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

by Henry Fountain

  For the many residents who had parked out at Mile 6, by 10 p.m. the rumored tidal wave had not materialized. Thinking that things were calmer in town, some of them jumped in their cars and headed back down the Richardson Highway.

  But the disaster wasn’t over in Valdez.

  Shortly before, the oil that was leaking from storage tanks caught fire. The flames spread, and soon what was left of the waterfront—including the Morgue Bar, on the remains of the earthen causeway that led to the main dock—was ablaze. Even worse, officials received word over the radio that another wave might indeed be on its way. They sent a vehicle out to drive around town with a loudspeaker to warn remaining residents to evacuate. Those leaving Mile 6 now encountered a string of cars carrying new evacuees out of Valdez, including the dozens of mentally disabled residents of the Harborview home. The drivers warned those who were heading back to town that the whole town would burn or be destroyed by a new tidal wave.

  At about 11:45 p.m. a third wave did roll into Valdez, followed two hours later by another. Neither was like the mammoth wave that ravaged Chenega; they were more like fast-rising tides that reached partway into town. Valdez wouldn’t be destroyed by a tidal wave, but the city would be swamped. The second wave, in particular, flooded buildings for several blocks inland with five feet or more of water.

  There was a mammoth wave in Port Valdez, however, far out in the bay about ten miles from the town. Only a few people experienced it.

  Basil Lee Ferrier, known as Red, and his son, Delbert, had motored out of Valdez on Friday in their thirty-foot fishing boat. They didn’t have fishing in mind, however—they were headed to the narrows that separated Port Valdez and Valdez Arm to do some logging. There was a spit of land, called Potato Point, in the narrows about ten miles west of Valdez proper. Father and son anchored the boat two hundred yards offshore, ran their skiff to the beach and were up in the woods when the shaking began. With snow sliding all around them, they ran to the skiff to get to what they thought would be the relative safety of the fishing boat.

  Just as they pulled away from the beach, though, the water dropped away underneath them, leaving the skiff high and dry. Even the fishing boat, they saw to their horror, dropped out of sight, sinking into a narrow channel as the water continued to recede. Then, as quickly as it had left, the water returned with a rush, floating both the skiff and the larger boat. Amid the turbulence, the Ferriers couldn’t control the skiff, but they were lucky: it moved close to the fishing boat and they managed to climb on board.

  Delbert pulled up the anchor and his father got the engine going. Just then—shortly after the shaking stopped—the boy saw a large wave developing to the northeast, in the direction of Shoup Glacier, which ended in a small bay on the northern side of Port Valdez about eight miles west of the town. Terrified, Red Ferrier turned the boat to the southwest, toward the Valdez Arm, and gunned the engine, trying to outrun the wave or at least get out of the narrows before the water reached them. He pulled out of the narrows and into wider water just as the wave, dark with mud and timbers, rushed through. Ferrier estimated its height at fifty feet or more; it overtopped a navigation light in the middle of the narrows that was on a concrete pedestal thirty-five feet high. But as it emerged from the narrows into the arm it decreased in height, enabling the Ferriers’ boat to ride over the top of it—just as Howard and Sonny Ulrich had managed to do in Lituya Bay six years before.

  It took several hours for the water to calm down—for a while, wave after wave came through where they had finally stopped, at a place called Jacks Bay just outside the narrows. Finally, as it grew dark, the Ferriers began heading back to Valdez. As they passed through the narrows, they saw dead snappers floating everywhere on the surface of the water.

  Later, scientists discovered signs at Cliff Mine—the once-prosperous gold mine near the mouth of Shoup Bay—that water had reached a height of 220 feet above sea level. And just across Port Valdez, at Anderson Bay, there was evidence that the water had reached about 80 feet. It seemed that these large waves and the wave that the Ferriers rode out were related and perhaps were all caused by an underwater slide somewhere near Shoup Glacier.

  At the time, no one was sure. But one thing that soon became clear was that the waves in the western end of Port Valdez were responsible for Valdez’s thirty-first fatality. Harry Alden Henderson was a forty-nine-year-old fisherman who had a small camp on Anderson Bay. When others went to check on him after the earthquake, there was no sign of the camp, or him.

