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

by Henry Fountain

  That first summer they lived in green army-surplus tents and, with the fish camp at Port Nellie Juan wiped out, explored nearby fishing grounds. The catch was good, and they were able to sell their haul to a relatively new, and apparently insatiable, customer—the Japanese. They made about as much money as they would have had the Nellie Juan cannery been in operation.

  By summer’s end, Chenega’s schoolchildren were enrolled in Tatitlek’s school. A team of fifteen carpenters hired by the Bureau of Indian Affairs showed up in September and with the help of the villagers began building the new homes. The federal public health service also came in to design and build a public water and sewer system, something that Chenega had never had. In October, the Tatitlek harbor was dredged to pre-earthquake depths, making life easier for those with larger boats like the Marpet and the Shamrock.

  Outwardly, at least, all appeared to be going well in the combined community. In November the two village councils joined together for an all-community meeting to plan a new, larger church that could handle a population that now numbered about two hundred. There was also talk of building an airfield and a breakwater.

  But all was not right among the Chenegans. As Nick Kompkoff—who eventually became a Russian Orthodox priest—put it a decade later, while the decision to move had to be made, and at the time Tatitlek was the best (if not the only) option, for the villagers it was a decision that came too soon. Emotionally they weren’t ready; the wounds were too fresh.

  For some, the hurt showed itself in complaints about little things. Avis Kompkoff hated the time they spent living in a tent and the camp-style breakfasts; for a while, it seemed, she had to eat powdered eggs every day. But others had deeper concerns. Mary Kompkoff, Nick’s wife, thought that the fundamental problem was that the new village was not theirs. Occasionally, she recalled later, Tatitlek residents would make this clear to them, saying: “You can’t do this. This is not your village.” But the distrust and dislike came from the Chenegans too. “We couldn’t—I don’t mean to say we didn’t—get along,” she said. “We weren’t used to living with Tatitlek people.”

  A few of the villagers had decided not to make the move to Tatitlek, opting instead to settle near family in Cordova or Anchorage or elsewhere. But some of those who did make the move began to drift away that fall, even as plans were made in their new community for the larger church and other improvements. Nick Kompkoff himself went to Anchorage to study for the priesthood, though he eventually returned and led the Tatitlek church for three years. Others went to Cordova and, eventually, Valdez. At least one Chenegan moved Outside, to Seattle.

  Paul Kompkoff Sr., who had moved from Chenega to Cordova before the quake, recalled later that Tatitlek “wasn’t right for some of the people….They were away from the hunting and fishing that they knew.” And Nick Kompkoff would say that on some level, through no fault of their hosts, the people of Chenega had not felt at home. “We still wanted our own place.”

  The diaspora had begun. Eventually there would be more Chenegans in Anchorage than in Tatitlek or anywhere else. Chenega would become a community in exile—tied together by background and culture and the nightmarish events of March 27, 1964, but without a physical location of their own.

  It would take two decades, and a lot of starts and stops, for the community to find a home again.

  —

  The announcement appeared in the June 20 edition of the Earthquake Bugle, the mimeographed sheet that a local couple, Ed and Frances Walker, put together weekly to keep Valdez residents informed about recovery efforts. In a show of solidarity with the women of Valdez, the announcement said, the Lovable Company, a lingerie manufacturer based in Los Angeles, had sent twenty-five dozen brassieres to the town along with various foundation garments and garter belts. The gift had made quite a splash nationwide—it had been written up in newspapers from Connecticut to Arizona—but the shipment had been lost for a while, stuck in a warehouse in Fairbanks. Now the bras had finally been delivered and were available for the taking at the Hotel Valdez. The Bugle thanked Lovable for “this useful yet highly flattering gift” and exhorted its female readers: “Line up, gals!”

  There wasn’t exactly a stampede to pick up free undergarments. For one thing, there weren’t yet three hundred women in Valdez. For another, the women who were in town—and the men too, for that matter—had a lot of other things on their minds and a lot of work to do.

  The city was going to be moved, that much was certain, but what was unclear was when, and what it would mean for each household. Until the relocation happened, those now in Valdez—the original forty-five who stayed had been augmented by several hundred more, and more people were returning every day—had to make sure their homes could make it through the winter. Or if not, they had to obtain one of the trailers being offered.

  A month after the quake, the Valdez town council voted to move. But moving an entire town had almost never been done in the United States, and such an undertaking was far beyond the capabilities of local leaders. The state housing authority was put in charge, with much assistance, and money, from the federal urban renewal program. The Army Corps of Engineers would do most of the basic work of building the new town, including extending the Richardson Highway four miles to the new location.

  Owen Meals had proposed donating 110 acres of the 670 acres of the old Meals-Hazelet homestead, four miles to the north. Together with other land that Valdez could annex, there would be more than enough room for the population of old Valdez and then some. Meals didn’t want any payment, just a waiver of taxes on the land that remained. There was some grumbling about this idea among the people of Valdez—might Meals, who owned the power plant and telephone service in the old town, have something up his sleeve? But eventually it was accepted, and a planner was hired to come up with a design for a new Valdez. The planner, thirty-three-year-old Paul Finfer, came from a place about as far removed from Valdez, physically and geographically, as possible: Mishawaka, Indiana, near South Bend.

