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

by Henry Fountain

  And it accounts for earthquakes, too. Thanks to the understanding of plate tectonics, and the work of Plafker and many other scientists, science now has far greater knowledge of earthquake hazards around the world.

  The 1964 quake, as Plafker described it in both the 1965 Science paper and a longer report for the Geological Survey published in 1969, was the first recognized “megathrust” earthquake. But beginning with Plafker’s work on the 1960 Chilean quake, scientists began to see megathrust earthquakes everywhere. Subduction of denser oceanic crust—the Pacific plate—is occurring all around the “ring of fire” in the Pacific, and megathrust earthquakes occur in these subduction zones. The 2011 quake off Japan that led to the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power plant is just one example of a recent major megathrust quake. But subduction-related quakes occur elsewhere around the planet too, even in places where the collision is between two continental plates, like the Himalayas, where an April 2015 earthquake killed more than nine thousand people in Nepal.

  Even earthquakes that are not of the megathrust type, like the 1906 San Francisco quake and others that have occurred on the San Andreas Fault, are understood to be related to plate movement. The mechanics are complicated, but the San Andreas, for example, is a transform, strike-slip fault between ridges; the slip movement is horizontal. The Fairweather Fault, which caused the 1958 quake that led to the giant wave in Lituya Bay, Alaska, is a transform fault as well.

  The Alaska quake had other lasting impacts, too. That so much of the death and destruction was attributable to water led to extensive research on tsunamis (the Japanese word having eventually gained preference over the less-than-accurate term tidal wave) and what generates them. In large part because of what Plafker learned about uplift and subsidence in 1964 and the quake motion that he identified, scientists learned how to recognize areas of tsunami risk and engineers better understood how to design protective structures. Tsunami warning networks, installed in some parts of the world since the late 1940s, were expanded and improved.

  The collapse of the Valdez waterfront and the slides in Anchorage were just two elements of the destruction in Alaska that revealed, to an extent seldom seen before, the dangers of soil liquefaction during an earthquake. Engineers learned that identifying soils at risk of failing in a quake was as important as designing structures to withstand shaking. Earthquake codes were made stricter, in Alaska and elsewhere.

  For seismologists, the Alaska quake led to improvements in measuring the power of earthquakes. The 1964 quake—during which the closest seismograph essentially went off the charts—revealed some of the limitations of the Richter magnitude scale. The 1960 Chilean quake, too, had shown that the scale wasn’t particularly accurate for large events. By the 1970s, scientists had developed a different approach—using what is known as “moment magnitude,” which takes into account the size of the fault and the amount of slip and can be determined from the size of the seismic waves.

  On this scale, the 1964 Alaska quake has been calculated at magnitude 9.2. That makes it the most powerful earthquake in North America ever measured by instruments, and the second most powerful—to the 1960 Chilean quake, calculated at 9.5—in the world. The 2011 Japanese earthquake was measured at 9.1, which means that the Alaska quake, while only one-tenth larger in magnitude, released about 50 percent more energy.

  It’s in helping scientists understand earthquake risks in other areas of the world that the Alaska quake has had its biggest impact. And among these other areas, none has a potentially graver risk than the Pacific Northwest—from British Columbia to Oregon.

  There, off the coast, conditions are similar to those in Alaska. Rather than the large Pacific plate, however, three smaller oceanic plates are sliding under the North American continental plate in an area called the Cascadia subduction zone. Stresses are building up, just as they did in Alaska until March 27, 1964.

  While scientists cannot predict earthquakes—although over the years many, including Frank Press, have tried to develop ways to do so—they are able to forecast, more generally, the earthquake risk in a certain location, especially if they know when earthquakes occurred there in the past. Once again, studies of the Alaska quake have been crucial for recognizing and understanding past earthquakes elsewhere, a field known as paleoseismology.

