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

by Henry Fountain

  But in some cases—especially where coastal rocks were regularly exposed to strong waves—there would be no barnacles at all, old or new. Plafker found that in those locations he could use another marine organism in their place—a type of seaweed, Fucus distichus, or rockweed. This grew in an olive-green band on the rocks, and the upper edge of the band correlated well with the barnacle line. When it died, it turned brown.

  At some spots along the shoreline there were bands of rockweed and barnacles and, above the barnacles, a third band of a dark-gray lichen that encrusted the rocks. So for Plafker and the other researchers, hunting for the barnacle line sometimes meant looking for rocks that had a tricolor band of gray, white and brown.

  The bands were usually easy to see from the Don J. Miller. The barge would cruise the coastline, and the researchers would look for good spots to take measurements. After a while they became experts at sighting good locations from far off. Rock formations that were smooth and closer to vertical were best, because the barnacles were close together and the band was more distinct. On gentler sloping rocks the barnacles were scattered over a larger area and the line was not as clear. Tidal pools and other features of the shoreline could also confuse things.

  When they found a good spot, Plafker and an assistant—often Larry Mayo, a young geologist who had just started at the Survey the year before and would go on to have a career studying glaciers—would get into one of two skiffs and motor over to the shore to take measurements and photographs. Jim Case, a Survey biologist, would climb into the other with another assistant and work a different part of the shoreline. They tried to get accurate measurements every one to five miles, which would give them enough data to create a contour map of the region showing the uplift and subsidence.

  After so much time in backwoods Alaska, Plafker was quite happy to spend a summer on the water. It was a far cry from his usual fieldwork—they weren’t doing any real geology, where they’d have to stop and examine rocks and break off samples with a rock hammer and haul the samples back to their camp. But in many ways it was easier. Whether out of guilt or just habit, at times Plafker would find himself studying the geology of a location anyway. He couldn’t help himself.

  The accommodations were more comfortable than a spike camp. The barge was no luxury yacht—Plafker would refer to it as “that crummy barge”—but it was a pleasant change to spend one’s nights surrounded by four solid walls rather than a canvas tent. With its flat bottom, the barge rolled a bit in rough seas, but in more placid water or when the captain, John Stacey, anchored for the night near shore, it could be almost relaxingly calm.

  Then there was the food. The other member of the crew, John Muttart, turned out to be quite a cook, and Prince William Sound produced a fabulous bounty of seafood. When Plafker and the others left in their skiffs in the morning, Muttart would throw traps over the side of the barge, and when the men returned for lunch or dinner there would be shrimp or Dungeness crab for everyone. There was a charcoal grill on the deck if the men preferred their crustaceans barbecued. Occasionally, just to change things up a bit, Muttart would let out a line and within minutes pull up fish off the bottom for the night’s meal.

  They couldn’t live by seafood alone—although it was tempting, Plafker thought, especially given all the Dungeness crab—so every once in a while they would radio to Cordova and place an order for groceries, which would be delivered by floatplane, piloted by Osborne or someone else. And once every few weeks they’d have to put into Cordova or another port for fuel.

  As field research went, it was not a bad situation. But once or twice things threatened to get out of hand. Plafker was listening one day when one of the other researchers, on the radio to Cordova, calmly added a case of whiskey to the grocery order. Plafker blew his top, reminding the man that as Geological Survey staffers they weren’t supposed to have any alcohol, much less a case of whiskey, on board. And the radio was on an open channel, meaning just about everyone else working in the sound, including fishermen, Coast Guardsmen and other Survey researchers, could hear the order. It was canceled.

  The barge worked the sound and Resurrection Bay in the Gulf of Alaska most of the summer. For Plafker and the others it was a very productive time. They visited almost every island, including Chenega, Evans and Knight, and went up most of the fjords and channels. They also had occasional use of a helicopter to take them farther afield.