  Finfer didn’t have much time; officials had decided that they should have a plan in place by the end of summer, to get started on what would be a lengthy relocation process. He got to work, at first by sending out a questionnaire to determine residents’ desires for a new town. They were asked what kind of lot size and shape they would prefer, whether they were planning to build their own house, whether there should be standards for landscaping and maintenance, and other basic questions. When they were asked what kind of recreational facilities the new town should have, the responses included a bowling alley, a movie theater, tennis courts, a golf course, an auto racetrack, handball courts and a roller-skating rink. One person suggested a burlesque hall.

  Responses to the questionnaire reflected the independent spirit typical of many Alaskans. Under “additional comments and suggestions,” one resident had written: “I don’t believe in a lot of zoning laws telling me what to do on my land. If I like them I would of [sic] stayed Outside. I believe in minding my own business and others minding there’s [sic].”

  Some people in Valdez assumed that the new town would simply re-create the old; if they had a home or a business it would be on the same street or at the same intersection it had been in old Valdez. Finfer had other plans—and what planner wouldn’t, given the haphazard nature of the old town’s development?

  But Finfer had very specific ideas about the way a town should be. He had studied architecture and planning at the Illinois Institute of Technology under Ludwig Hilberseimer, a German American who was an early proponent of the idea of “street hierarchy,” in which a community’s roads are classified by importance and function according to strict rules—so that, for instance, local roads don’t connect with higher-traffic thoroughfares. Finfer had adopted the idea. For him, the pedestrian was king; a community needed to be designed so that home, school, work and shopping were all in close proximity, and children, especially, could walk to school protected from traffic.

  Finfer held a serie
s of public meetings to talk about his plan, which included residential cul-de-sacs and a car-free business district. Some in Valdez thought the plan was crazy for one reason—where would they put the snow? The town got upwards of twenty feet of it every winter, and when the streets were plowed there had to be places to put it. Finfer’s design had made no allowance for that. As one resident put it later, the design “was more like an artists’ colony where they don’t have any snow.” The plan for the business district was changed, with much wider streets and parking lots that in winter would hold snow rather than cars.

  Finfer’s plan was approved that summer. But doing the detailed design work, preparing the land, and building roads, water and sewer lines, docks and other infrastructure would take time, particularly since little could be done in the harsh winter months.

  For home owners, the process would be arduous as well. Anyone who thought that Owen Meals’s donation of much of the land meant that relocation would be without cost was in for a rude awakening. The state would buy home owners’ houses, after an appraisal process. There would be an auction for lots in the new town, and home owners would have to arrange financing or otherwise figure out how to pay for a lot and for a new house if they chose to build one. If their old house was in good enough shape, they could choose not to sell it to the state and instead move it over to the new town. The whole process would take time, as there were plenty of bureaucratic hurdles to be overcome.

  Home owners were dissatisfied with the appraisals of their current houses—though since the town had been through a major earthquake it’s not difficult to understand why they would have relatively little value. But beyond that, most people in town had built their houses themselves or otherwise paid little for them, and if they’d ever had a mortgage they had long since paid it off. There were federal loans available for the move, and in some cases the payments could be deferred for a few years, but eventually home owners would face large monthly payments where they hadn’t before. Valdez had hardly been a boomtown prior to the earthquake. Who knew if the new town would thrive economically and if its residents would do well enough to afford their new payments?

  By the end of that first summer, Valdez residents could be forgiven if they felt unsure about their future. Current circumstances did little to lighten the mood. The Army Corps of Engineers had installed a temporary aboveground water supply system and had made repairs to the sewer system, so at least residents didn’t have to leave tanks outside their house for pickup each day. But the water system was fragile—for some reason, the corps had used soft aluminum pipes, which kept getting crushed by cars. At one point, the town council had to threaten home owners with a fine of one hundred dollars if the pipes in front of their houses were damaged.

  Worse, though, was that the tides now came into Valdez much farther than before the quake. The shaking that had caused the waterfront to collapse had had an effect on the sediments that the rest of the town was built on too. They didn’t collapse, but they sank several feet.

  The result was that some homes close to the water, even if they had made it through the quake, were now uninhabitable because of constant flooding. Walt and Gloria Day’s house on McKinley Street was among them; they moved into one of the Salvation Army–supplied trailers.

  Valdez wasn’t such a fun place to live anymore, and it would be at least a year, and probably longer, before anyone could move to the new town site.

  There had been a question of what to do about the schools. Valdez High School could be made usable for now. But the elementary school, even if it could be fixed, was judged a fire hazard. A new school was needed immediately. After months of being, as the Bugle had put it, “a town without children,” Valdez was now starting to welcome back families with their youngsters. The town council realized that they could raise morale and show residents that a move was really happening by building the elementary school at the new town site.

  On the face of it, it was a crazy idea. Design of the streets and utilities in the new town hadn’t even begun, so the school’s foundation would have to be built in such a way that it could be raised if needed to drain properly into the future sewer system. And transporting children every day to and from old Valdez to the new school would be costly.

