the possibility of a heart attack crossed the captain’s mind.

  Several crewmen materialized and helped Thompson up, half carrying him toward the interior stairway to the deck below, trying to stay upright against the continuous shuddering and bouncing of the seismic waves being transmitted through the thin layer of water beneath the ship.

  She was rising again, rolling suddenly once more to port, another incredible gyration threatening to capsize the vessel, pushing them toward the shore and forward, throwing the crew members off their feet again.

  Stewart had the handle of the engine telegraph in his hand. It had been on “one quarter ahead.” Now he slammed it forward to “full speed ahead” and noticed the pointer respond as one of the engineers answered the command from down in the battered engine room some two hundred feet away.

  To his left Stewart could still see the tortured town gyrating and bouncing, the tanks of the Standard Oil and Union Oil tank farms in violent motion. He expected to see an explosion from what had to be spilled fuel, but so far it hadn’t happened.

  The ship was over thirty degrees to port again, but this time the rate of roll seemed to be slowing—stopping—as the big vessel paused, rising on the new wave, shuddering at the top, beginning to roll back the other way to the starboard side as the water again passed beneath the ship, the wave unable to push that much weight ahead of its crest. As Stewart watched, the wave smashed into the interior of the harbor, playing out before hitting the edge of town.

  The ship was coming down approximately where the small-boat harbor had been. It had not been raised as high on the second wave, so the impact when the flat bottom smashed onto the mud the second time was nowhere near as violent and bone-crushing as the first. She shuddered, n
o water beneath her for a second, and then seemed to refloat almost as quickly on a combination of the backwash and a new wave growing beside them to starboard.

  Stewart noticed the rpm needle move. The screw was beginning to turn, barely and dead slow, but at least he was getting some steam. Maybe, maybe he could get some headway before the waves put them on the beach.

  As the ship came up for the second time, Stewart could see they were just inside the shallow ledge of the interior harbor, the huge vessel seemingly inches above the bottom, barely refloated on the incoming water. He dashed out the door onto the port wing again and looked aft, trying to assess whether they had maneuvering room, trying to decide if he could order a turn, wondering if he still had a rudder.

  The scene that met the captain’s gaze was as near hopeless as anything he had seen in three decades at sea. The Chena’s stern was sitting in the middle of a floating junkyard of broken pilings, rocks, mud, and the remains of the dock. The blades of the ship’s propeller would be smashing into that debris even now—if it could even continue to turn.

  He whirled to look forward. No solace there, either. In front of the bow lay another impossible barrier: the floating ruins of a cannery that had been on the collapsed end of the parallel dock which bordered the southeastern end of the small-boat harbor. The cannery’s foundation was gone, but the cannery itself lay right across the only path to deeper water.

  And they were too close to the mudbank to turn. If he ordered the wheel in either direction, they would run aground.

  The Chena, he realized, was trapped.

  Fifteen hundred feet from the Chena thirteen-year-old Tom Gilson was frantically trying to make headway toward the First Bank of Valdez, getting nearly half a block from the waterfront intersection behind him before he really noticed that he was running up the middle of what had become a growing stream. With a shock he realized the water wasn’t coming from behind him (which was what he expected somewhere deep in his parcel of fears) it was coming toward him. Muddy brown torrents of water forced up from the saturated soil mixed with the effluent from the destroyed sewer system and destroyed water mains in the town and coursed down the street at least a foot deep, maybe more, channeled by the high snowbanks on each side of the avenue. Tom was half running, half wading up Broadway while the surface of the street continued to undulate beneath the current, hundreds of cracks ripping through the surface as the loosely consolidated soil beneath the city settled and stretched toward the bay in the continuous grip of the seismic waves.

  The shaking had not let up, but Tom was finally learning how to time his movements in order to stay on his feet. He had given up waiting for the quake to end. It was not going to end, apparently. He didn’t understand why, but it was obviously a fact he would have to accept for the moment.

  Fissures were opening everywhere in the street in front of him, and with the water getting deeper he was having trouble staying upright—avoiding the cracks. Ahead of him was the Alaska Hotel, the principal lodge in town, built of concrete blocks and stucco. As he looked up at the building, one wall peeled away and the front disintegrated, debris falling onto the inundated pavement before him. Other walls farther up the street were waving and threatening to shatter as well. He kept telling himself the bank building would not be one one them.

  Marion Ferrier had refused to leave without her purse and galoshes, and her daughter was furious with her. Giant waves were headed up the bay, and the house sat by the waterfront. They had to leave!

  Marion pulled on her boots and grabbed her purse, following her daughter outside, the sound of her overturned clock’s incessant chiming filling her ears as she rushed through the door. The gyrating of the building seemed to be slowing now, but it wasn’t over. She could see a car coming up the street, still bouncing on the quivering roadway.

  Larry had already fled into the street, flagging the driver, trying to get them a ride out. The station wagon filled with a neighbor family slowed enough for the Ferriers to pull open the doors and jump into the moving vehicle, which immediately sped away up Wickersham Street toward higher ground. The unspoken thought in everyone’s mind revolved around the horrific sight they had seen in the harbor two minutes before; surely there would be another giant wave, and that one would get their houses.

