Cascadia's Fault Read online

  Another important reason for clustering so many instruments here is that just before the 1966 main shock, the earth may have given off subtle warning signs. Twelve days before the temblor, fresh cracks appeared in the ground near the center of the rupture zone. Nine hours before the main shock, an irrigation pipe that crossed the fault broke and separated. Were these true precursors? Maybe. That was still the subject of vigorous scientific debate. But even the outside chance of a successful prediction was enough to motivate the USGS team to do everything they could to spot reliable symptoms of the next San Andreas quake.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Alaska Megathrust: Cascadia’s Northern Cousin

  Even before the earth hammered Mexico City there were telltale signs of what to expect from Cascadia’s fault. One of the first clues arrived by sea at ten minutes past midnight on Good Friday, March 27, 1964. A tumbling ball of water moving southbound from Alaska at an estimated 330 miles (530 km) per hour passed beneath the hulls of ships at sea without causing a stir.

  At surface level in the open ocean, it felt like just another swell in the North Pacific. But this was a “seismic sea wave,” what used to be called a tidal wave (now known as a tsunami) and it was very different from the chop and rollers left by a storm that had passed through a few days earlier. To a sailor’s wary eye, only the three-foot (1 m) crown of this monster’s head would have been visible that night, just another hump in a sea of thousands, with all its furious strength hiding in darkness below.

  Unlike ripples, whitecaps, and windblown breakers that churn only the surface, this rolling mountain of brine reached all the way to the ocean floor and traveled at the speed of an airliner. When it reached the western side of Vancouver Island, the front of the wave began to slow as it scraped over the shallow bottom of the continental shelf, forcing the back half to mound up eight feet (2.4 m) above a normal high tide. An edge of the wave then sheared away and made a fast left turn into a fjord called the Alberni Inlet.

  As the turning flood crashed over rocks at the Bamfield lighthouse on the outer coast, a keeper on duty grabbed the phone and placed an urgent call to Port Alberni, a mill town at the head of the inlet. The funnel shape of the inlet itself—a saltwater canyon cut through narrowing mountain walls—squeezed and amplified the wave as it shot toward the heart of Vancouver Island like a cannon ball. The fast-rising swell ran forty miles (65 km) from the Bamfield light to the head of the fjord in only ten minutes, not nearly enough time to spread the word. Port Alberni might as well have had a bull’s-eye painted across its industrial docks, marinas, and low-lying residential streets.

  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 heart-stopping 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 hit hot pipes and caused an explosion. The mess inside the Webb’s house was by now three feet deep and rising as Allan and Jill made their way to a small side room where their twenty-three-month-old daughter, Carrie, slept.

  They found Carrie standing in her crib, staring wide eyed but silently at the gush coming up through a trap door in the floor. Allan estimated the flood had risen another foot within minutes. “I got a drawer out,” he said with a shrug. “I figured I’d float the child around. And Jill—she can’t swim, so I don’t know what I’d have to do with her. But . . .” He let the story fade.

  Jill was still remembering the look on little Carrie’s face. “She was just sort of standing up looking—you know? With big eyes. And we just picked her up,” said Jill, “but she was really very calm—calmer than we were.”

  Yvonne Forbes, a neighbor down the street, recalled that her father, who worked at the mill, grabbed a ringing phone that woke everyone in the house. “Somebody called him from the mill and said there was a tidal wave, but he didn’t really believe it,” she said. “I mean, from an earthquake in Alaska?” She mugged a look of disbelief. “It just sounded like a fairy tale, really. You know? And nobody knew anything, really.” Heads around the room nodded in agreement. Then she continued her father’s story. “It was in the middle of the night, pitch black, no power. So he opened the back door—I don’t know why—and then he could hardly get it shut. And the water just was coming in.”

  When Yvette Gaetz started telling her story, every mouth in the room fell open. “Well, I was nine months pregnant,” she said, matter-of-factly. “My baby was due that night.” She and her husband, Simon, also had three other children under the age of three asleep in the back bedroom.

  “My uncle worked at the plywood [mill] and he lived next door. And when the plywood sent him home, he just phoned and he said, ‘Yvette, there’s a tidal wave!’ And I could see water coming under the kitchen door. So, as I was talking to him, I say, ‘I gotta go, uncle. The water is comin’
in!’”

  When Simon spotted the dark, muddy scum spreading across the kitchen floor, he rushed to the front of the house and flung open the door, only to face a larger, blacker torrent. He and Yvette’s brother Ray, visiting from Saskatchewan, threw their combined weight against the incoming flood.

  “We had a hell of a time closing the door,” said Simon. “We got it closed and that’s when we started putting everybody up in the attic.” It seemed like the only way out was going to be up, so they grabbed a chrome highchair and planted it under the trap door to the attic. Yvette lifted the youngest child from a crib while Simon and Ray gathered up the other two children.

  “I’m left in there with the baby, and I gotta get my baby out. Now, I don’t know how I did it, but I crawled on top of that highchair—being nine months pregnant and holding a thirteen-month-old in my arms,” she paused for a breath, rolled her eyes and went on. “But then I see the fridge. It was floating in front of me—with the plug still in the wall!” There was a sudden intake of breath as everyone in the room got the picture. “And I thought, ‘Now where do I go?’” Yvette laughed and the room laughed with her, nervously.

