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

by Henry Fountain

  Hall now planned to provide similar assistance to the Chenegans. With the hall’s basketball hoops and gymnastic rings tied out of the way, and with large curtains strung around the room to give families some privacy, forty-two Chenegans moved in and made it their home. Hall also provided the use of his parsonage for other villagers. A cannery lent cots, and towels and blankets were provided by Cordova’s hospital. Local stores provided food that the villagers cooked for themselves using the hall kitchen.

  The villagers were appreciative of the help, but for a people who were used to living close to nature, spending much of their time outdoors hunting, fishing and playing, Cordova was a shock. The community hall was crowded, and there was little to do. The Chenegans grieved for the loss of their loved ones, to be sure, but of so much else as well: their homes, their island, their way of life. They were understandably numb and withdrawn.

  In the middle of that first week, a Red Cross volunteer from San Francisco, Claude Ashen, arrived in Cordova to help. While at first glance it didn’t seem as if he had much in common with the villagers, he would prove instrumental in helping them get back on their feet.

  Ashen, known as Pete, was an insurance salesman with John Hancock who in his spare time helped direct disaster-relief efforts for the Golden Gate Chapter of the Red Cross. The night of the earthquake, Ashen received a call from someone he didn’t know in Fairbanks. Over a scratchy connection the caller told him about the disaster and, before the line went dead, begged him to send help to the state. Ashen called his higher-ups in the Red Cross, who met the next day and decided to send him to Alaska.

  Ashen had been in Anchorage for several days when, upon hearing reports about the disaster at Chenega, he realized he could be more help to the surviving villagers. Over the next eight weeks, with funds provided by the Red Cross chapter back home, he worked to replace some of what the villagers had lost—boats and gear—so that they could resume their hunting and fishing lifestyle.

  Kris Madsen found herself largely on her own. She was lodged separately in Cordova with a local teacher. For her the earthquake had been a figurative as well as a literal jolt. It had helped crystallize her thinking about her future.

  State education officials and the Bureau of Indian Affairs had a plan to get the children of Chenega back in classes, making use of a single room at the local elementary school in Cordova. Madsen had been in Cordova about a week when they came to her with a request. A chartered boat was taking various officials and villagers back to the island, and they needed the attendance and other records of Madsen’s pupils. Would she go back and get them?

  Madsen reluctantly agreed, but she was upset at the request. Chenegans had been through a horrific disaster; villagers had suffered the loss of family and friends and everything they owned. Madsen had had it easier than the villagers themselves—she hadn’t lost any loved ones and didn’t have much property to lose. But she was deeply traumatized. And all the bureaucrats seemed to care about was paperwork.

  Nonetheless she had gone back, along with the chief, Charles Selanoff, and others. Where the center of the village had been, little was recognizable, just fragments of wood and other materials scattered about, with the log pilings that had supported the homes poking up through a layer of silt. When she walked up the hill to the schoolhouse, she found the generator shack and the play yard awash in silt as well. In the schoolhouse she gathered a few things from her living quarters, although most of her clothes and shoes had been given out to the villagers the night of the quake. Then she entered the classroom. It was a shock to be there again, in a place that had once been filled with happy children. The room was as they had left it when Jim Osborne had come to get them, with books, papers, food and other supplies strewn on the floor. Paper Easter eggs still adorned the walls, and the chalkboard still carried the day and date of the earthquake, written in her hand. She gathered up the necessary papers and left.

  A few objects were found and salvaged during that trip, including a Russian-language Bible from the church, a basket made by Katy Selanoff, wife of the chief, and some photographs. But the visit was unbearably sad. Officials shot the dogs that had remained in the village, including her dog, Tlo. But Madsen realized that everyone in this part of Alaska had a lot more to worry about than caring for a dog.

  After a few hours on the island, she couldn’t wait to head back to Cordova. By then she’d made up her mind to leave Alaska. Madsen was sorry, but the school officials would have to find someone else to teach the remainder of the school year. She would return to Long Beach, where she’d visit with her parents and figure out the next stage of her life. Selanoff wanted to leave Alaska, too. He had fewer ties to Chenega than most villagers and at age thirty-two was ready to see more of the world. Madsen invited him to come to California. From there he could head off to points beyond.

  A few days later, she found herself in Anchorage at the state education offices, where she dropped off the Chenega records. An official there tried to persuade her to teach somewhere else in the state to finish out the school year. But she had had enough. In a few days she and Selanoff boarded a plane to California.

  Over those first few weeks, some of the men of Chenega made additional trips by boat back to the island. On their way they explored the shoreline along Knight Island Passage, Whale Bay, Dangerous Passage and other waters looking for signs of loved ones.

  On Knight Island they found the second floor of Steve and Anna Vlasoff’s house, which had been one of the few two-story houses in the village. In the violence of the tidal wave, the two floors had come apart, and the top floor had floated some miles out of the cove before washing up on the beach. Inside, the Vlasoffs’ bed was still made.

  On Knight Island, too, villagers found the body of Avis and Joe Kompkoff’s daughter, Jo Ann. The corpse had been attacked by birds and was so damaged that Avis was not allowed to see it. But she received the cross and T-shirt that Jo Ann had been wearing when Avis heard a voice telling her to send her home to her grandmother’s.

