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

by Henry Fountain

  The first wave of this type had struck Kodiak Island within an hour, as more of a gentle flood than a wave. But a second wave, about an hour later, was a thirty-foot wall of water that rushed into the harbor, picking up fishing boats like toys and pushing them five blocks inland. The torrent wiped out all the docks save one, and as it raged into the town close to sixty buildings were destroyed. The Kodiak Naval Station nearby was flooded and heavily damaged—its cargo dock, its roads and bridges, its central power plant, its radar installation and even the station’s bowling alley were destroyed. In all, nineteen people died on Kodiak, including eight in the town itself.

  Meanwhile, waves were spreading out across the Pacific. The first one reached the Hawaiian Islands, some 2,700 miles to the southwest, about five hours after the quake, and Japan a few hours after that. It took almost twenty-four hours to hit Antarctica. In most cases where they struck land the waves weren’t very big and did little appreciable damage. Hilo, Hawaii, had some of the biggest waves, at about ten feet. Waimea, on the North Shore of Oahu, had fifteen-foot waves, but the famous surfing spot regularly has forty- or fifty-footers that roll in during the winter. In Japan, the waves from the Alaska quake were much smaller, a foot or less. Those that reached the West Antarctic Peninsula were about four feet high.

  But larger waves—some more than twenty feet high—left a trail of destruction southeastward along the North American coast, through British Columbia, Washington, Oregon and California and into Baja California, in Mexico.

  Cape St. Elias, at the tip of Kayak Island, sixty miles southeast of Cordova, was hit first. Four Coast Guardsmen lived at the cape, maintaining a lighthouse that had stood there, in one form or another, since 1914. One of the guardsmen, Frank Reid, had been out photographing wildlife when the quake occurred, and had had his leg broken by falling rock. His three colleagues came to find him and, while carrying him back, were hit by the wave. The three able-bodied men managed to swim to safety, but Reid was lost.

  The wave continued southeast along the Alaskan and then Canadian coasts. Vancouver Island, in southwestern British Columbia, first encountered it about three hours after the quake. The most devastation was caused at the twin towns of Alberni and Port Alberni, in the southern part of the island and up a twenty-five-mile inlet from the Pacific. Because it took time for the wave to travel up the inlet, the towns were not hit until about midnight. That first wave served, literally, as a wake-up call. Residents knew that a first wave was usually followed by others, so after the first one townspeople went around rousing people and urging them to get to higher ground. When the second wave, estimated at about ten feet, struck an hour later, it washed away fifty-eight homes and stores and caused damage estimated at $10 million. But there was no loss of life.

  Farther south, waves struck one stretch of the coast after another. At the southern edge of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State, high water washed away a bridge in the town of Copalis Beach. In Cannon Beach, a sleepy town in Oregon, participants in a late-night poker game ignored one telephone call warning them of the possibility of a wave; a second call a short time later relayed word that a wave had just hit the shoreline. Some houses floated away and a bridge into the town was destroyed, but everyone, including the poker players, survived.

  Just one hundred miles down the coast, however, at Beverly Beach, near Newport, Oregon, the McKenzie family was not so lucky. Monte McKenzie, a Boeing engineer, had driven down from the family’s home in Tacoma, Washington, with his wife, Rita, and their four children, ages three to eight, for the Easter weekend. The family had been through hard times recently—their eldest child, ten-year-old Susanne, had died from burns suffered at a campfire seven months before. At Beverly Beach the McKenzies had come across a driftwood shelter and had gotten permission to sleep there. Around 11 p.m. they were awakened when a small wave washed up the beach, reaching their campsite. The couple grabbed the children and started making their way inland, but were soon overcome by a series of much higher waves. A strong swimmer who had taught all her children to swim, Rita McKenzie tried to hold on to two of her children. The four youngsters were swept away and only one body was ever recovered—that of their six-year-old, Ricky. “I have no idea what happened,” Rita McKenzie said later, describing the tragedy. “Nobody had a chance.”

