The Wave

by Susan Casey

  Perhaps Ulrich was already dreaming of more pleasant things when he felt the first hard tug on his anchor chain. Figuring it had dragged, he ran to the wheel. It was 10:17 p.m., still light enough in the Alaskan summer for Ulrich to see something astonishing at the head of the bay, a vision not even his nightmares could rival: the mountains were twisting. “They seemed to be suffering unbearable internal tortures,” he recalled later. “Have you ever seen a fifteen-thousand-foot mountain twist and shake and dance?”

  Avalanches poured into the bay, 300 million cubic meters of rock and ice plunging thousands of feet to the water. For what he estimated to be two minutes, Ulrich stood rooted on deck, frozen by the scene. “It wasn’t fright,” he said, “but a kind of stunned amazement.” Suddenly an earsplitting crash erupted, and Ulrich saw “a gigantic wall of water, eighteen hundred feet high” engulf the northwestern edge of the bay, ricochet to the east side, and then head directly for Cenotaph Island and the Edrie. Like Larsen and Frederickson before him, he tried desperately to raise the anchor, but it seemed to be stuck. Throwing a life jacket on his son, he did the only thing a mariner in his situation could do. He let out all 240 feet of his anchor chain, opened the Edrie’s throttle, and headed straight at the wave, yelling a Mayday into the radio: “All hell has broken loose in here! I think we’ve had it … Good-bye.”

  Plafker showed me into a room next to his office where I could spread Miller’s files out on a table. I picked up one with the title “After the ’58 Earthquake” penciled on its cover in a neat architectural hand. It contained sheets of 35mm slides and a few faded typewritten pages that looked like an interview of some kind. “From my notes,” the first page read. “Diane Olson. F.V. [fishing vessel] White Light. Location: About 35 miles from Lituya Bay.”

  Olson and her husband Ole, it appeared, had been fishing outside the mouth of the bay. Judging from the notes, Diane had total recall, chronicling the events of July 9 down to the minute. Her first inkling of disaster, she believed, happened at 10:22 p.m. “Suddenly it felt as though our boat was being dragged over a corrugated rock.” The White Light was anchored in sixty feet of water at the time, so that was unlikely. Almost immediately they heard the cacophonous roar of a huge earthquake. “It was then,” Olson wrote, “that we turned on the radio.”

  Panicked, garbled voices cut in on one another, boats all over the area reporting ocean pandemonium. Forty-foot geysers had erupted from crevasses that suddenly appeared along shore; a twenty-foot wave had surged into a harbor near Yakutat; part of an island had dropped one hundred feet into the sea, taking an unknown number of people with it. Underwater cables and oil lines snapped. The reports tumbled in.

  Ulrich’s Mayday cut through like a siren, silencing the chatter. For several fraught moments the airwaves stayed clear as everyone waited to see if the Edrie had survived the wave. After what seemed like an eternity, Ulrich came back on the radio. They had made it, he said, but the bay was a hellish stew of ice chunks, dead animals, and other wreckage, all slamming around in twenty- and thirty-foot waves. “There’s big trees, branches, leaves, roots, and everything everywhere I look,” he said, his voice cutting through static. “All around me! I’ve got to get out of here. I never saw anything like it.” He paused. “I don’t know if I can make it out, but I can’t stay here … The trees are closing in on me, all around me! We’re heading for the entrance.”

  Everyone feared the bay’s mouth would be impassable, clogged with debris and closed off by a rampart of waves, but somehow the Ulrichs made it out. Miraculously, Bill and Vi Swanson also survived. The Badger had been picked up by the wave, spun around backward, and hurtled toward the ocean at a height Bill Swanson estimated to be eighty feet above the treetops. Landing hard in the Gulf of Alaska, trees raining down on it, the Badger started to sink. The couple was able to scramble into their eight-foot dinghy; they were found two hours later drifting in the dark, shocked and hypothermic. The Wagners weren’t so lucky. When the wave appeared, they had run west toward the entrance, rather than facing it head-on. Despite extensive searching, no trace of them was found.