  A few other bodies were found, but most of those who died at Chenega were lost forever. Those who survived had to somehow pick up the pieces, overcome their feeling of numbness and loss and rebuild their lives. The solution, they realized, was to reestablish the village. But where? There was talk among the survivors of perhaps returning to the island and rebuilding Chenega where it had been. But the idea was quickly dismissed. For one thing, no one could be certain there wouldn’t be another earthquake and tidal wave someday; it seemed foolhardy to rebuild in a place that had suffered such destruction. For another, how could they live in a place where so many loved ones had died? But most important, especially to the women, was the fact that their church had been destroyed—a sure sign they shouldn’t return.

  The discussions about the fate of Chenega, mostly among the elders of the village, with input from Bureau of Indian Affairs officials and others, went on for weeks. One possibility, supported by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, was to move to Tatitlek, the other Alutiiq village in Prince William Sound, twenty-five miles northwest of Cordova.

  Accessible only by water or air, Tatitlek was located on the eastern side of the mouth of Valdez Arm. It had a population of about one hundred. The village was on the water, but it was at a higher elevation than Chenega. Tatitlek’s harbor would need to be dredged, but other than that the village had made it through the earthquake with relatively little damage.

  Like the Chenegans, the people of Tatitlek lived a largely subsistence lifestyle, relying on fishing and hunting for much of their food. But the village had seen more prosperous times. In the early 1900s a rich copper deposit had been found several miles north, at a place called Ellamar. The mine provided jobs and brought more people to Tatitlek, with the population swelling to 212 in 1920. Soon after, it started to drop, gradually at first as the copper deposits were played out, and then precipitously, when a flu epidemic wiped out half the population in 1922.

  A few Chenegans had relatives in
Tatitlek, and the two villages shared Alutiiq heritage and culture. But most Chenegans had never had a great affinity for the other village, and vice versa. When discussing the possibility of moving there, many of the survivors said they would prefer being closer to Ellamar.

  Calling a meeting of its tribal council, the Chenegans voted to move to a new village site between Tatitlek and Ellamar in late May. They would live in tents while new homes were built from materials provided by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

  Ashen, meanwhile, was working on his plan to supply the Chenegans with items that were essential to their lifestyle: boats and guns. The villagers had lost almost all their boats in the quake, and only one rifle had been found. So Ashen, after consulting with the chief, Charles Selanoff, with money provided by his Red Cross chapter back home, arranged to purchase rifles through Karl’s Hardware, on Cordova’s main street, for each of Chenega’s fifteen remaining households. Ashen also bought hip boots and other foul-weather gear for the villagers, and ordered from August Tiedmann, the best boat builder in town, four twenty-four-foot skiffs. Ashen would also buy some sixteen- and eighteen-footers, making fifteen boats in all, each with an outboard motor. The villagers would have most of what they needed to hunt and fish.

  Ashen thought that Selanoff, as chief, should get the first skiff, but Selanoff insisted that all the heads of households draw straws. The Red Cross insurance salesman had taken a liking to the Alutiiq chief. He had lost two children in the quake, yet he maintained his dignity. Ashen told a newspaper reporter later, after he’d returned home to California, that through meeting the chief he had gained new insight into people’s good qualities. “Charlie Selanoff is a man I’d like to call my friend,” he said.

  —

  The US Army showed up in Valdez on Saturday morning, in the form of 5 officers and 102 enlisted men from Fort Wainwright, near Fairbanks. Military commanders in Anchorage first had gotten word about the situation in the town the evening before, in the form of a short radio message.

  “Valdez is a shambles” was all it said.

  That had been enough to get the military mobilized. Some of the soldiers were put on helicopters that left shortly before midnight. Valdez officials, hearing of the troops’ impending arrival, sent cars to the town’s dark airfield so their headlights could light the landing zone. But bad weather forced the choppers down in Gulkana, 120 miles north of Valdez. They resumed the trip in the morning, landing about the time a truck convoy arrived carrying the rest of the troops and emergency supplies, including tanks of fresh water, a water-purification system and C rations. The soldiers set up a command post at Owen Meals’s generating plant and commandeered the Switzerland Inn as temporary living quarters.

  Both the power plant and the inn had made it through the quake in good shape. Much of the rest of the town was a mess, however, and the townspeople were unnerved. Many of them had left Friday evening, only to come back a few hours later when it seemed that things were calming down. But it had been a rough night, and now most of those who had come back were preparing to evacuate again.

  The initial exodus had begun in the first hour after the quake. It was, literally, a bumpy ride, as the earthquake had left the Richardson Highway badly cracked. For some, just getting to the highway required a detour around a huge fissure on Alaska Avenue. And on the highway itself, a traffic jam developed a mile out of town where a crack had opened in front of a bridge, rendering the road impassable. Eventually the highway department came out with truckloads of sand and filled it in.