  Scientists know that the last major earthquake in the Cascadia subduction zone was in 1700. The risk of another one is now considered high, with some parts of the coast estimated to have as much as a one-in-five chance of seeing a quake of magnitude 8.0 or higher in the next half century. Such a quake could spawn tsunamis and cause destruction along a coast that, with Seattle, Vancouver and other large cities, has a population close to ten million, or about forty times that of Alaska in 1964. Alaskans were caught unawares back then; but thanks to the scientific understanding gained from that event, today the people of the Pacific Northwest know they need to prepare.

  To reach Alaganik Slough, you drive out of Cordova on a road to nowhere. State Route 10, also known as the Copper River Highway, curves past Lake Eyak with its aquamarine glacier-fed water, and heads east past the airport, named for Merle K. Smith, a pioneering bush pilot who had perhaps the ultimate Alaskan bush pilot nickname, Mudhole. You turn off for the slough at Mile 17 (the highway goes only to Mile 36, where the river overwhelmed a bridge several years ago; there are no plans to replace it) and drive south for a mile or so. This side road slices across meadows punctuated by ponds and willows, alders and small stands of Sitka spruce, their dark-green boughs standing out against the more muted yellows and browns that dominate the landscape.

  The slough is on the western edge of the vast Copper River delta, where the river, on its way down from the Wrangell Range, separates into braids. These meander across the slightly sloping land, depositing huge volumes of glacial sediment before reaching the Gulf of Alaska. To the northeast, on the other side of Route 10, are the Chugach Mountains, with their snowy crests. Somewhere out there is Shattered Peak, the mountain that lost its top during the earthquake, causing a landslide that covered much of Sherman Glacier several miles away. A mile or so in the opposite direction is the gulf.

  The day is calm and beautiful, unseasonably warm for spring, and quiet save for the drone of the occasional plane approaching the airport and the cawing of hundreds of gulls. The hooligan are running, and the gulls are circling over a spot in the slough’s main channel where the fish are concentrated. The birds are anxious for a feast.

  It is late April 2015, fifty-one years after the Good Friday earthquake. George Plafker, now eighty-six, and I have parked our rental SUV and tromped across the spongey peat-filled meadow toward the channel. We’ve come to the slough for a reason: Plafker needs a few more elevation measurements for research he has been doing regarding the history of great earthquakes in Alaska. A few years before, he took some cores around the slough; they are in cold storage back at the Geological Survey’s office in California. I am here as his rodman, his field assistant, whose main job is to hold up a stadia rod so that he can make measurements by sighting on it from some distance with a hand lens. Plafker is tech-savvy and could be using some kind of digital surveying tool. But for this task that is overkill. I think he also wants me to get some small sense of what geology fieldwork is like. Being a rodman is, as Plafker has said more than once with a slight cackle in his voice, such an easy job that even I can do it.

  Three years after his work in Chile in 1968, Plafker got his doctorate from Stanford, writing a thesis comparing the Chile and Alaska quakes. He spent years working further on the geology and tectonics of Alaska, but he also studied many other earthquakes and tsunamis. He returned to Guatemala to study the 1976 quake there that killed twenty-three thousand people. Years after the 1970 Ancash earthquake in Peru, he went there and analyzed a landslide caused by the quake. The slide was far bigger and worse than the one at Shattered Peak—the debris at one point went over a ridge and became airborne, reaching peak speeds estimated at 600 mil
es an hour and burying the town of Yungay. All but about one hundred of the twenty thousand residents were killed. Later, he traveled to Aceh Province in Indonesia to study the 2004 tsunamis that killed more than 130,000 people there (and which, he found, were caused by movement on splay faults). To determine how soon after the quake the first tsunami had arrived in Banda Aceh, the capital, he bought some broken wristwatches from a shopkeeper whose store had been all but destroyed. The watches had stopped when the water hit.

  Plafker retired from the Geological Survey in 1995, but in reality he has never retired at all. As an emeritus geologist, he still has an office in Menlo Park—at the earthquake branch now, not the Alaska branch—and most days he makes the short drive there from his home a few towns away.

  The Alaska earthquake changed the lives of all who lived through it that day in 1964. Plafker didn’t experience the disaster—he arrived a day after the shaking stopped—but in his own way, and just as surely, the quake altered his life too.