  Sorting through a batch of photographs, I came across a ground-level view of what the wave had left in its wake: a mangled battlefield of tree stumps, a forest hacked up and snapped off and strewn everywhere, as though an enormous clear-cutting had been carried out by an army of angry, drunken loggers wielding very rusty tools. For scale perhaps, or because the only possible response in the face of so much bald destruction was morbid humor, Miller had hung his hat on a huge, splintered spruce stump—jagged as glass from having its trunk and branches torn off—and in doing so, he’d inserted a small human gesture into a scene that defied the notion that Nature held any place for us. The picture had such an apocalyptic feel that you expected to see piles of ashes still smoldering, smoke curling from the ground. But the image didn’t offer that kind of easy explanation; it had the tomb silence of mysterious disaster. On the back Miller had written a reminder to himself: “Make copy for Howard Ulrich.”

  It is every geologist’s (or tsunami expert’s) dream to actually witness the likes of a mile-high wave. This almost never happens, of course; the planet’s heaviest spectacles tend to arrive unannounced. But Miller came close to that grail. Sixty miles away, working in Glacier Bay aboard the USGS vessel Stephen R. Capps, he felt the shaking and knew this was no garden-variety earthquake. He could do nothing that night, but at first light the next morning he chartered a plane.

  Despite the arrival of the promised foul weather, as the pilot circled Miller was able to see the bay while it was still in the throes of its brutal transformation. Rocks fell from the cliffs; water dripped from the land where the wave had hit. Near the top of the T, the bay’s surface was sealed in a three-mile ice jam. A huge tongue of the Lituya glacier had broken off in the quake, along with much of Gilbert Inlet’s northeastern wall (the left arm of the T). The north side of the bay was plugged with a four-mile raft of trees and other wave-kill, and even more detritus spilled out of its mouth, fanning five miles into the Pacific.

  Miller’s written accounts of the wave are drily scientific, but even he seemed startled by the abruptly shaved mountainsides, and by an altimeter reading that pegged the wave’s uppermost reaches at 1,740 feet. Also, he noticed that the bay’s water level had dropped one hundred feet below its usual level. “The bay is a shambles, the destruction is unbelievable,” he jotted in his notebook.

  Plafker came into the room to see how I was faring, and he looked over my shoulder at a picture of a man in overalls, holding a camera and a notebook and standing amid a snaggle of downed trees. The man was wearing 1950s-era glasses and had a solemn look on his face. “That’s Don,” Plafker said, smiling at the memory. “Everything around him was just like Pick-Up Stix. And those were serious trees. Just … gone.” He pointed to an image that showed a long stretch of barren rock and ran his index finger across it. “The thing you see here is—there’s no soil! It’s really hard to imagine how much force it took for the wave to suck it all off.”

  Eventually Miller did those precise calculations. In August and September 1958 he returned to study the bay more extensively. He clomped up mountainsides and measured crevasses and examined tree rings; he calculated water particle velocities and learned that the wave’s force had exceeded that of a pulp mill. On Cenotaph Island he noticed that even the limpets, barnacles, and mussels—some of the earth’s most tenacious clingers—had been blasted off the rocks. “Not one living shellfish was seen,” Miller reported.

  In the end, Miller reckoned that the July 9 earthquake along the Fairweather fault—an 8.0 on the Richter scale that was felt as far south as Seattle (where it knocked the needle off a seismograph at the University of Washington)—had shoved Alaska hard: fourteen feet laterally and three feet vertically. It triggered a series of avalanches, which in turn kicked up 1,740 feet of screeching water. The resulting wave, basically an epic splash, had crossed the bay at more than one hundred miles per hou
r. It razed the landscape for four square miles, trampling every living thing in its path with four fortunate exceptions: the Ulrichs and the Swansons.

  The event was harsh. And, Miller realized with a chill, it was likely to happen again.

  And again.

  Wherever peppy earthquake action meets ocean, there will be giant waves. Which means not only Alaska but the entire North American west coast is poised to produce them. If you zoom out on the satellite map and trace the Pacific basin’s outline you’re looking at a path that scientists refer to as the Ring of Fire. A majority of the world’s active volcanoes reside along this arc, both above water and below. It’s the most seismically active place on earth, and the source of 80 percent of all tsunamis. As the Pacific and North American plates—two of the continent-size jigsaw pieces that cover the earth’s molten core—grind against each other off California, Oregon, and Washington, those movements create earthquakes. If, in the shaking, the land lurches vertically and enough water is displaced, tsunamis will arise.

