Cascadia's Fault - Jerry Thompson [24]
Consider the element of timing. The rupture happened late on a holiday Friday afternoon, the beginning of Easter weekend, so schools were empty and most offices were deserted. Construction crews working on the new Four Seasons building in Anchorage had packed up and gone home only thirty minutes before the earth began to shudder. The unfinished and fortunately unoccupied high-rise collapsed in a heap of buckled concrete and twisted steel.
At the moment of the rupture hundreds of trollers and seiners were tied up and dozens of canneries were shut down because fishing season had not yet opened. As luck would have it, the tide that afternoon was among the lowest of the year, so the reach and hydraulic impact of the tsunami was somewhat reduced. Imagine what might have happened along the docks and boat harbors in the middle of a busy workday on a swollen tide in high season.
Although snow blanketed the mountain slopes and still covered the ground in many places even at sea level, the temperature had been pleasantly mild that afternoon, with highs near forty degrees Fahrenheit (about 4°C). But weather-wise Alaskans were still dressed for the most part in warm clothing, which no doubt helped them survive a long, cold night outdoors or until they made their way to rescue shelters. Of all the things that could have gone wrong, not all of them did.
Alaska was and still is a sparsely populated frontier; an event of this magnitude in southern California would have been catastrophic in terms of deaths and injuries. But to those who survived, numerical comparisons are meaningless. No matter how lucky they were, most Alaskans were devastated by the earth’s staggering convulsion. To them Good Friday was every bit as traumatic as anything that has happened in L.A. or San Francisco. Hundreds of homes were damaged or destroyed in communities all along the south coast. In several waterfront towns large oil storage tanks ruptured and caught fire, spreading a blanket of flames across the tops of incoming tsunami waves.
In Anchorage, a multistory apartment block and a big department store collapsed. Yawning cracks opened in downtown streets and slabs of falling concrete crushed cars like pop cans. Outside the city, in a neighborhood called Turnagain Heights, built on a clay bluff with spectacular views of the sea, the earth split open in dozens of places. The ground slumped, houses caved in, and people fell into a maze of crushed timbers and fissures that opened and closed in the liquefied clay.
As the land heaved and bucked, railway tracks got twisted and humped, highways cracked, and bridges were yanked apart. Docks and port facilities in Whittier, Cordova, and Homer were smashed by incoming swells. Undersea landslides created local tsunamis that struck tens of minutes before the main tsunamis arrived from offshore. A wall of seawater fifty feet high (15 m) slammed the vital seaport of Seward, road and rail gateway to Alaska’s interior. Most of downtown Kodiak was inundated; the entire port city of Valdez was wrecked and would have to be relocated.
Later that night a radio operator aboard the oil tanker Alaska Standard tapped a frantic message in Morse code that said, “Seward is burning.” Ham radio operators working from mobile units in their cars finally reached the outside world with fragmented reports of whole towns “wiped out by a great tsunami!” In the end, giant waves took the most lives while rock and mudslides and twisted, heaved, and fractured slabs of solid ground caused the greatest physical damage.
Alaska had always been a rough and tumble, seismically active kind of place, and longtime residents had grown used to the almost constant rumblings of nature. But there had never been one quite like this. Even scientists who knew the most about the state’s geology were puzzled because nobody could say for sure which fault had broken or how it had gone undetected for so many years.
In a series of urgent phone calls late that Friday night, officials