  —

  The foothills of the Sierra Nevada in Northern California look something like the foothills of the Chugach in south-central Alaska, minus all the precipitation. There hasn’t been much rain, or nearly enough snow, in these hills east of Sacramento for several years, so that by the summer of 2015, as I drove up a long hill on the outskirts of Placerville, the landscape was very dry and very brown. At the top of the hill, down a long driveway, was a comfortable one-story house on six acres. It’s the house where Kris Madsen, now Kris Van Winkle, has lived for more than thirty years.

  After Madsen left Alaska in the weeks following the earthquake, it took her a while to stop her wandering. Her father and stepmother were overjoyed to have her home, safe and sound, in Long Beach, but they thought she was crazy to have brought Norman Selanoff with her. The tension was palpable, so he left after a few days, eventually ending up back in Alaska.

  After a month or so at home, Madsen was getting restless again. Her aunt Muriel and her husband were planning a long summer trip to Europe with their daughters and a cousin. Maybe it would be good for Kris to join them, to get her mind off Alaska and what she’d been through. The plan was to buy a Volkswagen in Germany and explore the continent. It would be a simple thing, they said, to buy another plane ticket, and Kris could share hotel rooms with the cousins. Madsen needed to think only briefly before agreeing to join them. She had plenty of money from her time in Alaska, and Muriel’s family would be good traveling companions. She told her stepmother that perhaps she’d find a job in Europe and stay.

  They left in June. Less than a week later Madsen was in a hotel room in Rome, idly looking at the classified ads in the International Herald Tribune. One of them caught her attention. It was from the International School in Frankfurt, West Germany, seeking an elementary teacher for the fall. She called, and a few days later, with her accommodating relatives having agreed to a short detour from their planned driving route, was in Frankfurt for an interview. In August, when they were in England, she found out she’d gotten the job. She didn’t return to Long Beach till the following summer.

  At the Frankfurt school she met another American teacher, Drew Van Winkle. The two hit it off immediately, though it took a while, and some transatlantic back-and-forth, for romance to blossom. They were married in 1966, Kris gave birth to twins in 1968 and the following year they returned to the United States to pursue graduate degrees and be closer to their parents. They settled in the Gold Country of Northern California and taught in the public schools for decades before retiring.

  Kris Van Winkle has never been back to Alaska. But Chenega, and what happened there in 1964, has never been far from her mind. Yet she was only vaguely aware of the villagers’ story since then.

  Most of the Chenegans were never completely comfortable in Tatitlek, where the government had moved them after the quake, and some started to drift away that first fall. Others followed suit later. Within a few years most were scattered around Alaska, even Outside in the Lower 48. Avis Kompkoff, for one, eventually ended up back in Cordova, where she lives to this day. Nick Kompkoff, who had become a lay priest, and others tried to maintain a kind of community in exile, with village meetings at least once a year, attended by whoever could get to them. In the back of everyone’s mind was the idea of rebuilding Chenega. In the immediate aftermath of the quake the villagers had resolved never to return to the island, but as the years passed that resolve began to weaken. Perhaps Chenega village would rise again someday.

  In 1968, another event occurred that would change Alaska forever. This time it wasn’t an earthquake; rather, it was the discovery of oil on the North Slope of the Brooks Range, in the far north. The oil itself would have a great impact, of course, but what affected life in Alaska much more immediately was the need to do something about natives’ claims to much of the state’s territory. The issue had been shelved during the statehood debate ten years before, but now, if Alaska was to be able to fully exploit what appeared to be vast oil reserves by building a pipeline across the tundra to bring the oil to market, the claims had to be resolved.

  The solution was the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, passed by Congress in 1971. In exchange for relinquishing their claims to the bulk of the state’s land (and their rights to fish and hunt where they pleased), the native population received more than forty million acres outright. They were also allowed to establish regional and village for-profit corporations.

  The Chenega Corporation was created several years later, with sixty-eight shareholders. As its share of the settlement, it received about seventy-five thousand acres of land in Prince William Sound. That helped fuel a desire to reestablish the village at Chenega Island. But a visit to the site by many villagers in 1976 quickly quenched that idea. Even more than a decade later, the memories of the quake and of lost loved ones were too strong.