  Waves wreaked havoc farther down the coastline. Boats were sunk in Santa Cruz and Half Moon Bay, south of San Francisco. A ten-foot-high wave hit Catalina Island in Southern California. Water surged into Marina del Rey, the newly built community just north of Los Angeles International Airport, and tore up 450 feet of dock and pushed it a half mile inland. In San Francisco, warnings on the late news about the possibility of a tidal wave drew an estimated ten thousand people to the shore, curious to watch the spectacle. Fortunately the waves that began coming in after midnight were not very high.

  But it was in Crescent City, California, a small port in timber country ten miles south of the Oregon border, that the waves proved most lethal. The death toll remains the highest from a tidal wave in the continental United States.

  Crescent City, a town of three thousand and the seat of Del Norte County, had experienced tidal waves before. Coastal engineers eventually determined that several factors, including the shape of the town’s harbor, tended to focus the wave energy and make waves worse there than just about anywhere else on the West Coast.

  News of the quake in Alaska had reached the town, and a tidal wave warning had been issued shortly after 11:00 p.m. Efforts were made to evacuate coastal and low-lying areas. Not everyone got out, but the first two waves that hit the town, beginning at 11:52 p.m., were small. They pushed into the harbor and Elk Creek, causing minor flooding in the commercial district.

  This is where the town’s familiarity with tidal waves proved fatal. Previous events had been minor, with one or two waves that did not do much damage. After the second wave on this night, many Crescent City residents thought this one would follow the same pattern. They returned to their homes and businesses to clean up.

  At the Long Branch Tavern, on Highway 101 near Elk Creek, the owners, Bill and Gay Clawson, came back to the bar with two employees and their twenty-nine-year-old son, Gary, and his fiancée, Joanie Fields. They hadn’t closed down properly and hadn’t collected the night’s proceeds from the till. Once at the bar, the water seemed to have calmed, and it was Bill Clawson’s birthday, so they decided to celebrate with a few beers. Two other friends stopped by to share in the merriment.

  Shortly after that, the third wave struck. Later, residue on a flagpole near the harbormaster’s office showed how high the water reached: nearly twenty-one feet above mean sea level. The wave flooded the tavern and pushed it off its foundation. For the eight people inside, the only way to go was up—first to the second floor, then, as the water kept rising, to the roof. Gary Clawson and one of the latecomers were the only ones who knew how to swim, so they jumped in the water and swam and then walked to higher ground. From there, Gary got a small rowboat and rowed back to get the others. With seven people on board the boat was difficult to maneuver, but they got it headed in a direction that they hoped would lead to land. At that point, though, the water started receding, about as fast as it had come in. The boat was drawn into Elk Creek by the strong current and eventually smashed into a bridge. Five of the seven occupants, including Gary’s parents and his fiancée, drowned. Gary was one of two who survived.

  Five other Crescent City residents died as a result of this third wave or a fourth one, equally strong, that arrived a little later. Nearly three dozen people were injured. A thirty-block area in the center of town, containing 250 homes and businesses, was essentially destroyed. Adding to the disaster, a loaded gasoline tanker truck got picked up by the third wave and was slammed into a Pontiac dealership, starting a fire that destroyed the dealership and spread to nearby oil-storage tanks. The blaze burned for three days.

  In all, sixteen people died as a result of the waves in California and Oregon,
including one in Klamath, California, not far from Crescent City, and another in Bolinas Bay, north of San Francisco. In Alaska, the death toll remained uncertain for weeks, which is not surprising given the remote character of much of the state and the sudden disappearance of many of the victims. Most calculations today put the state toll at 115; adding the California and Oregon deaths brings the overall tally to 131.

  One thing quickly became clear about the Alaska fatalities, however: relatively few people were killed in the way one would think that most deaths occurred during earthquakes, by being struck or crushed by falling structures or debris. Statewide only twelve fatalities seemed to fit this type, of which nine were in Anchorage. Of those, five occurred downtown, including two around the J. C. Penney store. (Blanche Clark, however, who had been trapped in her crushed Chevrolet, was not one of them. She was cut out of the car and, despite suffering a broken neck and arm, cracked ribs and a punctured lung, made a complete recovery.) Three people were killed in Turnagain Heights, including Leora Knight, a high school science teacher who fell into a crevasse along with her husband, Virgil. The crevasse soon closed up, crushing them. Leora never regained consciousness; Virgil survived but had to have a leg amputated.

