AHS Blog
Date Posted: March 22, 2014
Categories: 49 History
by Toby Sullivan
For thousands of Alaskans, the spill was a collective experience, and as such has become one of the defining moments of modern Alaska, second only to the 1964 earthquake. And like any historical event, there are two ways that the story of the spill lives on. First there’s the documented story: the newspaper files, the reams of data from public testimony and court documents, the photographs and audio recordings, and the published research done since the spill. And then there’s the memory of the people who were there, an experience mapped in neurons, recalled as images and emotion.
First, the facts. On the evening of March 23, 1989, the Exxon Valdez untied from the Alyeska oil terminal in Valdez, fully loaded with 1.2 million barrels of North Slope crude. A little after midnight, Third Mate Jeffery Cousins, left alone on the bridge by Captain Joseph Hazelwood soon after departing Valdez, and apparently trying to avoid icebergs, steered across the inside corner of a dogleg traffic channel and impaled the ship on Bligh Reef. The momentum of the ship over the reef ripped a gash eighteen feet wide and 60 feet long though the 3/4-inch steel hull. Driven by the head pressure of tanks whose tops were 60 feet above the waterline, oil came up from the bottom of the ship at the rate of 20,000 barrels an hour. The response from officials, the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, the U.S. Coast Guard, Exxon Corporation and Alyeska Pipeline Service Company, was confusion on a very large scale.
Although Alyeska’s oil spill contingency plan mandated that a vessel loaded with skimmers and booms be at the scene of a spill within five and a half hours, the containment barge was dry-docked with a broken weld, and the skimmers and heavy duty boom that went with it were buried under tons of lightweight harbor boom in a warehouse. In the predawn darkness, workers used a crane and a forklift to sort the boom and get it onto the barge. After hours of this, and just as the equipment was finally loaded, word came that the barge was needed instead to move fenders and other lightering equipment to the grounded tanker. Another ship, the Exxon Baton Rouge, was being maneuvered to pump off the oil still onboard the Exxon Valdez. An hour went by while workers searched for the fenders under the snow. The boom that had just been loaded on the barge was unloaded and the lightering equipment was craned aboard. It became apparent that the response plan was a fiction.
At 2:30 p.m., fourteen hours after the tanker went aground, the barge with the boom and skimmers finally arrived on scene at the Exxon Valdez. By 5:30 p.m., the oil had pretty much stopped pouring from the ruptured hull. Estimates put the amount of oil in the water at 240,000 barrels (11 million gallons), the largest oil spill in U.S history.
For three days, in calm weather, the oil slowly spread from the tanker while confusion reigned in Valdez. Alyeska skimmed up several thousand barrels but found it had nowhere to put it. Fishermen from Cordova scooped oil into buckets and ran into the same problem. Officials and biologists and oil industry experts began what would become a protracted argument over the use of dispersants, essentially dishwashing detergent sprayed from C-130 airplanes. Alyeska’s contingency plan had claimed 100,000 barrels would be recovered within 48 hours of a large spill, but by Sunday, March 26, less than 3,000 barrels had been skimmed off. The only good news was that the Exxon Baton Rouge had maneuvered alongside the Exxon Valdez and begun pumping off the remaining one million barrels.
For three days the oil lay in a great black mass attended by a few skimmers, some boom and the fishermen from Cordova, armed with their five-gallon buckets. And then the wind began to blow. By the morning of the 27th, 70-mile-an-hour gusts and 20-foot waves had swept the boom away and sent the skimmers scuttling back into Valdez Arm. The fishermen sought shelter in the Cordova small boat harbor. By Tuesday the wind had spread the oil west across 500-square miles of water and onto the beaches of Smith and Naked islands. Pictures of dead otters and bald eagles were on television screens around the planet. Within a week the wind and the prevailing westerly setting ocean current had carried the oil through the islands of the western Sound and out to the open ocean between the Kenai Peninsula and Kodiak Island. By June, oil was washing up in Chignik, 700 miles from the spill.
Those are the facts, easily found in the documentation of the spill, and in the long recitation of history, those facts will last a long time. What will probably be harder to find as time goes on will be what always fades from large historical events –the look and smell and taste of what happened –the emotional landscape that survivors carry with them the rest of their lives. Except for a few oral histories, a few first person accounts, that sense of what the spill felt like – maybe the most important part of any experience – is going away.
So, for the record, here’s a few entirely subjective things I remember as a Kodiak fishermen who didn’t fish that year and instead spent the summer going to meetings and talking to lawyers and wiping rocks in Uganik Bay.
News of the spill came at eight o’clock on a snowy Friday morning, the barest facts on Alaska Public Radio. A tanker had hit a reef outside Valdez. The radio sat on the windowsill of my back porch, next to a cup of coffee. The herring gillnet I was building hung from a hook in the corner, green plastic mesh bundled with the corkline, a plastic needle full of white twine in my hand. The Kodiak herring season would begin in three weeks. According to officials, as of 6 a.m., there were 100,000 barrels of oil in the water. What did that mean? A soft tremor of distant catastrophe reverberated in the room with me. Wet snowflakes slid down the window, obscuring the view of Womens Bay. I went into the kitchen and asked my wife if she’d heard.
