Anchorage was getting dark. There was no electric power. Telephones were out in many areas, water mains had been broken all over town, and the maze of natural gas lines had been shut down automatically and immediately by a model system of automatic emergency shutoffs that probably prevented the city from burning. Roads were broken in various areas, emergency radio communications were sketchy, the city’s radio stations were off the air, and in the moments following the last undulations, people all over the Anchorage area tended to think that they had been sitting on the epicenter of the quake. The idea that other areas might have been hit harder simply didn’t occur to such people as Bill Tobin, the Times managing editor who had watched people being killed and figured the world was ending in front of Penney’s.
Tobin was in a state of shock. The Penney’s building in front of him was destroyed, and he assumed there would be a score of dead customers inside. He raced to the nearby Holy Family Cathedral to find a priest for the dead at Penney’s, then went straight to the newspaper, bursting into the city room to find a photographer.
The lights were off in the Anchorage Times Building. The composing room looked like a war zone, with people standing around stunned. Bill Tobin was equally stunned to hear that his photographer was next door taking pictures of a liquor store.
“He’s got to go down to Penney’s. A lot of people have been killed there!” Tobin was a bit frantic, the galvanizing images from Penney’s still playing in his mind’s eye.
“Bill, there’s a real mess next door. All the bottles are broken, and Joe’s gone to get some shots.”
Bill Tobin just stared at him, not comprehending.
The staffer tried again.
“Bill, didn’t you hear about the earthquake?”
There was silence. A deep, all-pervading silence like nothing he had ever heard. Not a sound, no birds, no water running, no waves crashing, cars honking, planes flying—nothing.
Warren Hines, still holding on to his frightened little sister, who was now absolutely silent herself, stood on the promontory chunk of Turnagain Heights’ real estate some thirty feet above the devastation all around and looked back toward the south, more startled by the total lack of sound than the destruction.
He had given up hope that it would stop, but finally it had—slowing bit by bit until there was no movement.
Warren had no idea why the neighborhood was in pieces. He could see the landscape was broken in crazy chunks of tilted ground, groves of trees at weird angles, ten or twenty spruce trees all heeled over at forty-five-degree angles from their chunk of ground brushing another grove lying at an equally steep angle in the other direction. There were cracks and gullies and crevasses and roofs of houses strewn around in all directions. Some walls and garages were still visible, cocked over on their sides. Some had disappeared altogether, like Bob Atwood’s house.
Everywhere Warren looked there was desolation, and the entire world might look that way for all he could tell.
A figure suddenly appeared and then disappeared behind a chunk of ground in front of him. Warren watched, hopeful, searching the spot where the figure had disappeared.
There he was again. A man in a blue sports jacket came around the side of the mound in front of him, and Warren Hines realized with a start who it was.
Bob Atwood was known as one of the most immaculately dressed gentlemen in Anchorage. Now his clothes were dusty and his hair somewhat rumpled, but to Warren Hines he was a very welcome sight.
“Bob!”
“Yeah. Wait a second.”
Atwood clambered up the sloping side of the Hineses’ promontory chunk, joining them on top.
Warren Hines, many years his junior, looked at the city’s publisher, whom he knew as a family friend, and smiled.
“Well, Bob, you’ve got yourself a story.”
That stopped Atwood for a split second.
“You two all right?” he asked.
“Yes. You?”
“Well …” Atwood paused, looked back over his shoulder. “The house is gone, and …” His voice trailed off. The destruction they all were looking at was beyond grasp.
The three of them walked carefully down the slope of the thirty-foot rise that had protected Warren and Mitzi and began threading their way between the huge chunks of upended ground, trying to find the new edge of the bluff visible occasionally in the distance. People were starting to gather along that ridge—hopefully to help.
The concern over Mrs. Hines was growing. Bob Atwood’s wife, Evangeline, was in town on a shopping trip, and he assumed she was okay. But in the middle of the nightmare, Warren had seen his mother—he thought.
Now he heard her voice from somewhere above them.
