On Shaky Ground

by Nance, John J. ;

  He just couldn’t see them at first, he thought. They must be there. Seven million dollars’ worth of buildings and causeway and docks don’t just disappear.

  But with a cold knot in the pit of his stomach and the effort to fight the growing confusion with denial failing, his training in facing reality far too well developed, John Kelsey realized that was precisely what had occurred. The docks were gone! The buildings were gone. Most of the causeway was gone. And the people …

  Oh, Lord, what about his people out there—where were they?

  It was unbelievable. Beyond belief. Impossible to accept. But there it was. Nothing but debris beyond the stub of the causeway, nothing but wreckage—and the Chena, which registered in his peripheral vision off to the left, still afloat.

  Oh, my God! he said to himself. Anyone not on the ship couldn’t have survived. Did they make it? Did anyone make it?

  The Chena held that answer. The ship, he realized, was doing something quite odd: It was steaming through the middle of the cannery, smoke coming from her stack, obviously running for safety.

  Through the middle of the cannery? Was nothing left?

  The vivid mental image of all those men, their wives, and the children, good people in a festive mood as he had seen them fewer than twenty minutes ago, played in his mind’s eye.

  John Kelsey, his world in ruins, stood in the middle of Alaska Avenue for a brief moment, neither seeing nor feeling the rush of water coursing around his ankles and legs as he stared into the void.

  Seward, 5:40 P.M.

  Like the rolling thunder of a high-speed freight train a second after the caboose passes, the deep-throated, soul-shaking rumble and roar created by the seemingly endless chain of seismic waves punishing Seward began to subside. Slowly at first, the jerking and twisting motions diminished just enough to raise a faint glimmer of hope in a thousand minds that maybe, just maybe, it was not the end of the world after all. After nearly five minutes of progressive disintegration of their city and whatever trust they had held in the security of the ground beneath their feet, it was hard to believe that Armageddon had not arrived. Five minutes had become an eternity of disorientation and disbelief.

  Wave by wave, undulation by undulation, Seward came slowly to a halt, its wild north-south, up-down, booming and tilting motions subsiding as if someone were turning down a giant control knob.

  Virginia and Oscar Darling finally reached the top of the stairs and raced down the hallway toward the far end, where the form of a tiny woman stood, braced, in a doorway.

  Emma Hawkins was as white as a sheet. As her daughter and son-in-law rushed up to her breathlessly, the final surface waves were passing underneath the Brown and Hawkins building, the sound of screeching nails and groaning wood, rattling dishes and jars and crashing canned goods now subsiding, the noise down to an occasional quiver.

  The kitchen floor behind her looked like a casualty of war, but the owner was simply angry.

  “I couldn’t get off the bed!” she began.

  “Mother, come on, we’ve got to leave!”

  Emma Hawkins had tried for a full five minutes to get up as her building bucked over the seismic waves like an out-of-control raft on a white-water river. Every time she tried, however, another lurch would throw her back on the bed, and that had left her furious. The Seward pioneer had weathered just about everything else this land could throw at her, and she was in no mood to be thrown around by a mere earthquake. With the contents of shelves, pictures, and almost everything else breakable or movable in the small apartment hurling themselves to the floor, she kept trying to get to her feet and at last succeeded, moving quickly then to the presumed safety of the door. She had handled it and survived, thank you. Why on earth should she leave now?

  Emma Hawkins looked at her daughter with a puzzled expression.

  “It was only an earthquake, Virginia, and it’s over now.”

  That brought the two rescuers to a mental halt.

  “But,” Virginia began, “they say there’s going to be a tidal wave.”

  The retort was instantaneous.

  “Oh, they always say that, but it never happens.”

  The elderly lady had her jaw set and her arms extended, holding on to either side of the door, oblivious of the battle zone of canned goods and kitchen contents strewn in crazy profusion behind her.

  “Mother!”

  She looked up at her daughter.

