On Shaky Ground

by Nance, John J. ;

  More uncertainty and confusion resulted. Should an isolated Pacific island like Midway expect anything more significant from a killer wave? Did that prove anything? No one really knew; the business of monitoring tsunamis was too new. Minute by minute the staff discussed, worried, phoned, thought, and, worst of all, waited.

  Until midnight on the West Coast, that is, when word arrived that a great wave had roared ashore at Depoe, Oregon, the backwash carrying four children away from their family campsite and into the sea, drowning them. Within an hour the wave had come ashore as a series of four breakers in Crescent City, California, just south of the Oregon border, demolishing much of the town, throwing redwood logs everywhere, wrecking a sawmill, and drowning ten people.3

  The evacuation order was issued with the wave less than an hour away, and Hawaii braced for the worst.

  In Anchorage’s Providence Hospital the sight of Dr. Perry Mead in constant motion professionally attending to patients was in contrast with the tears streaming down the man’s face. He had arrived home twenty minutes after the quake to find it gone, his wife standing on the roof of their destroyed house, his daughter, Penny, hugging him in tears with the word of her brothers’ disappearance.

  “Daddy, we’re never going to see Merrill or Perry again.”

  He had known in an instant it was useless to dig, useless to search anymore. His boys could not have survived a half hour below ground, without air. He had stood and stared at the wreckage for what seemed like an eternity. Now he was trying to keep busy—to help those who could still be helped. The hospital staff was nearly in tears watching him, knowing the magnitude of his loss.

  If Doug McRae had been able to read his watch in the darkness, he would have placed the last major wave to hit Seward at a little after 10:00 P.M. Alaska time. Bob and Blanche Clark had left the protection of their tree hours earlier to join the bedraggled McRae family on the roof of the battered house just after the first wave had hit. As darkness enveloped the area, the men had cut a hole in the roof, wrapping the women and Doug’s tiny infant son in fiberglass insulation for warmth—a necessary move, but one that would have them scratching tiny glass fragments from their skin for weeks. After each wave, Scotty and his son rekindled the fire behind the house, which now rested in the woods many yards from its foundation, and brought the family down to huddle around it for warmth. It had been around 10:00 P.M. that the all too familiar sound of roaring water caused them to scurry back to the roof again, riding out the last major onslaught of black water in the dark—a darkness still punctuated by the sight of the Seward waterfront on fire.

  The sight of creosote-soaked wooden pilings floating vertically all over the bay, their top ends on fire like some sort of aquatic candle, was a sad and eerie contrast with the flames from the ruined fuel storage tanks. Now, at 1:00 A.M., however, with their tiny campfire going again, they felt a surge of hope. The waves had been getting progressively smaller, and it seemed certain that the worst was over. The rest of the night would be a numbing procession of relighting the fire, watching for additional wave crests, and trying to keep the family warm, but they knew they were going to make it. Battered, dispossessed of their property, probably burned out back in town—but alive and uninjured. Even Doug’s infant son was holding up well and sleeping most of the ordeal away.

  Daylight, they knew, would be only hours away, and when it came, Doug McRae planned to walk to the nearby highway for help.

  The heart of Seward was in far better condition than the McRaes and the Clarks had feared. There had been 86 houses totally destroyed and 269 heavily damaged; but their homes were standing, and the center of town had not burned. Though the ruined tank farms and fuel-soaked debris would burn for days, the heart of Seward was safe.