Atwood and Hines looked up to see an amazing sight. Perched on top of another singular chunk of ground forming a tiny mesa were Margaret Hines and her car. They had been carried away from the edge of the bluff as she had opened the door of the vehicle in what had been her driveway. Now the surface she was standing on had enough room for the wheels of her car and her feet—no more. They helped her down, walking on gingerly to the edge of the bluff, where a gathering crowd of neighbors helped them up the thirty-foot embankment with ropes. Ten minutes before that embankment had been in the heart of Turnagain. Now it was view property.
In the minutes following the last of the seismic waves, husbands and wives turned the corner into Turnagain and other neighborhood roads, standing on their brakes with horror at the sight of what lay ahead: half the neighborhood broken away and strewn in pieces toward Knik Arm. Family, friends, and neighbors were milling around, trying to figure out where houses had gone, where their loved ones were, and what had happened. Some houses had slid so far it took a bit of detective work to track them. Others were left hanging off the new cliff, or were undercut by fissures a few feet back from the new cliff. Bob Atwood’s house held the record. It had traveled 1,280 feet before coming to rest in pieces.
Wanda Mead had been away on an errand when the seismic waves slammed into Anchorage. Now, as she turned into her neighborhood, she braked to a stop, seeing that the road ended much too soon. She left her car with heart pounding at the realization that her home was no longer where she had left it—her children no longer safe within.
She was helped down the slope by a neighbor who told her he had brought Penny and Paul out of the ruined area to safety minutes before. The two children had seen their mother as she passed, tears streaming down her face, determined to go in after Merrill and Perry, relieved that at least two of her children were safe.
There was nothing left of the house. It was down there—somewhere. She assumed that Merrill and Perry would be nearby, maybe standing, confused, beside one of those blocks of ground.
The words from the young man helping her at first made no sense. Now they were beginning to sink in along with a cold fear. He had talked to Penny, talked to others who had seen Perry and Merrill scramble from the house, talked with the one other person who had seen Perry and Merrill fall from view into the crevasse.
“I’m very sorry, Mrs. Mead, but I’m afraid they’re gone.”
“What?” Uncomprehending, she looked at him.
“We can’t find them. I’m afraid they’re buried.”
Wanda Mead looked toward the north where the home had been, where her sons still were. The landscape was insane. Her sons were down there somewhere, but where? Was there any time left? Where could they dig? The horror of it all—the uncertainty and the fear that time was running out—pressed in on her.
Chapter 8
Seattle—Washington, March 27, 1964
Seattle was swarming with scientists. The annual meeting of the Seismological Society of America had inundated the campus of the University of Washington and several downtown hotels with seismologists, geologists, marine geologists, and others from both the U.S. Geological Survey and universities throughout the nation. Now, at 7:44 P.M. Pacific standard time on Friday, March 27, 1964, most of them were too busy wit
h early-evening seminars or dinner meetings to notice the city shiver.
The local newspapers had given lukewarm coverage to the meeting so far, with a combination of tepid interest and routine interviews producing routine answers. But one question kept coming up nationwide, and several members of the Seattle press had used it as well: Will we be able to predict earthquakes someday?
The question was always a long shot. Research scientists—especially the type of scientists who studied earthquakes, the seismologist—were hard to pin down on such major questions.
Geologists always seemed eager to talk about their work, but too often no one outside the scientific community seemed to want to listen. The press chased after seismologists, however, asking for simple explanations of complicated processes on short notice whenever earthquakes rumbled onto the news wires. In being professionally careful, the seismological community had developed a reputation for being circumspect and hard to interview.
“Seismologists”—one research geologist sniffed—“tend to be quiet, brilliant little fellows with thick glasses who spend their lives in basement labs reading squiggly lines transmitted in from halfway around the world.” A scandalously inaccurate stereotype, of course. But in the early sixties seismologists were found in numbers too limited to defend themselves, and the science they pursued still seemed quite a mystery even to the informed layman—its practitioners somewhat akin to modern-day alchemists armed with seismographs instead of beakers.