  “Mother, there’s a fire someplace awfully close, and that is real—I saw it myself. We’ve got to get out!”

  Emma Hawkins thought over that new bit of information, thought about her building, the town’s other wooden buildings, and the fuel tanks down by the shoreline.

  “Well,” she said finally, “that’s different. Let’s go.”

  Within minutes after the shaking had stopped, the rumbling of the massive quake was replaced by the sound of car engines starting up all over the central area of town as people decided a burning city was no place in which to stay. Cars began collecting residents and heading north, out of Seward, across the lagoon road, which moments before had been washed by a debris-ridden wave full of spilled fuel and the remains of small boats. The twenty-foot-wide strip of concrete was still open as Scotty McRae, accompanied by his son Doug, drove the family car past the lagoon. With Mrs. McRae, children Robert and Linda, Doug’s wife, Joanne, and their baby son, plus one neighbor aboard, the presumed safety of Joanne’s family home south of the airport at the head of the bay was their destination. They would wait there at her parents’ house while Scotty, a volunteer fireman, went back with Doug to help fight the blaze which would surely consume Seward—and their homes with it.

  As Scotty and Doug helped unload the family and prepared to return to town, a dark shadow of water entered the southern end of Resurrection Bay at high speed, gaining height as it moved, spanning the bay—the logical result of the sudden uplift of hundreds of square miles of seawater which had occurred minutes before during the progressive breakage in the rocks of the Alaskan subduction zone.

  As it moved, cars on the northbound road to Anchorage that had reached the northern limit of the town, just north of the mile-long airport runway, came screeching to a halt. The road ahead was, in a word, destroyed. Impassable. Impossible. The remains of a series of small bridges were twisted and broken off to the side, visible to the lead cars as a jumble of concrete and twisted beams. Such an occurrence on the only surface route in and out of Seward meant only one thing, of course: The entire town was trapped.

  The fire was not spreading. Dan Seavey had noticed that fact within the first five minutes after the shaking stopped. Virginia and Oscar Darling with Emma Hawkins in tow noticed it, too.

  The plume of smoke and flame was going straight up. Without wind, the flames were staying confined to the waterfront—or what was left of it.

  But the silent, black wall of water that would enter the harbor some fifteen minutes later would catch the populace unprepared. The first wave had been a harbor wave, created by the underwater landslide.

  The next one would be a true tsunami.

  Volunteer firemen had gathered helplessly near the flaming eastern shore. All the water mains were severed, and one lone pumper truck was racing north to find fresh water, its driver hoping no buildings would catch fire until he could get back. Soldiers from the Army barracks above the destroyed Army dock had fanned out into town along with dockworkers who had left the docks minutes before the shaking started. Many were now back near the destroyed railyards, looking at the damaged and missing tracks and the capsized lines of rail cars, as well as the boxcars half submerged on the other side of the Texaco tanks.

  With a sudden vengeance which betrayed its force and fury only at the last second, the dark wall of water which had flashed unseen from the south end of Resurrection Bay now found itself limited by the bottom. It rose to crest twenty to thirty feet above the muddy surface of the upper bay and the area which had been the small-boat harbor, now seemingl
y drained of water as the huge wave built itself up to a crescendo, crashed ashore all at once along the ruined eastern waterfront, carrying a secondary tidal wave of burning petroleum on a fiery crest toward the buildings of Sixth Avenue, threatening anything and anyone in its path.

  Dockworkers and townspeople who had ventured in a dazed state close to the wreckage of the first wave saw the deserted diesel engine shudder for a second, then rise like a wounded beast, pushed and propelled toward the town, 250,000 pounds of machinery shoved like a surfboard ahead of the flaming wave crest, bracketed by boxcars and tank cars and disconnected flying wheel trucks from the disintegrating railroad cars in its path, all of it hurtling into small buildings and over the shattered ties and roadbeds to form an amazing, flaming windrow of wreckage from the southeastern corner of Seward’s ravaged waterfront to the northeast corner, where the remnants of the small-boat harbor had been seconds before.