  The continuous plume of black smoke from the town, however, was the funeral pyre for Seward’s economy. There was no longer an Alaska Railroad dock, or a Standard Oil dock, or a San Juan fishing dock, or a small-boat harbor, railyard, trackage, or fuel storage facility in Seward. There was no longer any way to send and receive cargo whether to and from Anchorage or the outside world by water. In the blink of an eye—in the space of five minutes—the massive federal, state, and private investment in Seward as the aquatic front door to Anchorage had been virtually destroyed. And the slide of the entire waterfront into the muddy bottom of the bay had taken with it any chance for rebuilding in the same area. Thirteen people had lost their lives, five were injured seriously, but the vast majority of the nineteen hundred residents would survive physically, only to be faced with near economic strangulation. Dan Seavey would stay in Seward and teach, Brown and Hawkins would stay in business, the Endresen family would claw their way back into the boat and fishing business, and the core of the town would remain. But with the docks gone, the longshoremen would have nowhere to work for months, if not years, and the railroad payroll would never return to the same levels. Even though the federal recovery programs and cleanup jobs would sustain many through 1964, the long-term prospects were grim. Worst of all, Anchorage would finally have the excuse to open its own deepwater channel to the outside world.

  To the northeast of battered Seward, anchored several hundred yards off Valdez, the captain of the Chena was amazed to find that the reliable old ship was not sinking after all. Stewart and the chief engineer had searched all through her interior, expecting to find a rising tide of seawater. But she was dry. Somehow the Chena had absorbed the abuse and would stay afloat, arriving in Seattle battered but operative a week later.

  Some of the human beings aboard and around her in Valdez, however, had not been as fortunate. Third Mate Ralph Thompson, two of the longshoremen, and all those who disappeared in the swirling waters which had closed over the dock in Valdez had not survived. And Jack King, the longshoreman whose feet were crushed in the Chena’s forward hold, had spent the night in agony aboard the ship (though he would survive after an emergency airlift to Anchorage the next day). For the next fifteen hours Stewart and the Chena stood off the stub of the ruined piers, the anchor holding the ship at the end of several hundred feet of chain.

  Within minutes of finding the docks gone, John Kelsey and his brother had begun damage control operations, trying to keep the fuel tanks by the waterfront from burning, and trying to help their mortally wounded community. Within an hour many of the wives and children in town had gone up the road to higher ground while others tried to bring some organization to the chaotic nightmare. As in Seward, the spirit of cooperation and altruism would carry the Valdezans for several weeks before a more organized level of outside help would come.

  Valdez had more problems than just the loss of people and pier. The town had sunk. The surface of the community had dropped an average of ten feet and stretched some twenty-five to thirty feet toward the bay as the unconsolidated alluvial rocks and gravel settled and crept westward during the shaking. Now Valdez’s water table was at the surface, the underground utilities were broken in hundreds of places, and the main streets of the town were underwater at high tide.

  The one realization, however, that did not dawn on them for some time was apocalyptic: Valdez could not remain where it was. Alone among the major Alaskan coastal communities, the entire town of Valdez would have to be abandoned and physically relocated farther to the west along the north shore of the bay. It would take years of hard work and dedicated effort on the part of scores of residents, leaders, and government officials, but Valdez would eventually be uprooted and relocated in an amazing story of human determination which would position the town for a massive recovery when the Trans-Alaska Pipeline project began a decade later.

  But in the darkness of Friday evening in the midst of wreckage and pain and ruin, those thoughts and prospects for recovery were hard to grasp—mere threads of hope in a tapestry of disaster.

  In the early hours of the morning the tsunami waves reached the north shores of the Hawaiian chain, causing extensive coastal flooding and some moderate damage on Maui, but killing no one.
Without the evacuation, people would have been caught in some of the low-lying areas when the wave, which was more of a sudden high tide than a breaker, came in. As the wave continued south toward the equator, the weary employees of the tsunami alert center continued sending out reports on wave height, speed, time of passage, and direction to other parts of the Pacific basin—just in case.

  Reuben Katchadoorian, another USGS geologist in the Alaska branch at Menlo Park, California, had reached his bed a little after midnight in the San Francisco suburb after a quick trip to the homes of fellow geologists George Plafker and Arthur Grantz to pick up extra clothes and winter coats. Grantz had accompanied Plafker to the Seattle meeting. Now the two of them were tasked to join Katchadoorian in a hurried trip north to Alaska. The three had been on the phone by late Friday evening, planning what to do, making last-minute arrangements, and exchanging the latest word on what had occurred.

