Disasters: Bad Friday

Late on Good Friday afternoon, a University of Washington seismologist named Norman Rasmussen was worshiping in Seattle’s Church of the Assumption. He looked up and saw that the chandeliers were swaying. Instantly Rasmussen realized that an earthquake had struck.

Fifteen hundred miles away, an earthquake was devastating Anchorage, Alaska, and a ring of nearby towns and villages. With the thunderous impact of a mountain falling into the sea, the shock waves from Alaska rippled outward, sending tsunamis (seismic sea waves) around the Pacific, flooding portions of North American western shores, coursing across the sea toward Japan and southward toward Hawaii.

Swallowed. Seconds earlier, Anchorage, a bustling city of 50,000, was undergoing the hectic but commonplace ritual of the evening rush hour. The downtown business district was filled with people walking and driving home from work. Suddenly the very earth cracked, roared and rolled. An amateur radio operator who was talking from his car to another radio ham in Seattle called out: “My God! What’s happening?” The streets, he cried, were rippling like waves and the ground was pitching like an ocean. Streets split into gaping wounds, two of them 12 ft. deep and 50 ft. wide. Mrs. Jean Chance watched as “the earth started to roll. It rolled for five minutes. It slammed parked cars together. People were clinging to each other, to lampposts, to buildings.” A 30-block section of the downtown area crumbled. People, automobiles, houses, slid helplessly into the crevasses.

Beyond Anchorage, the earthquake stalked like an insatiable beast. In the coastal town of Valdez, a hole opened in the dock area and a man and his two little children disappeared into it. Moments later, the entire dock was gone. In Seward, fires fed by ruptured oil tanks raged through the night. Airports for miles around reported buckled runways and disrupted services; at Elmendorf Air Force Base, Anchorage, the control tower itself collapsed.

Snapped. All through the night, bands of rescuers worked by flickering flashlight, rummaging through the rubble to find the lost, the injured and the dead. Air Force disaster units flew into Alaska with doctors, nurses, medical equipment and emergency hospital units.

The tidal waves were murderous. At Beverly Beach State Park near Depoe Bay, Ore., four children who had been asleep in bedrolls were swept away. In Crescent City, Calif., the shock waves sent the sea pouring into the downtown sector to wreck 150 stores. Four gasoline storage plants exploded and burned. Three thousand townspeople fled; ten were drowned, 70 hurt, more than 50 missing. Near Los Angeles, 10-ft. waves damaged the coast of Santa Catalina Island. In Hawaii, residents of the city of Hilo fled to high ground as six huge waves lashed the shores.

It would be days before Alaskans could count the precise loss of life and property, months before the destruction could be wiped away and the towns rebuilt. The cost could be counted in scores of lives; in dollars it ran to as much as a quarter of a billion.

The Fault. Scientists could only speculate on the cause of the disaster. Long ago, primitive people believed that earthquakes were caused by subterranean animals, perhaps moles; others attributed them to tempests in the caverns beneath the earth’s crust. Today, experts believe that the quakes are signs of earth’s “growing pains,” sudden movements of the earth’s crust caused by pressure changes. These shifts, or slides, create tremors that travel both through and around the earth in sound waves. Most earthquakes occur where ancient wounds in the earth have created faults in the crust. One of the greatest quake-producing faults, known as the circum-Pacific belt, runs completely around the Pacific Ocean, along the west coast of the Americas from Alaska to South America, and along the coasts of Siberia, Japan and South Asia. The Alaska quake had its origins probably 30 to 60 miles beneath the surface at Prince William Sound, and in its initial shocks was about as severe as any ever recorded. The famed 1906 San Francisco earthquake, for example, registered 8.25 on the experts’ Richter scale (a seismographic measurement); the Alaskan tremor registered somewhat higher. And the energy released by the Alaskan earthquake was 10 million times stronger than that of the atomic bomb explosion in Hiroshima.