  Most of the Alaska deaths—103 by modern count, out of the 115—were caused by waves. In addition to the 19 on Kodiak Island, 12 died in Whittier and 11 in Seward. There were isolated deaths elsewhere in Prince William Sound and the Gulf of Alaska.

  Then there were Chenega and Valdez, where the loss of life was worse than anywhere else. In the hours and days after the quake, the people of those two communities struggled to cope with the deaths of family and friends, and with what to make of their own lives from there on.

  —

  The buzzing sound started up the next morning, after a night short on sleep and long on misery for the sorry group of survivors gathered on the hill above what had been the village of Chenega. The noise came from the sky, faint at first but growing louder. It was the sound of an airplane, a hopeful sign, evidence that the villagers weren’t alone and that help would be arriving.

  There were actually two aircraft nearing Chenega Island at that moment, around 9 a.m. One was a Coast Guard plane making a broad sweep of Prince William Sound, searching for people who might need help. The other was a seaplane belonging to Cordova Airlines and flown by one of the airline’s pilots, Jim Osborne. He was accompanied by Frank Eaton, a member of the Civil Air Patrol. They were on a much more specific mission.

  Osborne knew Chenega and its inhabitants well. Cordova Airlines had the mail contract for most of the sound, so Osborne stopped at the village as often as twice a week in summer and every other week in the winter, if the weather allowed. He took the business of delivering Chenega’s mail seriously, as he knew it was the main connection most of the villagers had with the world. At the airline office late Friday evening after the earthquake, Osborne had been alarmed to hear reports of the disaster relayed from the Marpet.

  Osborne decided to fly to the island the next morning, with the idea of shuttling back survivors. For the task he’d need the airline’s Grumman Widgeon, a six-passenger high-winged plane that could take off and land on wheels or on its belly on water. But there was a problem. The Widgeon was out of service for maintenance and inspection. Some parts of the plane had even been disassembled.

  Osborne called the airline’s mechanics, described the situation and asked if they could get the aircraft back in one piece by morning. They were reluctant at first, as the plane was down near the water and they were worried about being caught by more destructive waves. But eventually they agreed. Working overnight, the mechanics had the Widgeon back together before 8 a.m. A little while later, Osborne and Eaton were airborne for Chenega, less than one hundred miles to the west.

  As they got closer to the village, flying over Knight Island Passage along Chenega Island’s eastern shore, they were overcome by what they saw. The tide had swept most of the ruins of the village out of the cove and into the passage, where they now covered a huge expanse of water—perhaps five square miles, Osborne thought. There was debris everywhere, flotsam and jetsam that had once been Chenega interspersed with dead red snappers, the fishes’ skin giving an eerie iridescent sheen to the surface. Much of the debris was unrecognizable, but looking closer Osborne and Eaton could make out intact walls and other parts of houses.

  They saw the Coast Guard plane pass overhead as they swooped down toward the village. The pilot made no sign—no dipping of the wings or other maneuver—that he recognized there was a problem below. Osborne didn’t give it much thought as he landed in the cove and taxied up to the beach. He had flown in here often, and this time it felt like there was something different about the shoreline; the beach seemed much wider. Osborne wondered if they had arrived at an exceptionally low tide, or if somehow the earthquake had caused a change in the land.

  As the plane pulled into the shore past where the dock used to be, some of the village men came down the hill from the schoolhouse. They seemed stunned and emotionless, Osborne recalled later. He could tell from the looks on their faces that they’d been through hell.

  Later, Osborne learned that the pilot of the Coast Guard plane had radioed in that the village appeared to have survived the quake. From the air he’d seen the intact schoolhouse and the empty expanse at the bottom of the hill, next to the beach. The waves had done their job so well, and the pilot was so unfamiliar with the village, that he hadn’t realized that he was looking at a scene of destruction, a place where fewer than twenty-four hours before there had been homes and a church. Still, Osborne couldn’t understand why the pilot hadn’t recognized that something was amiss. Hadn’t he seen the miles of debris on the water?