  It was very clear that the survey needed to be there in force—fast. The types of surface effects that such a quake could cause—phenomena such as sandblows and cracking in lake ice—could disappear rapidly, yet the information such clues might provide could be invaluable in searching for answers to the question that was already circulating like a brush fire in the geologic and seismologic community: What on earth—or more specifically below the surface of the earth—could have caused such a massive disaster? Although no one really knew many hard facts by midnight Friday, it was becoming apparent that this could be an extraordinary opportunity to study a great quake in the survey’s own backyard, and maybe, just maybe, advance the science more rapidly than they had dared think possible.

  George Plafker, Art Grantz, and Reuben Katchadoorian were part of an army of scientists who had begun advancing on Alaska as soon as the word of what had happened echoed across the scientific community. Nearly six hours after leaving Seattle on Saturday morning, their propeller-driven Super Constellation had landed at Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage (since the main Anchorage airport was still unusable), carrying a planeload of scientists, worried returning residents, and newsmen. After securing parkas, boots, rooms in the visiting officers’ quarters, and a rental car with the help of the military, the three USGS men headed into Anchorage for an initial look at an incredible sight.

  This was virgin territory for the trio. Not one of them had ever participated in researching the aftermath of an earthquake—especially not a great earthquake. All they had known before leaving Seattle was that Anchorage had been hit hard and that there was some ocean wave damage to a few outlying villages. Within minutes of arrival they were hearing rumors and worries about Seward, Kodiak, Valdez, and many other significant communities to the south.

  And Anchorage was indeed a mess. The Fourth Avenue collapse, the destroyed buildings, the L Street slide, Turnagain Heights, Government Hill (where a school and several homes had slid halfway to oblivion) were astounding features. Katchadoorian was oriented to engineering concerns, and decided to work in the Anchorage area. Plafker and Grantz would move to the outlying areas.

  Meetings with local and military officials followed, triggering questions about where to look for the greatest hazards and how to pinpoint potential landslides. People wanted quick opinions on the scope and the breadth and the causes of the damage.

  Sunday morning, while Katchadoorian worked in the Anchorage area, Grantz and Plafker got on board a Twin Otter twin-engine propjet aircraft for a reconnaissance flight, winging over the Kenai Peninsula, Whittier, Chenega, Seward, and down Resurrection Bay toward Soldotna and back up past the Kenai lowlands. On Monday, all three of the USGS men flew in an Army Huey (HU-1 helicopter) over the Anchorage region, looking at the quake’s effects on the ground. And Tuesday, Grantz and Plafker once again boarded the Otter, flying a second time over devastated Seward, along the coast eastward to Montague Island and Cordova and (after a fuel stop) to Valdez.

  What they were seeing was unbelievable. Geology is a science of interpreting both very slow change and cataclysmic alterations. Of the two, cataclysmic changes are the most frustrating; geologists seldom have the chance to see one in progress or examine one in the immediate aftermath.

  Here beneath them, however, was a landscape in twisted agony, a land which had undergone a cataclysm of change in a matter of minutes. Landslides and avalanches, twisted tracks on a destroyed Alaska Railroad bed throughout its length south of Anchorage, Seward’s waterfront collapsed and destroyed, the city’s industry in ruins, Kodiak awash in debris with wrecked fishing boats strewn everywhere, the coastal community of Chenega completely washed away with twenty-three lives lost, an entire village gone—it was incredible.

  They flew over glaciers which had been covered by landslides miles in length, coastal towns with their waterfronts strangely inundated, and others with boat harbors now completely above waterline, all for reasons they couldn’t fathom at first.

  It was, above all else, a mammoth laboratory, Plafker realized. Dispite his empathetic feelings for the people and the communities, his excitement was growing by the minute. The things they could learn from this!