  The image of that gigantic railroad locomotive in mid-flight would become a metaphor in the minds of those who saw it for the immense forces of nature unleashed on Seward and other Alaskan communities—as would pictures of the smashed diesel’s final resting place: on its side nearly two hundred feet to the west of its original position.

  Bob Clark and his wife, Blanche, were headed for higher ground when they saw the wave, a dark line moving fast toward the town and toward their tiny neighborhood at the head of the bay, just south of the Seward Airport.

  “Oh, my God … we’ll never make it!”

  Clark jammed the car in reverse and wheeled around, racing back a half block to their house, leaving the car and pushing Blanche along before him toward a backhoe parked by a tree in the adjacent yard. The Clarks clambered up on to the bucket of the backhoe, and were halfway into the branches of an adjacent tree when Bob noticed the McRae family’s car coming slowly past them. They hadn’t known of Scotty and Doug McRae’s plan to leave the family in the house across the street. All they could see now was that father and son were headed back toward town across the flat, sea-level stretch of ground separating the small housing area from the lagoon road. Bob Clark could tell the two McRaes didn’t know what was coming. And he knew that if they drove into that flat area head, they wouldn’t make it.

  “Go back! Scotty, Doug, get back!”

  Clark’s voice seemed inaudible against the wind.

  “Back! Go back!” he yelled at the top of his lungs and was relieved that the McRaes hit their brake, looked around, and understood him at last.

  Scotty and Doug heard the words “tidal wave” and reversed course, racing back to the house, yelling for the rest of the family to get out. Doug found a barrel at the rear of the house and began pushing his family one by one up on the garage roof. Joanne McRae’s parents’ home was deep in a grove of trees. The Clarks’ house was just across the road to the south, blocking the view of the bay. However, the sound of the oncoming wave had already reached them, a roar as menacing as the earthquake.

  Doug’s mother was up, the neighbor had made it, his brother, Robert, and his sister, Linda, carrying his newborn son, and finally his wife were all on the garage. Scotty McRae jumped up to the eave and helped his son up, both looking toward the bay simultaneously—and both realizing the water was too high.

  A mountainous wave maybe twenty feet high could be seen now between the trees in the distance, a growing roar filling the air, headed toward the low-roofed garage.

  “Up, we’ve got to get higher. Get up on the roof!”

  The McRaes began scrambling again, jumping from the garage roof one at a time to the higher roof of the one-story residence. The wave was over the north edge of the bay, headed right for them.

  Doug was up, having lost his footing for a second, then turning around in time to see his dad leap to the higher roof just as the first wave crashed into the house and the garage, ripping the structure from its foundations and carrying it off to the woods behind them.

  The house held with the first wave, teetered, shook, and moved, but held—probably on the strength of the plumbing. The wave, however, inundated the family, cascading over them and drenching everything.

  The Clarks could not be seen, but they, too, had held on in the branches of their tree a half block away, bracing for the second wave, which hit with even more force, tearing loose from its foundation the house the McRaes were riding, rafting them back in the same direction as the garage in the fading twilight.

  Doug McRae held on to his family and tried to hold on to the roof. It was a terrible battle to stay in one place. He assumed there would be a third wave. His sister still held his baby son, his wife was to one side, and they all were hanging on. He had seen the Clarks’ house destroyed by the first wave. The house they were riding had lost the garage in the first wave and been swept off the foundation with the second. He understood the horrendous power of that water, and he knew instinctively there would be more waves.

  And he doubted they could hang on through a third.

  The passage of the first tsunami wave from outside the bay, the second devastating wave to hit Seward, had barely disturbed the Alaska Standard as she stood out from the town slightly down the bay, the shell-shocked crew recovering rapidly from their ship’s close call. As the crewmen once again ventured outside, knees still shaking, eyes filled with the awful sight of Seward apparently in flames, they heard a weak voice from somewhere above a forward hold.