  The propeller speed was up to five revolutions now. Merrill Stewart checked the gauge as the Chena rose off the bottom for the third time. She was plowing through mud and debris, scraping along the bottom, barely floating, headed right for the remains of the cannery and doomed unless she could be turned. Ahead of her was the muddy stub of the causeway to the cannery, and she wouldn’t clear it.

  Stewart was aware of the backwash from the previous waves, but he hadn’t noticed the cascade of water from the Valdez streets. Now, without warning, a gush of water pushed in from the port bow, mixing with the backwash from the third wave, putting an incredible field of floating debris into motion, the sound of roaring water rising above the noises of cracking timbers and screeching wooden beams scraping along the hull of the ship.

  The shaking of the quake could no longer be felt. But at that moment his finely tuned nautical senses detected something else. The rudder was positioned straight ahead, yet the Chena’s bow was beginning to swing to starboard. It moved slowly at first, just a hint of a movement, something most people would never feel. It hadn’t even registered on the compass yet, but it was there.

  The backwash wave was pressing on the port bow, putting the twenty thousand tons of metal into a right-hand rotation, acting like an aquatic tugboat pushing the bow to sea. If there was enough of it—if the current lasted long enough—maybe they could avoid the mud ahead.

  Stewart, still on the port wing of the bridge, watched as his ship rolled slightly to starboard and the bow began to move a few degrees at a time to the right, the propeller turning even faster now, the sounds of the ship’s bottom scraping and screaming past untold debris still ringing in his ears.

  In the number three hold it was too late for two of the longshoremen, one of them crushed to death and the other dead of a heart attack in the excitement. But with the wild rolling of the ship now apparently over, several men had come to Jack King’s rescue, and King was alive, though in great pain with two crushed feet. His rescuers knew instinctively that King would need quick medical attention and a hospital, and with what the ship was going through, they also realized that neither might be possible. There were no doctors aboard the Chena.

  The noise of the impact with the remains of the cannery was considerable, but Captain Stewart counted it as a victory. The bow was more than ten degrees right of where it had been, and speed was picking up, the distance between the ship and the mudbank on the left giving him the ability to order a slight turn of the wheel to increase the turning rate to starboard, toward the relative safety of the bay. Merrill Stewart couldn’t believe it, but it looked as if they were going to avoid becoming a permanent feature of the Valdez waterfront.

  Of course, they would undoubtedly become a permanent underwater fixture. With what the Chena had been through, Stewart felt instinctively that she was sinking. He would take her into the channel, drop anchor, and prepare for the worst.

  Red and Delbert Ferrier had never experienced anything like the shaking and bucking that had kept throwing them on the beach for the previous five minutes. Within seconds, it seemed, an avalanche started down the slope right above them, breaking into the stand of trees right above the shoreline and stopping before reaching them. Red realized that if another slide occurred, they wouldn’t be so lucky—the trees wouldn’t hold. Father and son had bolted to their skiff and frantically paddled to the Falcon on the crest of a wave. The skiff suddenly washed up to deck level, and the two men jumped out and into the Falcon, abandoning the skiff.

  Within moments they had the engine going and pulled in the anchor, heading to the southeast across the narrows toward Jack Bay.

  It was then that the wall of water caught their eye. The first
backwash from the huge wave created by the collapse of the Valdez waterfront had begun racing westward down the ten-mile fjord less than two minutes into the quake. Now it could be seen bearing down on the narrows, cresting, gigantic in height.

  The Falcon could manage only seven knots of speed, but they were coaxing every ounce out of her, trying to get to the shelter of the other side, trying to outrun a wave that was obviously going to outrun them.

  The lighthouse at the north entrance of the narrows was nearly a mile behind them now as Delbert looked back, watching the crest as it bore down on the concrete installation, which sat twenty-five feet above the waterline. The wave was on it in an instant, snapping the entire structure off its foundation as if it were a matchstick, rising above the top of where the lighthouse had been seconds before.

  “We’ll take it on the stern. Hang on!”

  Red had no idea what their chances were, but with a fantailed stern and a lot of luck, they might survive.

  The wave lost its crest after it had moved into the narrows and taken the lighthouse. Now it was bearing down on the Ferriers’ boat, mere yards behind them, a wall of water in the form of a huge swell, which suddenly picked the thirty-four-foot boat up, surfing it along before it, inundating it, consuming it, upending it, and disorienting its two occupants, the deck angle unbelievable, the boat’s prow seemingly pointing straight down.

  And just as quickly it was over. Profoundly shaken, Red and Delbert Ferrier watched the wave recede to the south and tried to let the fact sink in: They were still alive.

  It was followed by the cold fear inherent in the next thought: If that wave had come from their town, what had happened to Valdez and their family?

  John Kelsey’s building had tipped partially off its foundation. It was now leaning over at a shallow angle; but amazingly, it was intact, and his family had made it through the incredible shaking unscathed. Even his mother-in-law had won her battle to catch the gyrating coffeepot without injury. He emerged from the building into the torrent of water and looked toward the waterfront—to one of the most profound shocks of his life.