The Great Quake: How the Biggest Earthquake in North America Changed Our Understanding of the Planet

by Henry Fountain

  Suddenly a crevasse opened beneath his feet, and he was falling. To Atwood it seemed that he fell a long distance, and although it was still light out suddenly he was in darkness. But he landed in sand, miraculously soft and dry. He saw that he was in a deep V-shaped chasm, and it was starting to fill up with other objects—tree stumps, fence posts and boulder-sized chunks of frozen soil. His right arm seemed to be buried in the sand, and he realized that his right hand was still holding his trumpet. Whole trees were now falling into the crevasse, which was getting wider and growing laterally toward the house of Atwood’s neighbor, Lloyd Hines, an optometrist, and his family. Atwood could see their house through the ever-lengthening chasm. It appeared to be sliding toward him.

  After a while—he wasn’t sure how long—the house stopped moving. In fact, Atwood realized that everything had stopped moving, or at least was only moving slightly. It was quiet, except for the occasional crash of damaged structures or trees. He let go of the trumpet, wriggled his arm free and slowly climbed out of the crevasse.

  The neighborhood was gone. Some houses were reduced to splinters, heaps of broken wood and glass. Others were still intact but were scattered this way and that, like dice rolled on an uneven surface. A few were nearly upside down. Atwood’s house, which had been about seventy feet above the water, was now down at sea level, a pile of kindling except the roof, which amazingly was in one piece. It would be used as a landing pad for rescue helicopters the next day.

  The birches and cottonwoods that had characterized the neighborhood were largely flattened. Atwood, still in his suit and tie from the office, looked around for others who might have survived. He heard two of the Hines children, eleven-year-old Warren and four-year-old Mitzi, crying. Climbing over the jumbled terrain, he eventually reached them. Then another neighbor—a mother with her four children—appeared. Together, the eight of them set off to find stable ground.

  Soon they came across Margaret Hines, Lloyd’s wife. She had been driving in her car and had just turned into the driveway when the quake started. The land around her had shaken and broken up and fallen away, taking the house with it, and she and the car had been left perched on an isolated patch of ground, a giant earthen toadstool high in the air. Seeing the other survivors, she climbed down and joined them.

  Atwood looked around to try to figure out which way led to solid ground. In one direction he saw a stand of trees that appeared to still be vertical—a good sign, he thought. The motley group headed that way, with Atwood in the lead, scouting for a safe route. It was slow going, climbing up and down over blocks of earth and broken trees, but eventually they could see a bluff, with people standing on it. It was a new bluff, apparently, created when all the land to seaward—the land that his house and countless others had sat on—slid away. As Atwood and his companions neared it, a rescue party came down, with ropes and saws, to help them climb to safety.

  —

  When the shaking started, Kris Madsen knew instantly what it was. She was from Southern California, after all, and she recognized an earthquake when she felt one.

  She was up at the pond behind Chenega’s schoolhouse, with Norman Selanoff, fetching water. The ground started to move, and like so many others that day she thought, Okay, I’ve been through these kinds of things before, it’ll stop.

  But the shaking soon got so bad that Madsen could barely stand up. Then she realized that the trees around her—mostly large spruces—were swaying. But it wasn’t just the tops that were moving, as would be the case in a windstorm. Entire trunks were swinging from side to side, from the ground up, like a metronome.

  In the midst of this she turned around and looked out. The view from the hill was still magnificent, the mountainous islands stretching out in the distance beyond Whale Bay and Bainbridge Passage. But closer in, something was startlingly wrong. The water in the cove had disappeared. It was as if a giant vacuum hose had come along and sucked it dry. She had never experienced anything like this.

  Down in the village, nineteen-year-old Avis Kompkoff had taken little Lloyd, her infant, out of his baby seat and put him on the bed. She had gotten him dressed and put booties on his feet. Then she thought about her bath. She’d need fresh clothes afterward, so she leaned over to get some out of the bottom drawer of her dresser.

  It was then that her three-year-old, Joey, jumped up on the bed. He didn’t speak, but he seemed spooked: there was a wildness in his eyes. What the hell is the matter with him? Avis asked herself.

