The Great Quake by Henry Fountain

Author:Henry Fountain
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2017-08-08T04:00:00+00:00

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The screeching was the worst thing. Gloria Day didn’t recognize the noise, but later she realized what it was: the sound of her house, just a few blocks from the waterfront in Valdez, struggling to stay in one piece. The sharp shaking of the earthquake was warping the wood frame, so much that studs were bending away from sole plates and joists were being pulled from ceiling beams. The whole house was being bent out of shape, and the steel nails that held the lumber together were taking the strain. The screeching noise Day was hearing was the sound of those nails being pulled through wood fibers.

She and her husband, Walter, ran outside. McKinley Street was rippling and cracking, the waves running from north to south through the property next door and on down the street. Gloria looked down McKinley toward Alaska Avenue and the center of town. The buildings on the corner seemed to rise and fall as they rode the waves. At times they almost disappeared from sight.

Then she turned and looked to her right, toward the waterfront. The stern of the Chena, the 441½-foot-long cargo ship that was being unloaded at the main dock, was rising at a sharp angle, its bow pointed down. The stern was so high Day could even see the ship’s large brass propeller above the houses.

Down at the dock itself, the world was ending.

When the quake began, the Chena’s captain, Merrill Stewart, and its pilot, John Carlson, were eating in the dining room below-decks. They felt a shaking at first, followed by sharp shocks. The ship seemed to be hopping about. Stewart instinctively knew it was an earthquake, and the two headed toward a ladder that would take them to the bridge, three decks up. Stewart had been aboard ships most of his life, and at age sixty-one he was still pretty nimble. He made it up to the bridge, he estimated later, in about twenty seconds.

Among the crew were a couple of shutterbugs—Ernest Nelson and Fred Newmayer. With little to do during the cargo operation, they had been out on the deck with 8mm film cameras, shooting the scene at the dock to while away the time. With its beautiful snow-draped mountains as a backdrop, Valdez was one of the most photogenic of the ports they visited.

Less than half a minute after the shaking started, that port disappeared, as land turned to liquid. A long slice of the seaward edge of the plain that Valdez sat on—a section nearly a mile long and as much as six hundred feet wide—compacted, slumped and then slid into the bay. When it did, it took the two docks with their warehouses and canneries with it, as pilings and decking and buildings tilted and twisted and finally broke apart and descended into the maelstrom. It nearly took the Chena.

In grainy frames from Newmayer’s and Nelson’s films, the main dock can be seen collapsing and the roof of one of the warehouses starting to fall. A few small boats are in view, looking as if they’ve been tossed about in turbulent water.

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