  Lately geologists have refined their sleuthing methods, taking core samples from seabeds and coastal areas and then searching the layers for odd deposits—seashells crushed in alluvial sand a mile inland, for example, or coral that somehow made its way to the top of a two-hundred-foot bluff. Sometimes they find “ghost forests,” places where the trees have been snuffed out by being buried, drowned, torn away, or poisoned by salt. Whenever the ocean leaves these kinds of calling cards, scientists can infer that waves once swept over the area with great force.

  Using these techniques, they discovered that a tsunami rivaling the one on December 26, 2004, in Indonesia, had been generated on January 26, 1700, off the Oregon coast, by an estimated 9.0 earthquake. (This was surprising: at the time, the six-hundred-mile-long area that ruptured, known as the Cascadia subduction zone, had been considered kind of sleepy.) No visual description of the tsunami’s impact on the Pacific Northwest has survived, but it was likely impressive: the waves’ fingerprints show up in the geological record all the way from northern California to Vancouver Island.

  Proof that this earthquake spawned a tsunami solved a longstanding mystery: the source of the twenty-foot waves that had walloped six hundred miles of Japan’s Pacific coast at that same time, flooding villages and harbors, wrecking boats, killing people, and causing fires that burned down homes. By necessity Japan has always been a tsunami-savvy place—no country is more vulnerable to giant waves—but on this occasion people were caught off guard because they hadn’t felt an earthquake. Japanese records describe the day as having “unusual seas” and “high waves.” They never dreamed the waves had come from clear across the Pacific.

  These days the Cascadia fault is under constant scrutiny. The combination of its location near a crowded coastline (a serious tsunami originating there would definitely hit California) and some recent spooky behavior has scientists worried. There are strong signs that pressure is building on the fault again, and that it’s likely to grumble loudly in the not-too-distant future. In 2005 a California Seismic Safety Commission report stated bluntly that “the Cascadia subduction zone will produce the State’s [sic] largest tsunami.” The report went on to predict “wave heights on the order of 60 feet,” warning that building codes were too flimsy, evacuation plans were nonexistent, and people didn’t take the threat seriously enough: “Californians are not adequately educated about tsunamis and the risks they pose.” As if to illustrate their point, on June 14, 2005, a 7.2 quake rattled the seafloor near the Cascadia fault; when the tsunami warning went out, it was widely ignored. It was due only to luck that the earthquake hadn’t occurred in the subduction zone itself, and no waves arrived.

  If any West Coast town should be unnerved about all this, it is Crescent City, California. Located just fifteen miles south of the Oregon border, Crescent City—named for the sweeping bay that fronts it—is ideally situated to bear the full brunt of a Pacific tsunami. It faces the direction from which the waves would likely be coming, and there are no offshore land masses to shelter it. On the contrary, a nearby seamount coupled with a shoaling ocean floor creates the perfect bottom contours to focus a wave’s power—in much the same way as Jaws’ fan-shaped reef and Mavericks’ underwater shelves do. Downtown Crescent City sits smack in the tsunami-impact zone, a fact that became tragically clear on March 27, 1964—Good Friday, ironically—when a magnitude 9.2 earthquake near Prince William Sound, Alaska, knocked the planet back on its heels, causing water as far away as the Great Lakes to slosh around like a roiled bathtub.

  The earthquake’s impact on Alaska reads like a list of special effects for a high-budget disaster movie: gaping cracks opened in the ground releasing clouds of sulfurous gas; areas of land suddenly liquefied. Anchorage was all but destroyed that night; an entire suburb slid into the sea. The port city of Valdez was assailed by fifty-foot waves and ended up partly underwater, and in Whittier, population seventy, a pair of forty-footers killed thirteen. At Seward, an oil-storage depot exploded into a fireball, and giant waves picked up an oil tanker and deposited it on land. The waves, now filled with flaming debris, went on to hit the Texaco oil installation, and it too exploded. Fiery forty-foot walls of water wiped out Seward’s waterfront, its power plant, and most of its houses. These fire-waves then struck the railyard, where they swept a 120-ton locomotive with an eighty-boxcar train more than three hundred feet inland. The boxcars, also filled with oil, burst like popcorn. Meanwhile the fishing town of Kodiak lost its entire hundred-boat fleet.