  Then she felt the shaking.

  She wasn’t unfamiliar with earthquakes, either. Just a few weeks before, in fact, there had been a mild quake, a rumbling that had lasted a few seconds. But this one was different, Avis knew: it went on and on, and the motion became so severe that the little house seemed as if it might fall apart. She didn’t know what to do but remembered something that older people in the village had once told her: in an earthquake, get the door open if you can. Otherwise, if the shaking is strong, the house can quickly go out of kilter, the door will become jammed and you’ll never get out. Avis decided to go her elders one better: open the door and get out. She grabbed the two boys and went outside.

  She found herself next to a neighbor, Steve Eleshansky, whose house was just uphill from hers. He had gone outside, too, holding his one-year-old daughter, Rhonda. His wife, Dorothy, known to everyone as Tiny, was nowhere to be seen, as was their other child, five-year-old Steve Jr.

  In a few moments Avis’s husband, Joe, who had been down below the bulkhead on the beach, came running up. Like Madsen, Joe had seen the cove become suddenly, and eerily, empty. Even more ominously, a moment or two after that, he’d heard someone shouting about a tidal wave. He took Joey and told Avis to bring the baby and follow him.

  The Kompkoffs’ house was on the south side of the village. To reach the steps to the schoolhouse they would have had to run along the top of the bulkhead to the store. They didn’t have time for that. There was a hill directly behind their house, separated by a ravine from the hill the schoolhouse was on, with a narrow rope bridge connecting the two. They went straight up this closer hill, with Joe carrying Joey and Avis carrying Lloyd. Behind them, lagging somewhat, was Steve Eleshansky, carrying Rhonda. Avis quickly lost her slippers as they struggled up the slope through the waist-high snow. The terrain was open at first, but in a short while they reached a stand of trees. Avis briefly got one of her feet trapped in some tree roots, freed it and kept going.

  Nick Kompkoff’s first thought when the earthquake started was about his oil-burning stove at home. His wife, Mary, had been cooking a pot of chili on it that afternoon. The stovepipe was unstable even in the best of circumstances, and he was worried that the whole thing would topple over and set the house on fire. Kompkoff had been on his way to the Smokehouse to shoot some pool, but now he hurried down the boardwalk toward his house on the opposite side of the village. Before he got there he ran into Mary, who was wondering about the children. Nick Jr. and the other boys had come back from the beach a while before; they’d gotten thirsty, so they’d stopped in at their Aunt Shirley’s house for water. But the three girls—Carol Ann, Julia and Norma Jean—were still down at the beach. Nick looked in that direction and saw them on the dock.

  He started running toward the girls, although by now the boardwalk was moving so violently he could barely stay on it. As he reached the dock he noticed the water receding from the cove.

  He reached the girls and picked up the younger ones, Carol Ann and Norma Jean, one in each arm. He shouted at the oldest, Julia, to come along. They ran toward land and the safety of high ground.

  At the far end of the beach, Timmy Selanoff watched in amazement as the rocks that he had been walking past began to bounce, like the ball in a game of jacks. He heard his friends calling to him from far away. But he couldn’t make out what they were saying, the earth was rumbling so loudly.

  He knew he had to get back to the village, so he started jumping from boulder to boulder along the sh
ore, nimble despite all the ground movement. The stones in his jacket pockets, his “ammunition” against the birds, were weighing him down, but he didn’t think to empty them. He was scrambling for his life.

  Recollections of survivors in the days that followed suggest that the first wave of water arrived in the cove less than a minute or so into the earthquake. It was more like a fast-rising tide than a wave, though, and since the tide was low to begin with, it came only about halfway up the beach. The incoming water was quiet, or it seemed so amid the shaking and rumbling.

  That first wave rapidly retreated, and then some. This was the vacuum effect that Madsen and the others saw. The bottom of the cove was exposed out to a distance of about a quarter of a mile and a depth of more than 120 feet. It was as if a canyon had instantly been revealed.

  Then, about two minutes later, a bigger wave came in. Survivors estimated it was a wall of water thirty-five feet high when it approached the shore.