  On Saturday morning, when the soldiers arrived in Valdez, they found the town leaders meeting at the power plant, trying to figure out what to do. Some of the residents out at Mile 6 had finally driven back to town in the middle of the night. They’d figured that the worst of the flooding was over and had heard that the oil-tank fire, though spectacular, probably was not going to destroy the rest of the town. So they’d reentered Valdez at about 3 a.m. Even the Harborview residents had been returned to the home.

  But now, in the morning, with the damage from the high water adding to the destruction from the shaking the day before, town officials were thinking that a near-complete, and final, evacuation should be ordered. There was little or no fresh water, the sewer system was destroyed and, perhaps most important, there was a huge cleanup to be undertaken. So together with the military officers, they decided to evacuate the town once and for all. Residents had until noon to gather up their things and leave. About forty-five people, mostly men, would stay and help the soldiers with the cleanup.

  Of those who left Valdez after the quake, about three hundred ended up in Fairbanks, where local residents and hotels accommodated them without charge. Others stayed in Glennallen or Copper Center; some moved in with relatives and friends in and around Anchorage. The state was insistent that school-age children finish out the school year wherever they ended up.

  Some went farther afield, to the Lower 48—Outside, in the parlance of Alaskans. A few days after the quake, Gary Minish took the first plane ride of his life, along with two younger siblings, heading to South Dakota to stay with his grandparents. He became something of a celebrity in his adoptive school—he’d survived the great earthquake, and he was in such good shape from life in Alaska that he was one of the school’s best athletes. Gary and his family, like other families, came back to Valdez that summer after the school year ended; other Valdez residents were away only a few weeks.

  The cleanup had gotten under way in earnest on Saturday afternoon. Crews repaired utility lines, and some semblance of telephone service was restored through much of the town. Houses and commercial buildings were inspected, and some were condemned and torn down. Others were judged to be in need of repairs but otherwise safe for occupancy. The Army Corps of Engineers came in and hired contractors to clean up the debris around the waterfront.

  The soldiers moved from the Switzerland Inn to larger quarters at the movie theater. A mess hall was set up, first at the inn and then at the Harborview. There was never a shortage of food, as supplies were brought down the Richardson Highway by a steady stream of trucks. Those who remained in their houses were given tanks for water and waste; these were put outside to be filled or emptied each morning by soldiers. For those whose houses had been condemned, the Salvation Army arrived with a plan for temporary housing—in the form of gleaming white house trailers—called Operation Mobile Igloo.

  Throughout the weeks that followed, residents trickled back to Valdez. Life there wasn’t particularly easy, and there were setbacks—including, a month after the quake, the deaths of four officers in the crash of a National Guard plane that had just dropped off the governor for a tour of the relief work. But there were signs of progress too. Among other things, Valdez once again had a newspaper, the Earthquake Bugle. It was little more than a mimeographed sheet, but it kept townspeople up to date on the news.

  Years later, Gloria Day, who, with her husband, Walt, had come back to town just a few days after the quake, would remark on how st
ressed everyone in Valdez was in the weeks after the quake. No one knew it at the time, she realized, but the combination of the events of the day—the loss of so many friends and neighbors—and the rough postearthquake conditions led to short tempers. Life in Valdez after the earthquake was full of uncertainties and annoyances; to Gloria, it was a wonder they got through it.

  The biggest uncertainty, of course, was what to do, in the long term, about the town itself. Henry Coulter and Ralph Migliaccio, government geologists, conducted soil tests and otherwise studied the site, but the people of Valdez didn’t need scientists to tell them the obvious: if the waterfront had collapsed once, it could do so again. (In fact, Coulter and Migliaccio had found evidence that the edge of the glacial plain had collapsed several times in the previous seventy years, although not with such devastating consequences.)

  The land that Valdez was built on was inherently unstable, and the town was a dangerous place to live. It would have to move. But where?