  They were still interviewing survivors where they could and studying the damage caused by waves at Chenega, Whittier and other places around the sound. Plafker and Mayo came up with a “wave magnitude scale” to quantify the water’s destructive force. Magnitude 1 were small waves that ran up just a few feet above extreme high water, could float houses and could break small limbs on trees. Magnitude 3 waves could run up to 55 feet above high water, break trees up to eight inches in diameter, move heavy equipment around and deposit cobbles on hillsides. At the top of the scale was magnitude 5—waves that ran up to 170 feet and destroyed everything in their path, scoured hillsides bare and threw large boulders about like marbles.

  But the elevation work—the barnacle line—consumed most of their time. Plafker and his colleagues ended up making more than eight hundred measurements around the sound. Elevation changes ranged from subsidence of almost seven feet near Whittier to a maximum uplift, on Montague Island, of nearly thirty-eight feet.

  It was on Montague, the long island that marks the southeastern limit of the sound, that Plafker finally found faults related to the earthquake. Jim Osborne, in fact, had first clued him in—he had noticed something amiss on Montague from the air. When Plafker and the others surveyed the island’s northwest coast, they found a long fault, running more than twenty-two miles, that had created a fresh scarp, a cliff that was more than twenty feet high at its maximum. Another fault, nearby, was shorter, and its scarp was not as high.

  Plafker didn’t quite know what to make of these faults. It seemed clear that they had made the uplift at Montague Island much greater than elsewhere. But it was also obvious that they were too small, and too far to the southeast, to have been responsible for the earthquake. It was more likely, he figured, that the movement along these faults accompanied the major fault break, which had occurred elsewhere.

  It was all food for thought. At the end of that summer, as other researchers prepared to go back to what they had been doing before the quake, Plafker found himself dwelling on it endlessly. Seeing the earthquake’s immense power firsthand—its ability to, quite literally, move mountains—had made him eager to know more. Rather than spending the fall and winter planning fieldwork for his regular job, he would spend the time preparing a report on the tectonics of the earthquake—how the earth had moved. It was an immense job, and he was, as he was fond of putting it, just a mineral resource geologist with no earthquake expertise. But someone had to do it, and the others were all caught up in their own little worlds. So it was left to him to assemble the data he and the others had collected and make sense of it. Then he had to set it all down in writing and, as best he could, come up with the answer as to why the earth had done what it had done.

  It was a huge challenge, but he already had some ideas.

  The envelope was addressed, rather incompletely, to “Governor of Alaska, Alaska,” but it managed to arrive in Governor Bill Egan’s office in Juneau just the same. When it was opened, it was found to contain a dollar bill along with a note, scrawled in blue ink on a sheet of lined paper, from an unidentified man in Arlington, Washington. The note read in part:

  Dear Mr. Governor,

  I am sending 1 buck to help the good people of Alaska. I am 70 years old and I think if all the people in the good old United States would just give a buck things in Alaska would come along in nice shape….I’m glad I am an American and not a communist and never will be.

  God bless you all.

  An old Great Lakes sailor

  The one-dollar donation was just one of thousands for emergency relief in Alas
ka. Letters poured into Egan’s office containing cash or checks, most for ten dollars or less, from all over the country—from the pupils and teachers of Edgewood Elementary School in Scarsdale, New York; members of the Goldwater for President Committee in Washington, D.C.; the Junior Women’s Club of Burbank, California; and many others, including hundreds of individuals. Money came in from overseas as well, especially from Japan, which was no stranger to disastrous earthquakes.

  With their donations, some children expressed concern about the fate of Santa Claus (they received a reply assuring them that he was unaffected by the quake). A seven-year-old boy in Port Chester, New York, wanted to donate his Easter basket to the cause, but when his father told him that the eggs would spoil he gave a dollar instead. Some people went to great lengths to help, among them Cyra G. Renwick of Ligonier, Pennsylvania, an amateur composer, who sent in fifty-seven dollars she had raised going door-to-door selling sheet music for a song she’d written, “Hymn to Alaska.”