  Kompkoff and others, notably Larry Evanoff, who had been off at school when the quake struck but had lost his parents in the disaster, kept pursuing the goal of bringing the Chenegans together physically. They found some land at Crab Bay on Evans Island, about fifteen miles due south of the old village site by water. It was about seventy feet above the water and had not been inundated during the 1964 quake. There was plenty of space for homes, businesses and a church, even an airport.

  The Chenega Corporation and the village council voted in 1977 to establish the new village of Chenega Bay at the Evans Island site. Money for houses, a school, docks and other improvements was a problem, but over the years enough was raised so that the bare bones of a village began to take shape. The first Chenegans moved there in 1982, and others followed beginning in 1984.

  Five years later, yet another disaster struck Alaska, this time made by man. The Exxon Valdez, a supertanker carrying some of the millions of barrels of North Slope crude oil that had begun flowing in the 1970s, ran aground in Prince William Sound, not far, in fact, from the village of Tatitlek. More than ten million gallons of heavy oil spread across the sound, fouling the rocks, beaches and fishing grounds. Chenegans, some of whom had returned to a subsistence lifestyle based on hunting and fishing, were badly affected as fish, seals and other sea creatures were contaminated.

  The oil spill and the lengthy cleanup that followed made establishing a new community in Chenega Bay even more difficult. Today about eighty people are living there. But not all are natives, and some Chenegan natives live in Anchorage, tending to the affairs of the Chenega Corporation, which has developed as a business, specializing in government contracts that it, as a native corporation, can bid on favorably.

  Back in old Chenega, the villagers have built a pavilion for the ceremony they conduct once a year, when they go back in the spring to remember those who died. The schoolhouse on the hill still stands, but only barely—the whole structure is in a state of slow collapse. What was once a bare knoll is now overgrown with spruces. The clearing where the church and houses stood is dense with alders. On the beach, a few of the pilings that once held up the dock a
re still visible, and the short stretch of the bulkhead that remains is rotting and falling apart.

  With the fiftieth anniversary of the quake in 2014, Kris Van Winkle decided she needed to do something. During her stay in the village, she’d taken some photographs from up on the hill. They showed the cove and the dock, the church and a few of the houses. Most of her photos, however, were of her students, taken at the school. One or two of them showed the children performing at the “American” Christmas show she had organized for parents. But most of the photos showed the students—including the two she’d lost, Julia Kompkoff and Cindy Jackson—outside, smiling and laughing in the sun. She’d even taken a few photos up on the hill after the quake, when the survivors gathered for the night. You could see the fear and sadness on some of their faces.

  Van Winkle put together a portfolio of 8×10 prints of some of the photos and wrote a note to the people of Chenega, telling them she hadn’t forgotten what they’d gone through that day. She put it all in an envelope and sent it care of the Chenega Corporation in Anchorage. She never heard back.

  She and Drew showed the photos to me, displaying them on a television in their living room. As Van Winkle clicked through photo after photo, she talked about life in the village and about the events of that terrible day. The thing that had stuck with her, she said, was the power of the earthquake—she’d never forgotten how the water in the cove had disappeared—and the stoicism of the survivors, who had lost everything but still somehow had the strength to go on.

  —

  Tom McAlister steered his pickup truck down Hazelet Avenue, past Iditarod Street toward Egan Drive, which counts, more than any other, as Valdez’s main street. It was late winter 2015, and McAlister, who had lived and worked here since before the quake—he was the Valdez fire chief for years, among other jobs—was showing me around “new” Valdez, which by now was nearly half a century old. He was pointing out some of the more than fifty homes and other buildings that had been moved from the old town, four miles away. Over there, behind some trees, was the house that Owen Meals had lived in. Over here was a house that was moved only because the couple that owned it had bought it for $6,000 shortly before the earthquake. They hadn’t wanted to keep it but couldn’t get out of the mortgage, so they moved it instead.