  Owen Meals had a suggestion: the land that his father and George Hazelet had homesteaded back in 1901, four miles northwest of the current town. Of the 670 acres—roughly a square mile—there was plenty of flat land that would be perfect for homes and businesses and a waterfront that could be made into a decent port with a little work. Best of all, there was plenty of bedrock that would keep the land stable in the event of another earthquake. There had been no fissuring on this land during the Good Friday quake. As further proof of its suitability, the one person who currently lived there—a crusty old man named Nicholas Mishko, who had had a falling-out with his neighbors in Valdez a few years before and in a fit of pique had hauled his home over to the homestead site—had ridden out the quake in good shape, his home undamaged.

  The Meals-Hazelet land had never caught on as a town site back at the turn of the century. But now it had a certain appeal. The land was still owned by the descendants of Jack Meals and George Hazelet—there were eight heirs in all—but Owen Meals had a plan for changing that.

  Later in his career, George Plafker proudly displayed a small plaque in his office at the Geological Survey in California. It read:

  IF GEOLOGICAL AND GEOPHYSICAL DATA CLASH,

  THROW THE GEOPHYSICS IN THE TRASH.

  The sentiment was a bit harsh, perhaps, though Plafker didn’t mean it personally. By then he had many friends and colleagues who were geophysicists, geochemists and other types of what are collectively termed geoscientists. But Plafker drew a distinction between them and him, an “ordinary” field geologist. The words of the plaque described what he felt was a truth: that he (and others like him) had an advantage over more august scientists who seldom if ever went into the field and were more comfortable working at a desk, analyzing data gathered by others and coming up with ideas that, to Plafker at least, sometimes didn’t make sense.

  Plafker believed that to fully understand something you had to experience it firsthand. The conviction dated from those summer field trips with A. C. Hawkins, the fill-in Brooklyn College professor, back when Plafker was first exposed to geology. Hawkins had urged his students to experience rocks in their natural settings, and Plafker had taken his advice to heart. His first job as a geologist had been disappointing, working at a desk poring over maps and reports for the military. But since he’d gone to Alaska with the Geological Survey, and even while his career took a detour to oil company work in Central and South America, Plafker had relished what being in the field gave him: a feeling that he knew what he was talking about. He’d walked the land and seen geological formations with his eyes. He knew how to read rocks, and what he learned by reading them was invaluable.

  Now, in the summer after the Alaska earthquake, his work took a turn. He’d still be out in the field, seeing and reading the rocks firsthand. But he’d be learning from something else as well—a tiny sea creature.

  —

  The northern acorn barnacle, Semibalanus balanoides, is one of the most common barnacles in the cold oceans. Take a look at the rocks in a cove, the pilings at a pier or the hull of a boat just about anywhere in the northern Atlantic or Pacific, and chances are you’ll find a lot of the little organisms. Despite the name, they don’t resemble acorns so much as tiny white volcanoes, about a half-inch wide at most, with five or six hard plates making up the flanks and on top, where the crater would be, a diamond-shaped opening that serves as a kind of trapdoor. Inside are the soft tissues, including six pair of feathery appendages—some people might call them legs—that emerge when the barnacle is submerged and the trapdoor opens; they filter seawater, removing plankton and other food that is then delivered to the mouth.

  Because of their hard plates, barnacles were initially thought to be mollusks, kin to clams. Then, in 1830, John Vaughan Thompson, a British Army surgeon and marine biologist, wrote of the similarities between the larval stages of barnacles and crustaceans like shrimp. Later, no less of a naturalist than Charles Darwin became involved; in the mid-1840s he became obsessed with barnacles, studying them for eight years and fastidiously describing and classifying them. There was no longer any doubt about it—barnacles were relatives of shrimp, crabs and lobsters.

  Unlike those crustaceans, however, barnacles don’t move around, except for the few weeks they are larvae, when they swim until they find a suitable rock or other rough surface to land on and grow. Then they use their antennas to find other nearby barnacles and settle, secreting a superglue that locks them in place for the rest of their lives—perhaps five to ten years—and beyond.