  The ground was still shaking at that point. Up on the hill, Madsen was struggling to walk in the snow. She and her friend had decided to head farther uphill, away from the schoolhouse. They were not sure how much longer it would be standing.

  Just then Madsen heard a tremendous noise from below. She turned in time to see the second wave crashing into the village. The water seemed to drop onto the houses and the church, the Smokehouse, the bathhouses—everything. She could hear the sounds of homes being shoved off their pilings and broken apart, of the church splintering, of the dock breaking, of boats being lifted and tossed about, of trees being snapped. And amid all the unnatural noises were the unmistakable sounds of villagers shouting and screaming.

  Kenny Selanoff, who had been playing down on the beach, managed to make it up to the village before the big wave struck. The thirteen-year-old dragged his younger brother George with him as he scrambled up the slippery wooden steps of the bulkhead. Once in the village, they grabbed on to a clothesline pole and, amazingly, managed to hold on while the water surged around them. Kenny saw homes being destroyed—among them the house of Avis’s adoptive parents, Willie and Sally Evanoff, and her daughter Jo Ann. According to Kenny, the three were standing in their doorway when the wave hit. It pushed them inside, and they were gone.

  Avis’s aunt, Margaret Borodkin, had been trapped inside another house when the structure partially collapsed during the shaking. Her hip and leg were badly injured, and she had been pinned to the floor. Then the second wave had struck, shattering the house into pieces as if it had been hit by a bomb, she recalled later. She passed out as the waters churned around her.

  That second wave surged across the flat expanse of the village, pushing some of the debris into the hillside. With nowhere to go but up, the water rose rapidly toward the schoolhouse, swirling around in a violent foam of debris, mud and silt. It wiped out the ninety steps to the top, as well as the rail system next to it that had been used to deliver supplies to the school. The water kept rising, reaching the play yard just below the schoolhouse and inundating the newer generator shed and the empty wooden workshop building next door that had housed the generator in the past. It rose some more, until it reached the foundation of the schoolhouse itself, seventy feet up. Then it stopped.

  After a few moments, the water started to subside, and then retreated back into the cove—taking the village, now reduced to a sad jumble of broken homes and other debris, with it. All that was left of most of the homes were the pilings they had stood on. Where the dock had been, the pilings looked as if they had been leveled with a chain saw.

  Joe and Avis Kompkoff and their two children had beaten the wave, making it up the hill behind their house and reaching the schoolhouse by scurrying across the footbridge, which was swaying crazily. With the water at its highest point, at last Avis turned around. Steve Eleshansky and his daughter Rhonda were nowhere to be seen.

  Nick Kompkoff heard the shouts of “Tidal wave!” too. He glanced back and started running faster, urging Julia on as well. But they couldn’t outrun the water, and it was soon upon them. As he described it several years later, he reached out in a vain attempt to grab hold of Julia. In doing so, Norma Jean came out of his arm. The water swept both of the girls away. Julia called out to him, screaming “Dad!” It was the last word he ever heard from her.

  He was in the water, too, desperately holding on to Carol Ann. The girl was wearing a hooded parka that was zipped closed. Kompkoff never figured out exactly what happened next, but he ended up at the back of the village, in a snowbank. He heard a loud cracking noise, and something—it might have been a large pole—hit his back. He passed out, and when he awoke he was holding on to a log or other piece of debris with his right arm, his back was aching and he had something in his left hand. He looked at it: it was the hood of Carol Ann’s parka. He tugged and felt the weight of his daughter, who was still zipped inside it, and still very much alive.

  For Timmy Selanoff, the village was too far away, and the water was coming too fast. He had to get away from it, and the only way was up—nearly straight up, since where he was on the beach a steep hill came almost straight down to the water.

  Timmy started up. He remembered grabbing on to a twig or root at some point. Other than that, he recalled later, he had no memory of what happened. He credited divine intervention—as the second wave approached, a voice had told him not to be afraid.