  The villagers told Osborne that some of them had come down the hill earlier that morning, at daybreak, in the vain hope of finding survivors. They had found a baby bottle filled with milk, which they brought back up to be shared by the youngest children. Then they had discovered the body of Tommy Selanoff, one of two twin toddlers who were lost, in a tree where the water had carried him. Down on the beach they found another body, that of Anna Vlasoff. Her husband, Steve, the lay priest, had been off the island on Friday, in Cordova. Eventually he would conduct funerals for all those who died. The first, the following week, would be for his wife.

  Also early that morning, Mickey and Nick Eleshansky had come back from Prince of Wales Passage in their fishing boat, the Shamrock. Chenegans now knew the full toll of the disaster that had befallen their village a little more than twelve hours before. It appeared that twenty-three villagers had died; there were fifty-three survivors.

  As Kris Madsen came to realize later, the waves had mostly claimed the young and the old. There were reports that a few of the older villagers had instinctively run to the church, rather than up the hill, when they heard shouts about a tidal wave. But others had tried, and failed, to get high enough up the hill to escape the torrent. Some of the youngest victims never made it off the beach where they had been playing.

  Twelve children, ranging in age from one to nine, were among the dead or missing. They included Rhonda Eleshansky, just a few weeks shy of one year old, the youngest victim; Robert Selanoff, who, like his twin, Tommy, was not quite two, and Avis and Joe Kompkoff’s daughter Jo Ann, who had died along with Willie and Sally Evanoff, Avis’s adoptive parents. Madsen counted two victims among her students—Julia Kompkoff, age nine, who had been swept away while trying to flee alongside her father, Nick; and eight-year-old Cindy Jackson, who had perished with her four-year-old brother, Dan, and their mother, Dora.

  Anna Vlasoff, the oldest victim, had turned sixty-nine the previous August. Only two of the dead—Dora Jackson and Richard Kompkoff, Avis’s cousin—were in their twenties. Several villagers said they had seen Richard swallowed up by the water as he was imploring Anna Vlasoff, who was frozen in fear, to flee to higher ground.

  Meeting with the men down on the beach, Osborne planned the evacuation. He
’d first take any injured, along with pregnant women and small children. There were a few mattresses in Madsen’s quarters in the schoolhouse; these were brought down to line the floor of the plane. A couple of cots in the school were used as stretchers to bring down Margaret Borodkin and Dorothy Eleshansky, who had a deep gash on her back.

  The two women were put on the plane, and were joined by as many other women and children as Osborne thought the Widgeon would bear. With Eaton staying behind, Osborne taxied off the beach and out onto the water. Before long the first of Chenega’s survivors were heading to Cordova.

  Osborne made three flights that day, taking all of the women and children and a few of the men. Madsen was on the last flight, and like the others in the village with dogs, had to leave Tlo behind. The rest of the men sailed back to Cordova aboard the Shamrock and the Marpet, arriving the next day.

  On Sunday the villagers got more bad news. Three people who had lived in Chenega but now made their home at Port Nellie Juan were presumed dead as well: Alex Chimovisky—godfather to Nick Kompkoff—his wife, Anna, and their adult son, Emmanuel, who served as winter caretakers at the Nellie Juan cannery that Chenegans supplied with salmon during the summers. A Coast Guard cutter had been through the area on Saturday and had discovered that the dock had been destroyed by a wave. Two skiffs were found, overturned, with their motors still running.

  In Cordova, Reverend Bert Hall, pastor at the Community Baptist Church and also the local Red Cross representative, heard of the destruction of Chenega and developed a plan. Hall and other leaders in the town of 1,500 had had recent experience in disaster management. A little less than a year before, much of Cordova had burned in a fire. In all, fourteen buildings had been destroyed and nearly 10 percent of the population made homeless. Hall and the others had sprung into action, sheltering many residents in the social hall in the church basement until new housing could be found.