Cascadia's Fault - Jerry Thompson [21]
“But my brother, I guess he was—he was more worried about me, thinking I was going to go into labor—because I was due that day! ‘What are we going to do if she goes into labor here?’” Yvette shook her head at the absurdity of it all. “But everything—nothing happened. I mean, the Good Lord was with us, I guess.”
As suddenly and mysteriously as it came, the flood turned around and started to go the other way. Jill Webb heard a funny sound and opened the living room window. She and Allan saw their car turned on its side, bobbing away in the moonlight. Carrie’s baby buggy had drifted across the street with the receding current—on its way west toward the ocean.
“It was really a very, sort of eerie feeling,” said Jill. “It sucked out.” To underline the point, she created her own sound effect. “It just went shooooop—you know?—as it was leaving.” She shook her head. “It was really kind of an awful sound ... Fortunately it didn’t take us, too.”
But that was only the first of six waves to come that night as the tsunami oscillated back and forth down the inlet like soapy swells in a giant bathtub for eighteen hours. Wave number two, which arrived ninety-seven minutes later, was the biggest and most destructive. At 1:20 a.m. a ten-foot (3 m) surge pounded the city like a wrecking ball, picking up all the debris left by the first wave—fishing boats torn free from their docks, floating cars and trucks, buoyant bundles of lumber, thousands of busted-loose two-by-fours and thousands more raw logs, many weighing several tons apiece—and hurled these projectiles into the low-lying streets of Port Alberni.
As the turbulent seawater climbed the government tide gauge at the rate of one foot (30 cm) per minute, the crew aboard the Meishusan Maru, which had been grounded on a mud flat by the outgoing rush of the first wave, quickly fired up their engines on the second swell, got the freighter off the mud, turned it back toward the main navigation channel, and dropped anchors in a deeper part of the harbor. At the same moment, River Road houses began to float off their foundations. An eyewitness told a newspaper reporter the next day of seeing a large, two-story house drifting down the Somass River. It gradually broke up and sank. At an auto court near the riverbank, the rising swell lifted a row of six small cabins simultaneously.
Mary Rowland, another of the white-haired survivors sitting on a couch in the mayor’s office, told of seeing her neighbor’s house being swept away. “Joy Smith had a little store at Beaver Creek and River Road, and she lived across the street in a house. And she had a habit of always having a cup of coffee on the go. It sat on the end of the stove. And so their house went down River Road and into the fields—oh, maybe about three blocks or something—”
“The whole house?” I interrupted.
“Yeah, and the cup of coffee was still sittin’ on the stove with the coffee in it.” She patted her hands together with a tiny smile. “That’s how calm it was. It just picked it up, took it along, and sat it down.”
A disaster report from British Columbia’s Provincial Emergency Program said it was hard to understand why no one got killed. The period of grace between the first surge and the disastrous second was not long enough to get everyone moving toward higher ground. “Many were caught in their homes,” said the report. “The fast-rising waters knocked out all power and street lighting, so that many waded chestdeep, in the sudden dark, through their yards to safety ... Even more miraculous were some of the hair-breadth escapes of children. One man dashed out to save his brand-new convertible only to find a pair of youngsters floating by on a log; he too was chest deep before the trio made it to dry ground. A civil defense worker rowing around in the dark checking houses, flashed