  But why and how could such force be unleashed without anyone’s having a clue that it was coming, or that it could occur? Alaska had quakes all the time—he had experienced them himself—but nothing like this had ever hit the Alaskan landmass. At least there were no historical records or stories of such major seismic events.

  It was also significant, he thought, that the loss of life was so low, despite the bombardment of the seismic convulsion the area had undergone for what people kept telling him was an impossible five long minutes.

  Five minutes? He was no seismologist, but how could a quake last that long? They would have to get an initial report out within weeks, but he was going to have to do some very rapid reading up on earthquakes and tsunamis.

  What, for instance, had wrecked the Seward waterfront? From the air it was obvious the docks were not just awash, they were gone. He and Grantz had obtained maps from the local USGS man in Anchorage and diagrams of the facilities. They knew what the Seward waterfront should be like, but it wasn’t that way any longer. An underwater landslide seemed possible, but they would have to study it in person.

  Could some enormous fault running many miles through the area south of Prince William Sound have caused this cataclysm? With his nose pressed to the Plexiglas of the Otter’s windows, George Plafker stayed alert for anything which looked like a fresh fault trace of mammoth proportions. So far there was nothing. Perhaps, he thought, it was underwater.

  And then there was Valdez. Below them now, the first few blocks of the town awash since it had apparently dropped in relation to sea level. The scars of a great wave could be seen from the air on a nearby shoreline west of Valdez, but the docks at Valdez were truncated, and the same sort of underwater disaster that had struck Seward looked possible here. More pictures were snapped and more notes taken as they continued, flying low over glaciers on the way back, landing at Elmendorf Air Force Base a short while later.

  Plafker was now more excited than he’d ever been as an earth scientist. He, Reuben Katchadoorian, and Art Grantz would have to work their tails off to find out all they needed to discover to write just a preliminary evaluation, but the potential value to science was staggering. It was going to be an agony, but it was going to be fun to be the first to study it.

  He felt a twang of guilt for enjoying this, for being excited. People had lost their lives and their homes and their economic futures in this earthquake. True, the initial death toll was just over a hundred, compared with thousands in other major quakes, but that didn’t lessen the human impact.

  But what excited him was not just the pure science of it, the pure thrill of discovery, of being on the cutting edge of understanding a side of nature that few had possessed an opportunity to study. What was also exciting was the possibility that this quake, if forced to yield its seismic secrets, could be one of the last killer earthquakes to catch an American—or any community—comple
tely unaware. Perhaps there were keys to where and when such things occurred, how they occurred, and how to prepare for them. Maybe there were valuable lessons on how to build to survive such high-amplitude earth shaking. Possibly there were clues that could lead to predicting such quakes, and recognizing the precursors, if any, which could herald their occurrence. Such knowledge would be of enormous benefit to mankind. That was exciting, and that would keep what one newsman would later describe as the “foot soldiers of science” roaming the tortured Alaskan terrain for years, putting together the pieces of the puzzle. Various thoughts of that sort crossed George Plafker’s mind in the first few days as the task began.

  The base commander at Fort Richardson next to Elmendorf in Anchorage seemed to have everything under control, Plafker noted. He had offered them unlimited support. Airplanes, cars, offices, anything they needed they had only to request.

  But he wanted—needed—one thing in return from the USGS men. With aftershocks constantly rattling the area ever since the main quake on Friday, threatening the nerves and the safety of those beginning the task of piecing the state back together, he needed information.

  “I need to know,” he had explained, “can it happen again? Will it happen again? And if the answer is yes, then how soon can we expect it? When will the shaking hit us again?”

  George Plafker, Reuben Katchadoorian, and Arthur Grantz were as diplomatic as they could be, but the answer for the general was frustratingly obvious.

  They didn’t know. No one knew. It could be years or decades before questions like that could be answered.

  But with the thousands of square miles of outdoor laboratory the great quake had created, they could dare to hope that the answers might be within reach.

  Chapter 9