  Simon and Ray put the three-year-old child on the couch and almost immediately it lifted off the living room floor and began to drift. They put Marcel, the two-year-old, on a mattress and the mattress started floating as well. “Marcel was fine as long as he didn’t move—but he was two!” said Yvette, her voice an octave higher.

  Then, because there was no ladder in the house, Ray stood on a chair and crawled up into the attic first. With Ray pulling and Simon pushing, Yvette managed to climb up and squeeze through the small square hole leading to the attic. When she got herself turned around and stable, Simon started passing the other children up to her. By now she was drenched and freezing cold, so the last thing Simon did before climbing up himself was to grab a handful of clothing.

  “So the kids were dry, but I was soaking wet,” she explained. “And he just grabbed an armful of men’s clothes, because that was the closest thing. And there I am changing clothes and hoping and praying the water wouldn’t come up.” She looked around the room. Her audience was spellbound.

  “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 chest-deep, 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 his light into one and rescued a baby floating on a mattress.”

  Scientists would later confirm that this runaway train of six tsunami waves had rumbled through the night the entire length of the Pacific Ocean from north to south. Four children camping with their parents near a beach on the Oregon coast were swept out to sea and drowned. Northern California got hammered when four of the big swells dragged across the shallow ocean bottom, sheared off, and circled back from the south to smash the seaside town of Crescent City, killing another dozen people. Sadly, several of the deaths in Crescent City were caused by ignorance. In 2008 Bill Parker, a retired civil defense coordinator who had tried his best to get everyone to higher ground, explained what happened when the salty sludge started to recede.

  “Everything was a mess,” Parker recalled. “The streets were loaded with debris. Buildings were shattered; cars were on top of each other.” Then, as the second wave began to ebb, people wrongly assumed the danger had passed. Curiosity and bravado drew them to the inky rubble.

  “Five people lost their lives because they went back to get the money in their store,” Parker explained. “The father said, ‘Well, it’s my birthday. Let’s take a drink for my birthday.’ And so they poured drinks and wished him a happy birthday.” Just then the third wave struck, a twelve-foot (3.7 m) wall of water that killed the five who thought they’d been lucky. “If they’d left three minutes before,” said Parker, with a slow shake of his head, “they’d have been safe.”

  Twenty-four hours later those six liquid mountains from the Alaska coast had finally splashed themselves apart against the icy shelf of Antarctica. At sunrise the next morning, through heavy mist and fog, Port Alberni looked like it had been ripped apart by tornadoes and then drowned. Fifty-eight houses had been washed off their foundations and destroyed, with 375 others severely damaged and a thick layer of silt and mud coating everything in sight. Chaotic piles of lumber and logs blocked roads and railway tracks. Upturned boats and cars were strewn everywhere, some cars piled atop others, one memorably parked on its nose, the front bumper buried in several feet of salty, sticky muck. Like the pedestal of some perverse art project, another car balanced a fifty-foot (15 m)
log across its roof.

  Two log booming boats were dumped high and dry on a downtown street and all of MacMillan Bloedel’s industrial plants—the pulp and paper mill, the sawmill, the planer mill, and the plywood plant—were knocked out of service and shut down. The shape of Alberni’s long, narrow canyon, cutting through steep mountain rock from the open ocean to mid-island, had focused the energy of the wave to devastating effect. Other island communities had also suffered damage—eighteen homes in the Hesquiaht village of Hot Springs Cove were wiped out—but no place on the British Columbia coast was as spectacularly messed up as Port Alberni.

  By noon on Saturday, help was on the way as roughly two hundred soldiers and a detachment of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police approached the Alberni Valley. Dozens of refugees gathered in emergency shelters while civil defense workers and the Salvation Army served hot meals and coffee. Counting the losses from the largest tsunami to hit Canada’s west coast in modern history, officials discovered that only a few people had been injured and none had died.

  The residents of Port Alberni found themselves miraculously alive. But with no electricity and the local radio station knocked off the air, they had no news about how much worse things had been for their neighbors to the north. On the Alaska coast, where all this violence and destruction had begun eighteen hours earlier, it had been a night of death and destruction by land and by sea.

  The earth tore itself apart fourteen miles (22.5 km) underground in Prince William Sound, eighty miles (130 km) east-southeast of Anchorage, starting at 5:37 p.m. on Good Friday. A complex fault that no one could see broke from its epicenter in two directions at once—to the southwest and the southeast. The ground shook hard for at least four minutes as the rupture spread over a distance of five hundred miles (800 km).

  Exactly how long the violent tremors lasted was hard to tell because “every seismic instrument within a radius of several hundred kilometers was thrown off scale” after the first few seconds, according to a U.S. federal study. How long it seemed to last depended upon who was telling the story and what kind of ground they were standing on at the time. If they were anywhere near the epicentral region, the lurching and jolting went on for at least four minutes and possibly as long as six. It must have felt like forever.