  In all, the governor’s office received more than $125,000 in private donations to help with relief and rebuilding. It wasn’t nearly enough, of course. Alaskan officials realized almost as soon as the shaking stopped that no state, much less their young and undeveloped one, would have the financial resources to cope with a catastrophe of this size. Egan had made an early off-the-cuff estimate that rebuilding would cost $500 million, and he and others were on the phone to Washington immediately to ask for federal help of that magnitude. President Lyndon B. Johnson responded on the day after the quake by declaring the state a disaster area, freeing up emergency money, and sending a personal representative to the state, Edward A. McDermott, who was head of the Office of Emergency Planning. Within a week Egan was on a plane heading for Washington to discuss longer-term aid face-to-face with the president, and within two months Congress had taken up and passed an Alaska Omnibus Bill designed to free up much more money. By then estimates of the disaster’s cost had declined to a little bit more than $310 million, not counting the loss of personal property. In all, the federal government ended up providing more than that amount in aid. Given the scope of the disaster—unprecedented for peacetime in the United States—Johnson also established a reconstruction commission, made up of cabinet secretaries and agency directors, including McDermott, to oversee the federal government’s efforts.

  Alaska needed rebuilding help in a hurry, as the summer construction season was approaching and it didn’t last long. It was extremely difficult, and far costlier, to try to build in the state during the cold months amid dwindling daylight. The Army Corps of Engineers was at work almost immediately, clearing landslides that blocked the Seward Highway and other roads, installing temporary bridges where needed, cleaning up the damage in hard-hit ports and demolishing condemned buildings in Anchorage. Before the end of summer, the corps, contracting out much of the work, managed to restore some semblance of normalcy to the ports of Cordova, Kodiak, Whittier and Seward—building temporary dock facilities where needed and, in Cordova, dredging the uplifted harbor to its original depth. In Valdez, the corps quickly rebuilt a dock so that the ferry Chilkat could resume service. In all, the corps spent more than $110 million on work related to the earthquake.

  Mostly on its own, the Alaska Railroad undertook the task of repairing its badly mangled line. A less-damaged stretch between Anchorage and Palmer, to the north, was reopened in about two weeks, while it took more than a month to make temporary repairs to the rails south of Anchorage. By summer the line was open all the way from Seward to Fairbanks.

  In Anchorage, recovery hinged to some degree on the status of the areas where slides had occurred. At these locations—including Turnagain Heights, Government Hill and Fourth Avenue—the Corps of Engineers with characteristic efficiency quickly removed damaged and demolished structures. But it was yet to be determined if the areas could, or would, be made safe enough to build on once more. The acreage involved was a not-insignificant portion of the city and made up parts of some key neighborhoods—Fourth Avenue, for one, was in the heart of downtown—and if the areas could not be made safe, Anchorage’s growth might be severely hampered.

  Initial reports, made within a month of the earthquake by a volunteer group of geologists, were not promising. The Anchorage Engineering Geology Evaluation Group, as it was known, essentially ruled most of the slide areas off-limits. Needless to say, this didn’t sit well with Anchorage’s political and business leaders, or with the many residents and small business owners whose lives and businesses were in limbo.

  A second group—known as Task Force 9, as it was the ninth of a series of committees set up by the federal reconstruction commission—took a more flexible approach. The task force’s job was to advise where federal money should, or should not, be spent to stabilize soils and whether it made sense to repair or completely rebuild facilities on a case-by-case basis. In Anchorage, the task force first divided the city into areas of high risk and, essentially, no risk. This was similar to what the earlier group had done, but then the task force looked more closely at the high-risk areas and determined that, actually, some of the land within them could be put in a lower-risk category—and could be built on again—if it was stabilized. On Fourth Avenue, the method of stabilization that was eventually proposed was a complex and costly one, involving a wide gravel buttress running for eight blocks. It would cost $10 million.

