Cascadia's Fault - Jerry Thompson [19]
No one noticed the fist of frigid seawater as it lifted two channel marker buoys and thundered across the threshold of the inner harbor. Night shift longshoremen, completely unaware, continued to hoist and sling bundles of lumber aboard the Meishusan Maru, a Japanese freighter at the sawmill dock. In the nearby pulp mill, boilers were running full steam. Paper machines were spinning out massive rolls of newsprint for the Los Angeles Times.
With little to do after midnight, most people in this town of seventeen thousand had already gone to bed. Only a handful heard skimpy stories on the late night news about an earthquake that had rattled Anchorage 1,120 miles (1,800 km) away. Even those who did hear about the jolt up north would never guess what was about to happen in the Alberni Valley or how it was connected to Alaska.
Crossing the harbor at 240 miles (386 km) per hour, the tsunami surged beneath acres of floating logs, breaking boom chains, snapping steel cables, and scattering dozens of rafts of heavy timber across the inlet. It assumed the shape of a blitzing storm tide rather than a towering curl. As in Sumatra and Thailand many years later, the wave that slammed Port Alberni looked more like a river run mad than the perfect breaker that surfers catch only in their wildest dreams.
Minutes later the main water pipeline to the pulp mill broke like a twig. The Meishusan Maru rode the surge to the end of her mooring lines, twisted free from the sawmill dock and drifted toward a nearby mud flat. Bundles of lumber floated off the dock and rode the churning froth into downtown streets like so many cubic battering rams. When the leading edge of the drenching brine finally reached the head of the inlet, the last of its energy was spent running upstream against the Somass River. With catlike stealth the water slipped over the low dike along River Road and spilled into the bottom-land housing on the other side.
All these years later it’s hard for survivors to recall what they heard first—the mysterious gurgling beneath their floorboards, or the heartstopping thump of a mill worker’s fist against their doors in the dead of night. Allan and Jill Webb lived in one of those houses near River Road. Forty-five years after that Good Friday night, they gathered with other Alberni tsunami veterans in the mayor’s office at city hall to recall their experiences. Jill told me it was the awful hammering that she would never forget.
“Well, that’s what I think woke us up,” said Jill. “You know, the banging on the door.” But she never saw the man who spread the alarm because as she climbed out from under the covers, her feet plunged into frigid wet muck and her attention went straight to the floor. “I stood up in this water and I thought ‘Oh, what is this?’” She laughed. “It was quite a shock to step into this water.”
Her husband, Allan, recalled the sequence of events slightly differently. For him the sound of trickling came just before the knock. “I got out of bed and stepped into about six inches of water. So I’m thinking, ‘Well, is there a pipe leaking?’ And of course, we have no idea what this is.” But then he glanced out the window and in clear moonlight saw what appeared to be a lake rising all around them. Then he spotted the lone, unidentified Good Samaritan.
“He was running down the alley,” recalled Allan. “And by the time he got to the end, the water was above his knees, so he couldn’t hang around too long.” Then they heard a great roar as boilers at the pulp mill blew off steam. Workers were desperately trying to bleed away pressure before cold seawater