  Like other barnacles, acorn barnacles on rocks or pilings live in the intertidal zone, between high and low water. For two periods almost every day they are submerged and able to feed, and when they are out of the water the trapdoor shuts to keep them from drying out. But Semibalanus balanoides doesn’t live just anywhere in this zone; the barnacles tend to settle in a narrow band with an upper limit that is at or just a little below mean high water. That means they are submerged at most high tides (though not all—they can survive for some time out of the water), and when they are submerged it’s for a relatively short time. This gives them some advantages. They are underwater long enough to get the necessary food to survive and grow, but their exposure to predators like starfish and sea snails is minimized.

  When he arrived in Alaska, Plafker knew nothing about the northern acorn barnacle, or any other kind of barnacle for that matter. He was a geologist, not a marine biologist. But he was soon to become quite familiar with Semibalanus balanoides. The barnacles’ intertidal existence—specifically, their precise location within the intertidal zone—was not just advantageous for them. It would prove extremely useful in studying the Good Friday earthquake.

  —

  After their arrival on the twenty-eighth, Plafker, Arthur Grantz and Reuben Kachadoorian stayed in Alaska for two weeks, working feverishly to collect data to compile into a report. The Geological Survey wanted to publish a preliminary study of the earthquake as soon as possible. Even if Charles Richter and other scientists differed as to the precise magnitude, the quake was already acknowledged as the strongest to hit North America and one of the most powerful ever measured anywhere. Seismologists and others around the world were interested in learning as much as possible about it. A quick report would also help build support from policy makers in Washington for a broad, and costly, program to study the quake in following years.

  After a few days together in Anchorage and a few more reconnaissance flights, the three had gone their separate ways. Kachadoorian, with his interest in engineering geology, had focused mostly on the structural damage to buildings, roads, port facilities and the railroad. Grantz, who had spent more time in interior Alaska, went to the Matanuska Valley, northeast of Anchorage, between the Chugach Mountains and the Talkeetnas, to the north. Plafker said he’d take the coast—he’d head to Cordova to work Prince William Sound. He was familiar with the area from prior years and knew a lot of people there, which would be a big help in gathering information.

/>   In fact, the previous year Plafker and a colleague had been as far as Middleton Island, the most southeasterly of the islands in that part of Alaska. Middleton was so far to the southeast—about eighty miles from Cordova—that it was outside the sound and in the Gulf of Alaska proper. Plafker was anxious to see it again.

  He was anxious, actually, to see as much of the area as he could. The reconnaissance flights out of Anchorage suggested that the land all over southern Alaska had deformed during the quake, rising up or sinking down. The changes were quite dramatic, as the three men had seen up close on April 1, when they had flown to Homer. The town was past Seward at the tip of the Kenai Peninsula and included a spit of land that jutted into Kachemak Bay. When they arrived, a work crew was busily jacking up an old inn on the spit. Before the quake, it had been comfortably above the high-water line. Plafker looked at the cribbing of large timbers that the men were putting under the building as they raised it. It was about six feet high; the land had sunk that much.

  Working out of Cordova, even for just a few days, he’d be able to see more of this kind of deformation up close. And he’d get a good idea of the work that would be needed when he and others came back in a month or so to make a detailed survey. Just as important, he’d get survivors’ accounts when they were fresh and most accurate—before they’d shared stories with others and inadvertently come to mix other people’s perceptions with their own.

  Plafker enlisted Jim Osborne—the Cordova Airlines pilot who had rescued the survivors at Chenega—to take him around the sound. He met up with Osborne on the thirty-first, when he and Grantz stopped in Cordova during another of their reconnaissance runs. Plafker found the pilot to be a very useful source of information about the effects of the quake. After all, Osborne flew the sound twice a week to deliver the mail at almost every village and outpost, so he knew the land and the people as well as, and in most cases better than, anyone. He told Plafker about what he’d seen and heard during those first couple of days, including reports of tidal waves that had not made any news accounts, at out-of-the-way places like Peak Island and Port Oceanic. And he agreed to let Plafker accompany him on his mail run later in the week.