Earlier in the day of March 27 the question about future earthquake prediction had landed in the laps of several seismologists as they talked to newsmen between professional sessions. The response of one California Ph.D. was typical.
“Who knows?” he said. “We’re looking for clues, but we don’t even agree among ourselves about the overall mechanisms which cause quakes—especially major ones. Until we solve that riddle, it’s hard to imagine how we could predict them.”
Dr. Otto Nuttli, sitting high above Seattle in the Space Needle restaurant, knew something had rumbled beneath his chair, but since it was sitting on a rotating platform traveling at one revolution per hour inside the panoramic windows of the restaurant, the realization that the vibrations might be seismic waves was a bit slow in coming. Five hundred and ninety feet beneath the distinguished seismology professor from St. Louis University the site of the 1962 Seattle world’s fair was bathed in a soft sea of artificial illumination, the glittering, twinkling lights of Seattle’s Queen Anne Hill, the harbor, and the downtown area in the background.
Nuttli’s dinner companions were puzzled, too. Fellow seismologists, professors, and scientists from across the United States looked up one by one, realizing something had happened, expressions of curiosity raising eyebrows. They were here to talk about earthquakes. Could that have been one?
Or was it the wind?
The turntable in the Space Needle restaurant had stopped, it’s automatic systems sensing an out-of-balance condition, tripping a relay, and shutting itself down as the ground so far below imparted a tiny back-and-forth motion to the well-engineered structure, a motion amplified to a gentle rocking at the top. The sounds of a first-class restaurant—muffled conversations and the tinkling of cutlery on plates punctuated by the occasional pop of a wine cork—died rapidly as the complement of guests began searching one anothers’ faces for an explanation.
The rest of nighttime Seattle looked normal and calm and unaware of the fact that the first S waves from the second greatest known earthquake of the twentieth century had just passed beneath them, headed southeast at twelve thousand miles per hour.
In the campus district two miles to the east where the day’s meetings had been held, U.S. Geological Survey geologist George Plafker settled into a booth in a small, ground-level restaurant. Plafker, an energetic thirty-five-year-old scientist from New York, who now lived in Menlo Park, California, had become an expert on south-central Alaska’s geology. As a member of the Alaska branch of the survey, he had mapped much of the area that held the epicenter of the colossal eruption of seismic energy which had just lashed Alaska for nearly five minutes—energy the equivalent of 250 million tons of TNT. As George Plafker studied his menu, unaware of anything out of the ordinary, the entire wave train began passing beneath the Seattle-Tacoma area. The waves shot by unheralded, marked at ground level only by a slight shiver or shudder beyond the notice of most people, leaving Washingtonians unaware of what had just occurred fourteen-hundred miles to the northwest.
The shaking had stopped in the forty-ninth state, the breakage which had begun beneath Prince William Sound was now complete, but outside Alaska no one knew for sure it had even started. No one knew that the Seattle-based Chena was at that moment fighting for its life, churning through the remains of the Valdez cannery. News of the wall of fire that shrouded Seward had not yet reached the outside world in the form of a radio transmission; and the deathly quiet of the alien landscape that was now Turnagain Heights was unknown to those a half mile away—let alone in the lower forty-eight.
As Warren Hines watched Bob Atwood appear around a mound of broken earth in Anchorage, the great seismic waves shot beneath Portland, Oregon, fifteen hundred miles to the southeast, and simultaneously beneath Petropavlovsk, Siberia, on the Soviet Kamchatka Peninsula to the west, headed relentlessly out from the epicenter, identical wave fronts expanding all over—and through—the globe. Seismograph needles in locations all over the United States jumped into motion, traveling almost instantly to the stops, bouncing back and forth between those mechanical limits, describing waves so large that their full magnitude could only be estimated.1
By 7:48 P.M. Pacific standard time the seismic waves had shivered unnoticed beneath the western shoreline of Canada’s Hudson Bay, beneath the ice pack over the earth’s North Pole, and beneath the Menlo Park, California, USGS headquarters. In another two minutes they were racing through the concrete of Main Street USA in Disneyland as George Gryc, the chief of the Alaska branch for the survey, strolled with his family on holiday from his duties at Menlo Park.