  The waves sped south toward Canada, smacking Vancouver Island, and continued on to Washington and Oregon. In all of these places they caused destruction and death, but on a mercifully smaller scale. Californians had received warnings that the tsunami was headed their way, but no one was overly concerned. The waves seemed to be fading.

  Until they arrived at Crescent City.

  High tide had risen and it was close to midnight when the Three Sisters showed up, a trio of waves surging south under a starry, full-moon sky. These first three were ocean Valkyries; they leveled the lower part of Crescent City, scouring two miles inland. Power lines collapsed, fires erupted, people were pinned against ceilings in flooded buildings. Twenty-nine blocks were left underwater, 172 businesses and 91 homes erased. Ten died. But it was the fourth wave that delivered the knockout punch, winding up by draining the harbor, and then rushing back at the land, coming in as a malignant black wall studded with logs, metal, plastic, glass, cars, trucks, home appliances, junk, treasures, bodies.

  It was a very bad night. Entire buildings were knocked off their foundations and dragged away. More things exploded. A house ended up on Highway 101. And water, everywhere there was water, swirling like the contents of a demonic blender. The world as everyone in Crescent City knew it had turned darkly aquatic.

  “You know, there’s no way anybody really observes giant waves, tsunami waves,” Plafker said as we gathered up the files. “First of all, you’re scared to death after a big earthquake. And then you can’t see them because usually they’re breaking far offshore. Or you’re running like heck. Heh heh heh.”

  From the photos I’d seen and the notes I’d read and the stories I’d heard about the kinds of waves that Plafker and Miller dealt in, the idea of running seemed quite inadequate. Who, for God’s sake, can visualize a 1,740-foot wave in the furthest reaches of their imagination? (Besides Howard Ulrich.) Even Hamilton might have a hard time with that one, I thought.

  Earlier in the year Garrett McNamara and Kealii Mamala had attempted to surf the waves made by a calving glacier near Cordova, Alaska. The adventure had sounded good in theory, and they arrived full of bluster. “We like to do new things,” McNamara told me. But then a chunk of ice the size of Yankee Stadium had plunged four hundred feet off the glacier, and the thirty-five-degree water had exploded into an unpredictable, confused mess of a giant wave, and McNamara, sitting nearby on a Jet Ski, realized: “I was freaked out.” Not even seventy-foot Mavericks or eighty
-foot Jaws or max-Teahupoo could prepare a rider for nature’s superheavyweight round. “I couldn’t … I was mind-boggled,” McNamara recalled, uncharacteristically tongue-tied. Though he and Mamala did manage several rides, McNamara remained on edge. “I was very concerned to say the least. I was no longer there for my passion, or the rush. I just wanted to get the hell out.”

  THIS IS NOT YOUR FATHER’S BAJA.

  Surfer Magazine

  TODOS SANTOS ISLAND, MEXICO

  I’ll tell you, I’m more freaked out about the bandito thing than anything else,” Tony Harrington said. “It’s heavy. We probably shouldn’t be going at night.” We were standing in front of the San Diego airport beside a mountain of camera gear and surfboards, waiting to load them into three trucks. It was midnight. From here we were headed for the border, and then south to Ensenada. Harro’s eyes were bloodshot; he hadn’t slept in more than forty-eight hours, and he’d spent all day on the water at Mavericks. The previous day, on Oahu, he had been caught inside by a thirty-foot wave, unable to escape, and his Jet Ski had gone pinwheeling in the whitewater with him on it, a forty-pound camera housing strapped around his neck. The wave’s impact had clanged Harro and the Jet Ski together like a pair of cymbals, and now the extent of the damage was clear: his entire groin was bruised “black as the ace of spades.”

  “Uh, what ‘bandito thing’?” I said.

  The police in Baja, Harro explained, or banditos impersonating the police, or most likely both, had been on a tear for the past few months, targeting vehicles carrying surfboards. Anyone displaying thousand-dollar toys, the banditos’ reasoning seemed to go, would be a rich vein in a shakedown. For surfers, hopping over from southern California to ride Baja’s uncrowded Pacific breaks had long been a popular jaunt, considered safe unless you did something outright stupid, like flash a wad of cash in a Tijuana bar.