  But the council approved the idea, and a contract to prepare land for the school was signed on August 17. Prefabricated structures arrived by ship a week later. Then, one morning in the last week in September, the children of Valdez were taken by bus down the newly extended Richardson Highway to their six-classroom school. In some ways, they were the first residents of new Valdez. Over the next few years, they would be followed by everyone else.

  The revelation came one day near the end of the summer of 1964, in the backseat of a car in downtown Anchorage. George Plafker had been spending the summer in and around Prince William Sound, mapping the land changes caused by the Good Friday earthquake. Soon he would be heading home to California to begin the task of analyzing all the data he and others had collected, trying to make sense of it. Right now he was back in Anchorage for a bit, in a car with other scientists from the Geological Survey, talking shop.

  Plafker had begun to get a clearer picture of what had happened in Alaska on March 27, but many things were still a mystery. He thought he had some understanding of why so much of the land affected by the earthquake had been uplifted, but he had more difficulty comprehending why so much land had subsided, or sunk. He’d seen this subsidence up close, in places like Girdwood, a small town along Turnagain Arm south of Anchorage, where trees near the shore that had been well above the high-tide line were now inundated when the tide came in. The salt water was killing them—and it was also killing Girdwood, which was now chronically flooding and would have to be relocated inland. Elsewhere, throughout northern and western parts of the sound, he’d precisely measured this subsidence, using the height of the barnacle line on the rocks as a reference.

  As he, Arthur Grantz and Reuben Kachadoorian had written in their report published a month after the quake, there was a clear “hinge” line, a zone of little or no elevation change between the areas of uplift and subsidence. But Plafker had learned other interesting things since that first intense month. For one thing, most of the aftershocks that had occurred since March 27—and there were thousands of them—had their epicenters within the zone of uplifted land. That was an indication that the main earthquake fault itself—the fault that must exist but that no one had seen evidence of on the surface—was beneath the zone of uplift and not beneath the subsidence zone. Or as Plafker was to put it later, the subsidence was “secondary” to the faulting.

  Second, in addition to the work by Plafker and others at the Survey to measure uplift and subsidence, the Coast and Geodetic Survey had begun measuring horizontal movement—how much the land had shifted laterally during the quake. This was apart from any local movement, like the Turnagain Heights slide in Anchorage. Surveyors had found, for instance, that Montague Island, at the southeastern limit of the sound, had moved about sixty feet to the southeast. That was about the maximum extent of horizontal movement. Whittier had moved about twenty-five feet, and farther to the northwest the numbers had become smaller, until there was no horizontal movement at all on a line that began north of Anchorage and ran east to Glennallen.

  Plafker had absorbed all of this information and turned it over in his mind many times. He could understand that when the fault had ruptured, the land over it had moved up and laterally. But he couldn’t understand what had happened to the land that was not over the fault. It had moved laterally, too, though not as much. Why did it sink?

  When he was alone with his thoughts for a moment in the backseat of the car, it hit him. The sunken land had, in a sense, been along for the ride. It hadn’t moved so much as it had been pulled, from one side, by the uplifted land as it was moving laterally to the southeast. What happens when something is pulled like that? It stretches and thins out. It would be like holding on to a thick disk of pizza d
ough with one hand and pulling with the other—the dough would become thinner. That’s what had happened here, Plafker thought. The land had been stretched and become thinner, and thinner land was lower land.

  Plafker thought he now had the answer to why so much of the land had sunk. It would take a while for him to quantify this and state it in scientific language, and he’d need expert help. But it was only one of many points he’d have to study and explain, and he was excited about the prospect. While many scientists had viewed the earthquake as an interruption and had longed to get back to the work they were doing beforehand, Plafker had a different attitude. To him the quake was less of an annoyance and more of an opportunity, a chance to learn about concepts and principles that were far beyond what he’d needed to know in his studies and career so far. As he prepared to head back to the USGS’s offices in Menlo Park, he knew there would be a steep learning curve. He would have to write a report for the Survey on the tectonics of the quake, one of many studies that were being produced. And no doubt he’d have to write a paper, too, for a professional journal. He’d be busy.

  —

  By the time of the 1964 earthquake, a little more than half a century had passed since Alfred Wegener first proposed his theory of continental drift. Wegener’s idea, altered and adapted over the years, had made inroads among scientists, especially those in Europe. Harry Hess’s hypothesis about seafloor spreading, as modified by Robert Dietz, had helped a lot. The “conveyor belt” concept—that oceanic crust formed when hot magma welled up at a midocean ridge, spread from the ridge as more crust formed, eventually sank when it met lighter continental crust and then looped back toward the ridge—provided something that Wegener lacked, a plausible mechanism by which the continents moved apart. Seafloor spreading also helped explain why to that point no oceanic crust had been found to be more than about 150 million years old: by Hess’s thinking, it was recycled back into the mantle before it got any older. The hypothesis also provided a mechanism for mountain building: as the oceanic crust reached the end of the conveyor belt and sank down into deep trenches, sediment that had accumulated on it during the tens of millions of years while it was moving would be scraped off by the continental crust, lifted up and, over more time, become mountains.