Cascadia's Fault - Jerry Thompson [74]
School was out and the kids had already made it home when the madness began. Up to her arms in soapy water, Stephanie Fritts stood in her driveway and stared at the spectacle for several minutes, not quite sure what was happening. By late afternoon that Wednesday the sun had come out and warmed the day enough to make washing the car a tolerable task, which is what Stephanie was doing when she noticed traffic—lots of it—heading southbound down the Long Beach Peninsula at high speed.
She immediately switched on the radio and heard a cursory news story about a big wave possibly en route from Alaska and wasn’t sure what to do next. She tried phoning her husband in Portland. Again and again and again she tried, with no luck. The lines were jammed. She did eventually get through to her parents across town and told them she was on the way to pick them up. She wrangled four children—ages three to fifteen—into the car and decided not to worry for the moment about David because in Portland he should be far enough inland to be beyond the danger zone.
But David was worried about her and the kids. After hearing the same vaguely ominous, fact-free news item on the car radio, he too made a dash for the nearest phone. He called the home number and called and called, unable to get through. So he decided to make a beeline for the family, driving west and north from Portland toward Astoria, where the big bridge crosses the Columbia just below Ilwaco. These were the days before most people had cell phones, so nobody in or near the danger zone could find out what was really happening. For David Fritts it was a shot in the dark.
As the first wave, a 5.8-foot (1.8 m) swell, came ashore on Adak Island, emergency bulletins echoed down the west coast of North America from Alaska to British Columbia and on to Washington, Oregon, California, and Hawaii. The quake had indeed generated a tsunami. In Kodiak a siren started wailing shortly after 5:00 p.m. Alaska time to warn people that a wave could strike there within the hour. Over in Valdez, it was only the luck of the draw that no ships were docked at the Trans-Alaska Pipeline terminal. The captain of an inbound tanker decided to slow his vessel to twelve knots in order to stay in deep water until the danger passed.
Along the Washington shore the U.S. Coast Guard sent airplanes and helicopters equipped with loudspeakers buzzing down the beaches to warn people to head for higher ground. They radioed fishing boats at sea and urged their skippers to head farther offshore. Even on the protected inside waters of Puget Sound the captains of ferry boats were warned away from their docks as the wave approached. A ship laden with dangerous cargo outbound from Seattle toward the Strait of Juan de Fuca was stopped by the Coast Guard and told to wait.
With four children and her parents in the car Stephanie Fritts was finally ready to make a run for it. She started driving southeast toward the Astoria Bridge. Traffic snarled almost immediately. Just outside of Ilwaco, they hit gridlock and were stuck on a country road only a few feet above sea level—waiting for what might be a killer wave—with nowhere to go. High ground was miles away. For nearly 17,500 people in five counties along the coast, a fine spring afternoon had vanished, replaced by a confusing, gut-clenching race to get away from the water as the sun set and the air turned colder.
Eventually Stephanie did get across the bridge at Astoria and as far inland as Westport, Oregon, where she managed to find both high ground and a motel where they could stay for the night. Then things got really crazy. In the darkening chaos of frantic headlights and confusion, David drove right past their motel in the opposite direction on his way home to find them. At the Astoria Bridge the Oregon State Police were allowing traffic to cross the river southbound to escape the Long Beach Peninsula in Washington, but they had blocked all traffic going north. Nobody was allowed back in