  By the summer of 1965, the buttress was yet to be built. The north side of Fourth Avenue, which had dropped ten feet during the quake, was now just a series of vacant pits. Little had been done in the other slide areas as well.

  But in some ways it didn’t matter. Task Force 9’s recommendations were just that—recommendations, not requirements—and some Anchorage developers disregarded the risk and built where they pleased. Among them was Wally Hickel, the future governor, who built a $4 million, nine-story hotel just off Fourth Avenue near the slide area. Never mind what the task force advised, he said—he had his own engineers, and they had assured him that the ground was safe.

  In fact, by a year after the earthquake Anchorage was undergoing a building boom, fueled by the desire of almost everyone to remain and rebuild the city. Building permits for projects worth $25 million were issued in 1964, three times as much as in 1963, which had been considered something of a boom year itself. Other hotels were in the works, and new government buildings were under construction. Apartment complexes were rising around the city, and a large shopping center was being built out near the airport. Perhaps most symbolic was the announcement by J. C. Penney that it planned to rebuild its store in the same location, with the same amount of retail space as before. It would be a little shorter, though—three stories instead of five.

  There had been talk after the earthquake that the disaster afforded Anchorage a singular opportunity to change the course of its development. Why not take what nature had done and go with it, and build a different city out of the rubble? Planners latched on to the idea and among other things proposed a rethinking of downtown—moving it and creating pedestrian malls and other features to drastically change the city’s look and feel.

  By the summer of 1965, it was clear that the people of Anchorage, and their business and political leaders, would have none of it. That July, a newspaper reporter asked one local planner, E. Jack Schoop, what had happened to all those plans. “Most of it went pffft,” Schoop said. Outside of the slide areas, which were still a work in progress, most of the planning, he said, had “pretty well been hammered out by property owners and the City Council.”

  Anchorage had been built in a largely helter-skelter fashion, and from the looks of things, despite the very real horrors of the 1964 earthquake, it would continue to be built that way. That was the Alaskan way, after all, encapsulated in Hickel’s line about not letting nature run wild. After the earthquake was the same as before it: Alaskans were determined to carve their civilization, on their own terms, out of a vast untamed landscape. The earthquake was just a different manifesta
tion of Alaska’s wildness, and Alaskans would be damned if they would let it get the better of them.

  —

  In late May, after two months of living in the basement of the Baptist church in Cordova, a few of the men of Chenega journeyed to Tatitlek to help set up a tent city and unload material for seventeen new homes. Things didn’t go exactly as planned.

  In their negotiations with the Tatitlek leaders and officials of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Chenegans had made clear—or at least thought they had made clear—that rather than settle right next to Tatitlek, they’d prefer to keep some distance, to help maintain their own village identity. Perhaps midway between the village and the abandoned mine at Ellamar, three miles away, would be good.

  It’s not clear what went wrong. One account suggested that perhaps the details of the agreement had never been completely firmed up, or that the word midway had been somehow unclear. Whatever the reason, when the advance crew from Chenega was shown the sites for their tent city and new homes, the plots were adjacent to the existing village. When the rest of the village showed up a few days later, some aboard the Marpet or the Shamrock and others by plane, no one objected publicly to the location. But some said later that when they saw the home sites plotted out with stakes in the ground it was the first time that they were certain where they were going to live.

  The arrival of the earthquake refugees marked the beginning of a partnership between the two villages—which at least in legal circles would be known as Chenega-Tatitlek. But it was an alliance that over the long term, despite good intentions, did not work out.

  The people of Chenega did voice their unhappiness about one element of their new homes—the size of the plots, which they felt were too small at fifty feet by fifty feet. But the homes themselves would be built of plywood and would be much more solid and up to date than what had been destroyed in Chenega. They could live with the small plots, as they would once again be able to hunt and fish, which they had largely been unable to do while in Cordova. Now, even before their homes were built, they had rifles to replace those lost, and the skiffs that Pete Ashen had ordered. The villagers could get out into the woods and onto the water.