  Doors were left unlocked, food was left in the fridge, valuables were left behind. The people of Valdez would deal with all of that later. Everyone had experienced personal trauma, the fear that they would be crushed by the house they were standing in or swallowed by the street they were walking or driving on. But there had been a collective trauma as well: a sickening realization, as word filtered through the streets about the destruction of the waterfront, that loved ones, friends and neighbors had disappeared, that in a horrifying instant their lives, and the life of their community, had been irrevocably changed.

  For some it was all too much. The pain of the earthquake reached so deep that they left Valdez and never returned. For most, however, the departure was temporary.

  Young Gary Minish and his family joined the stream of cars on the Richardson Highway that night. They all piled into the family car after their house started filling with water, but a fissure in the driveway prevented them from getting on the highway. As the yard itself began to flood, a tow truck happened by and helped them get the car on the road.

  The family didn’t go very far. There were rumors that another wave might hit Valdez, so they stopped at a patch of high ground at Mile 6 of the highway, along the Lowe River. It seemed as if half the town had heard the same rumors and had come to this spot, parking their cars and trucks along the road. People were in a state of panic, crying and screaming, wandering from car to car asking if the occupants had seen a husband or child, or a family pet that had run off in the chaos.

  Others drove farther, through Keystone Canyon and over Thompson Pass, stopping at one of the state highway department encampments or one of the roadhouses that were a vestige of the time when travel on the highway was a multiday affair. Some made it all the way to Copper City or Glennallen, more than one hundred miles from Valdez, before stopping.

  A few didn’t leave at all. After the quake, Dorothy Moore’s father, Sidney, dutifully reported across the street to the power plant where he worked. The building’s brick facade was intact, and although the interior had flooded and had to be bailed out, only one of the three diesel generators had failed. Moore decided to stay to help get things back to as normal as they could be, all things considered. That settled it for Dorothy’s mother, Edith. I’m not leaving without my husband, she said. And anyway, she went on, the house isn’t in too bad shape. So the Moore family remained, and their house quickly became a gathering place for others. The first night, the eight members of the Moore family were joined by thirteen neighbors, including a boy who had lost his father at the dock.

  Valdez was in shambles, as the radio operator had put it. There were huge piles of shattered lumber and other debris where the waves had pushed the ruins of the waterfront into the town. The shaking and rolling had done much damage to at least two-fifths of the homes and almost all of the commercial buildings; in the center of town, loose bricks and broken window glass lay scattered on the streets. Cars had fallen into crevasses, their back ends pointing to the sky. The floor of the bank had heaved up, making the prospect of opening the safe problematic. Aboveground, utility lines had been stretched and in some cases snapped, cutting power and telephone service; belowground, the fissuring had effectively shredded the town’s water and sewer lines. The town’s two-hundred-thousand-gallon water tank managed to remain intact despite rocking crazily, but because the water lines were cut all over town, it had quickly drained.

  Fissures that had opened in the ground had continued through buildings, tearing them apart. Valdez High School, just five years old, was damaged in this way. The concrete slab that served as its foundation was rife with cracks. In the gym, where the slab was covered with a linoleum floor, a crack had narrowly missed the school’s “Buccaneer” logo painted in the center. The elementary school was only slightly less damaged. Harborview, the home for the mentally disabled near the Richardson Highway, had suffered severe cracking of both its floors and roof. The fifty-some patients had been brought to the dining room, which was considered safe, and a staff member played the piano there to try to maintain calm.

  When the shaking had stopped, water had compounded the damage. The first wave—the one that the Chena rode and that destroyed the small boat harbor—had washed inland only a few blocks beyond McKinley Street. A second wave of about the same intensity had arrived less than fifteen minutes later. Neither inundated the business district to great depth—perhaps two feet at most—but they knocked around many of the small b
oats, which eventually were washed out into the bay and sank. (The larger Gypsy, the tourist boat, may have been struck by the Chena; it ended up at the bottom of the bay as well.) Oil storage tanks were also damaged by the waves. Those belonging to the Union Oil Company were knocked over and began to leak, and oily water began to spread through the south side of town.

  Before they left town that evening, families tried to track down loved ones. Dan Kendall, who had left Stanley Knutsen and Dennis Cunningham on the dock not long before the quake, walked over to Harborview to check on his mother, who worked there as a cook, and let her know that he and the rest of the family were all right. Gloria and Walter Day’s son Pat returned after a while in the family’s red pickup truck. He confessed sheepishly that he had not gone down to the waterfront to pump out their boat as promised but instead had gone for a joy ride inland. His parents were never happier to hear that he’d shirked his chores.

  Some residents went down to the waterfront to look for survivors. The water was still stirred up and filled with debris, and the situation looked hopeless. One body was found—that of George Joslyn, a longshoreman who lived by himself near Dan Kendall’s house. Later, when reports of missing persons were sorted out, the death toll down at the docks became clear. Thirty people had died—twenty-eight on the dock proper and two in the Chena’s hold. Other than the two men on the ship, Joslyn was the only one whose body was recovered.

  As the evening wore on, the power plant became the center of activity. Town leaders gathered. A radio there enabled them to reach the Chena offshore and make arrangements for the town doctor to get to the ship. Meals also owned the local telephone service, and the exchange was in the same building. Most phones were out, but long-distance microwave and undersea cable connections had survived the shaking.