  When the shaking finally stopped, the schoolhouse was still standing, a testament to the strength of its concrete foundation. Madsen and Selanoff went down the hill to it and went inside. Water had entered the basement, but had gotten no farther. There was plenty of other damage, though. Jars of surplus food had fallen off the shelves in the storeroom and were now broken on the floor. Butter, peanut butter and other food was everywhere, mingled with broken glass and books.

  Avis and Joe Kompkoff and their two children had been among the first of the villagers to make it to safety. Over the next few hours, by ones and twos, more survivors straggled up the hill. Nick Kompkoff, with his badly injured back, managed to crawl up the snowy hillside. About halfway up he met some villagers, who took Carol Ann and brought her the rest of the way. But Kompkoff heard a woman crying from below, so he rolled back down to where the voice was coming from. It was Tiny Eleshansky, in the snow. The raging water had ripped off her clothes save one sock. Ken Vlasoff and John Brizgaloff had heard her cries too and had come down the hill to help. Together, the three men brought her up to the school.

  Almost everyone, it turned out, needed something—they had fled the water with only the clothes on their backs and had lost everything. Madsen, overwhelmed and numbed by what she had seen, did the only thing she could think to do—begin handing out whatever was available in her apartment. She got a blanket and some clothes for Tiny Eleshansky. She gave Avis Kompkoff a pair of shoes to replace her lost slippers. Someone else got her rabbitskin coat, the one Madsen had bought two years before with her mother in Anchorage. Soon she had given out all of her spare clothing and shoes.

  As the villagers gathered, in shock, some moaned in pain and others cried out to no one in particular for help. Some tried to take stock of who was still missing. Parents called out for lost children, and children screamed and cried for their parents. There were tearful reunions. But there were far more tears for reunions that didn’t happen.

  The occasional rattling aftershock spooked the villagers enough that they decided to get away from the school, in case it were to collapse. They moved uphill toward the pond and set up a temporary camp of sorts amid the spruces. Someone made a bonfire, and people used cardboard boxes from the school, folded flat, to insulate themselves from the snow. Despite the damage inside the schoolhouse, there was plenty of food for those who were hungry, and milk for the children.

  The search for the missing continued, with some of the men going back down the hill to the flat expanse where the homes had been, calling out names. One house, out of the direct path of the water on the far eastern side of the village, had
been spared, but everything else was gone.

  While they were searching through the devastation, they heard a voice out in the water. It was a woman, obviously suffering from pain and fatigue, shouting for help.

  Margaret Borodkin had come to, lying on a large piece of floating debris—perhaps the wall of a house. She was wet and freezing, and her hip and leg ached from where part of the house had fallen on her; she couldn’t move. It was several hours after the quake, and darkness was beginning to fall. She’d heard the screaming and crying from the land and had decided to give it a shot to see if she could be heard.

  As she related later, whoever heard her voice had called out in return, asking who it was. When she told him, he promised to get help and headed back up the hill.

  Although she couldn’t move, Borodkin found that she was close enough to the edge of whatever it was she was floating on that she could dip one hand into the water. She tried paddling in this way toward the shore, but it was impossible to gain any headway against all the other debris, and the water was so cold she couldn’t stand the pain in her hand. So mostly she just lay in silence out in the cove, hoping that the villagers would return and figure out a way to get her safely to shore.

  She wasn’t sure how long she had been waiting, but at some point she heard the sound of a boat. It was the Marpet, with her brother-in-law George Borodkin and Mark Selanoff aboard, approaching the village. They had ridden out the quake in Whale Bay and had headed back home as fast as they could. Slowly pushing through the debris in the cove, they came upon Margaret, pulled her on board and wrapped her in three sleeping bags.

  Up on the hill, Madsen had gotten the battery-powered radio out of the schoolhouse and with some of the villagers had listened to reports of damage coming in from around the state. There were bulletins that Valdez was wiped out, Cordova was heavily damaged, Whittier and Seward were both ablaze. Madsen’s mood had shifted: now she had an eerie and panicky feeling. Were they alone in the world? Would anyone know they were still here? Yes, some of their family, friends and neighbors were gone, but there were still forty or fifty souls here atop the hill. Would anyone know to look for them? They would at least have to spend the night here, huddled together on the snow. No one would sleep, that was for certain.