At approximately fifteen minutes after the break, the S waves rippled through Dallas, Texas, which lifted along with most of the central United States as much as three and a half inches with the surface waves which followed—the soufflé type of rise much too gentle to be noticed by anything but future interpretation of distant, sensitive instruments. Dallasites considered themselves virtually immune to the effects of earthquakes, even though largely unknown, major faults lurked in the rock strata a hundred miles to the northwest. Like so many Americans living east of the Rockies, seismic problems seemed a West Coast worry. The idea that their city could be moved around, even without damage, by an event three thousand miles away was unthinkable. But it was happening.
And moments later the same wave front, expanding like a gigantic doughnut thousands of miles in diameter, passed simultaneously beneath Memphis, Tennessee (a city built on a seismic time bomb ticking away beneath the Mississippi River basin); Detroit, Michigan; the Canadian capital city of Ottawa; Goose Bay, Labrador; Reykjavik, Iceland; the northern coast of Norway; the Barents Sea north of Murmansk, Russia; Vladivostok, on Russia’s east coast; Sapporo, Japan, on the island of Hokkaido; and the state of Hawaii (all of which live with earthquake hazards of their own). Within the following forty-five minutes the waves touched most of the planet, the surface waves beginning a circumnavigation of the earth that was to last for nearly thirty days—the planet responding like a struck gong and vibrating, slowly, silently in space as a result of the enormous power that had been unleashed.
By 11:00 P.M. in Seattle (9:00 P.M. in Anchorage) the first detailed reports on the seismic cataclysm had reached the outside world, and men such as Dr. Plafker and Dr. Nuttli and scores of other earth scientists began hearing sketchy details of what had obviously been a large earthquake that seemed to be centered somewhere in Alaska. As excitement and interest grew and telephone lines came alive with calls among their hotel rooms, unbeknownst to the
m a dark mass of water, a true tsunami created by the sudden uplift of twelve thousand square miles of Alaskan seafloor, began rising near Port Alberni, British Columbia, on Vancouver Island, funneled in from the Pacific thirty-four miles up an inlet. One by one, four waves in all, the water pummeled the community, tossing several cars around and pushing buildings from their foundations.
The staff of the Seismic Sea Wave Warning Center in Hawaii had been in a dilemma for nearly an hour after the first seismic waves coursed beneath the sands of Waikiki, running the needles of their seismographs to the mechanical stops. Realizing a great earthquake had occurred somewhere to the north in Alaska, the men who staffed the center and worked to guard against giant waves crashing in on Hawaiian (or other Pacific Rim) communities without warning tried in vain to get through to Alaska to find out how bad it was, and whether this obviously mammoth event could have generated a sea wave. As the very wave they feared radiated out across the Pacific at greater than four hundred miles per hour, the warning center writhed in frustration. Calls to almost every branch of the U.S. military, urgent teletype messages to Sitka, Alaska (unanswered), seismic laboratories and observatories at Caltech in Pasadena, Berkeley near San Francisco, Tokyo, Guam, and others discovered nothing more than what they already knew. Within a half hour, with seismograph needles leaping to the edges of their drums at more and more observatories around the globe, urgent calls began coming into the center, requesting tsunami information from them—calls from Manila, Hong Kong, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the military, and others. Communications with Alaska were nearly impossible. No one knew what had happened, until an amateur radio operator talking on a car radio managed to get through with a chilling message: Cordova (to the southeast of Valdez) had been “wiped out by a great tsunami!”2
With that, the decision was made to issue an evacuation order for the Hawaiian Islands—a decision stopped at the last minute by a phone call from the Navy installation on the island of Midway to the northwest. The tsunami, they reported, had passed Midway like a cat in the dark, the waves rising a mere two feet higher than normal.
On Shaky Ground Page 12