  On a catwalk some ten feet above the main deck of the tanker, third mate Ted Pedersen had regained consciousness in total confusion. He had thought himself doomed. Now here he was aboard the ship he thought he had been unsuccessful in reaching. Was he really alive? Was this some sort of delusion?

  Pedersen had no idea how he had been washed up on the catwalk, but the pain in his badly broken leg began to reinforce the point that he was, in fact, alive—and in need of help. With no docks left to receive the ship in Seward, and those ashore rather occupied with their own problems, that help would be hours away. For Ted Pedersen, as with the McRae family and many other Seward residents, there would be a tomorrow and survival, but only after a long, cold, agonizing night.

  Anchorage, 5:41 P.M.

  The shaking in Anchorage had almost stopped. Bit by bit the buildings had regained the ability to keep up with the direction their foundations were moving as second by second the bucking and lurching and side-to-side motions lessened, then quit altogether.

  A gigantic series of fissures and grabens (collapsed or depressed areas left when blocks of land move apart) had formed in the shape of a boomerang, with its midpoint touching the middle of Fourth Avenue, the right “wing” coming very close to the Westward Hotel, the other “wing” describing a path of slumped land and ruined buildings to the east across Third Avenue. The clay beneath had turned to viscous liquid, and blocks of ground above, with their frozen, snow-covered surfaces bearing the weight of rows of shops and buildings, had begun to break away and slump down in relation to the south side of the fissures. Buildings like the Denali Theater and scores of shops both dropped and slid to the north a few feet.

  At the west end of the city, a similar “block glide” over the viscous liquefied Bootlegger Cove Clay had occurred on L Street—one of the fissures opening beneath the Four Seasons apartments and bringing it down in a heap. More than thirty city blocks of buildings shook, rattled, and slid over the layers of clay below, one six-story apartment building relocating itself eleven feet west of where it had been built, but without fatal damage.

  The Westward Hotel, however, had stayed in place. As its designers had planned, the huge foundation and careful construction paid off. There was damage where the hotel and an adjacent building flailed away at each other, but as the last waves diminished, the new hostelry stood relatively intact.

  In the Petroleum Club a shaken Bob Reeve felt the waves slow and stop at last. He picked himself up from the base of the bar railing and looked out with amazement on the devastation around him. The General Motors dealership by Merrill Fi
eld had collapsed, the concrete roof now lying in pieces. The J. C. Penney store was in ruins, the Four Seasons apartment building had collapsed, and damage was visible in every direction—though overall Anchorage was still standing.

  Three miles to the east of town, Baxter and Robert Rustigan realized they had survived, but their knees were still shaking. With bloodstreams full of adrenaline, the two brothers held on to the now-wobbly fence in their front yard until they were sure the quake was really over, then headed back inside the house.

  Like the majority of the wooden frame homes in large earthquakes, the Rustigan house was a terrible mess inside with most of the shelves and cabinets unceremoniously emptied, furniture overturned, and glass broken. The bathroom was a noxious mixture of perfumes, after-shave lotion, mouthwash, and other assorted fragrances now in a slush of broken glass on the tile floor, the kitchen covered with broken plates and glasses amidst dented pots and pans. Characteristic of wooden frame homes when the foundation doesn’t fail, though, the basic structure of the house was intact.

  Baxter and Robert Rustigan plugged the fuel oil tank at the back of the house and decided to drive into town to sightsee. It was logical to assume that everyone had survived as well as they. Not in their wildest nightmare would the two boys have imagined what had just happened to their mother in downtown Anchorage: Mary Louise Rustigan had seen the growing shadow of the falling slab from the J. C. Penney store, recognized what was happening, and given her daughter a final shove a split second before the force and fury of the falling concrete ended her life in the middle of the rubble-filled street. Bonnie Rustigan had been propelled to safety. Her mother had not.