Three months later we were on contract with Veco, the company that ran the cleanup operation on Kodiak Island. My wife and daughter and I and three crewmembers were at our setnet fishing cabin in Uganik Bay, but we were not gillnetting salmon. We were wiping rocks and bagging dead birds on a beach across the bay. And in doing that we got a good long look at crude oil, at the thing itself. It was the darkest most beautiful shade of glistening black we had ever seen. The surface of any glove-full was usually so smooth, like liquid glass, that you could see your own curving reflection in it. But beneath the reflection the oil had a spooky blackness, a density of opaqueness and heavy viscosity that was like something from another planet. Even after being washed through 300 miles of ocean, it remained depthless and black and pure, the distilled blood of dinosaurs. I still have a glob in a canning jar that I take out and show people sometimes. It’s dried out and no longer liquid, but it still looks weird, and it still sticks to your finger if you touch it.
In early August, the tender that was supposed to be picking up dead birds hadn’t come around in a few days. A friend of mine and his two crewmen were burning oil soaked cormorants on the beach in front of their cabin on the other side of the bay from us. It required nothing but a little newspaper and a match to get them going. While they were staring into the little pyre of burning wings and webbed feet, a helicopter with a Veco “beach-assessment” team landed and a fat Texan with a cowboy hat walked over. He asked how things were going: Did they need any more absorbent towels, any boom? How was their fuel situation? My friend told him they had enough equipment; the problem was the whole thing itself –the oil, the dead birds, the not fishing.
“We’re really not having much fun you know,” my friend said. The Texan, who’d been hearing that kind of thing ever since he’d gotten off the plane from Houston two weeks before, squinted at him. “Y’all have joined the real world now, boy.” We still say that line sometimes and laugh, acutely remembering the smell of burning oily birds, a mixture of coal smoke and rotten meat.
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| Helicopter at Uganik Bay, 1989 (Toby Sullivan) |
Early in the summer we were thrilled with the helicopters. They were everywhere, and they were beautiful. Once when I flew into town in a chartered Cessna to get supplies, a guy in the Veco office told me they’d be happy to fly me back out in a helicopter if one was going that way. The next morning, I waited with a crowd of fishermen, Coast Guard officers, lawyers in suits, and various federal and state officials. It was like a taxi stand. Twenty Bell Jet Ranger helicopters sat at the end of the runway, shiny as new toys. Our pilot explained the procedure if we lost power (who’s he kidding? I thought) and then we strapped in and took off. The ride was like sex, the pilot streaming us tight between mountains, his face exquisitely expressionless behind his wraparounds, the cliffs and vegetation at 150 knots like skin sliding against the window. We landed on the beach in front of my cabin. I stepped out in front of my wife and crewmembers like a god. The high lasted all day.
Every day helicopters landed on the beach where we worked to deliver edicts from the contractor, take the logs and crewmember time sheets back to town and to monitor the progress of the cleanup. One of the pilots told us the Veco guys were using the helicopters to count skiffs on the cleanup beach to make sure we were all working. One day my wife took our daughter back across the bay to our cabin to feed her some lunch. A helicopter hopped over the hill behind the cabin and hovered in the front yard like a giant insect, the pilot and an observer staring in the kitchen windows while my daughter stared back over a spoon full of macaroni and cheese. A few days later another helicopter swooped around the cabin trying to take pictures of my crewmembers while they ran behind the corners of the building, gulping sandwiches and beer. One morning a helicopter landed at a setnet fish camp across the bay and blew a tent with a couple of kids down the beach into the water.
By July, the crewmembers were getting edgy and bored, tired of wiping rocks all day in the rain, tired of watching for helicopters whenever they snuck back to the cabin for lunch. My wife was growing unhappy about keeping our daughter on the beach all day. The mail wasn’t getting through on the Veco boats and driving 80 miles in an open skiff back to town for food was getting old. The helicopters flew down our beach at eye level four or five times a day, the sound of the turbines arriving like tearing metal, the grass flattening as they went by 40 feet from the cabin windows. One night I dreamed about all the Jet Rangers parked rotor to rotor at the end of the runway in Kodiak. I was standing with two five gallons buckets of gasoline and a Bic lighter. There was no fence to stop me. The beautiful machines had become carriers of the plague.
There are days when the spill seems like a very long time ago, and other times, as if it were last weekend, or even, in some strange way, like it is still happening somewhere, still in the process of arriving from just over the horizon north and east of the Barren Islands or lying outstretched in the forests of our minds where certain dappled moments of the past live brightly forever. Like all great events, the oil spill created its own weather of effect, perception, memory. Even now at this twenty five year remove, I sometimes feel a certain sensuous echo of that lost season.
In writing about the spill a few years ago, when I asked people if there was a thing they considered part of the central experience of the spill for them, they would grow quiet, pause, audibly inhale. In that pause the meaning of whatever story they were about to tell me would always come somehow before they said it, like the sound of a helicopter’s rotor wash rattling a hilltop stand of birch trees before the machine itself rises into sight from the other side. I was struck with the familiarity of that time as they described it. Even when the narrative details of their memory of that summer were different from mine, we orbited the same emotional nexus.
If it is true that the images of the most intensely lived parts of our lives can reverberate and sometimes outlive us in the memory of those who knew us and heard us tell about those things, it is also true that our deepest moments of sharing and understanding come when we share those images. In those moments, when someone tells us something important about themselves, the space between our different stories and lives collapses and we share the same emotional space. When I asked people about 1989, they would pause and then tell me their story, and the underlying reality was always recognizable and familiar.
In August of that summer, our Veco coordinator downgraded Uganik Bay from “moderately oiled” to “lightly oiled.” The cleanup was over. On the last contract day we skiffed back across the bay to the cabin in an evening drizzle. Streaks of sheen lay in great swathes across the water. Oily sticks and kelp and the occasional dead gull lay in the sheen. The bay was quiet, the helicopters were gone. We picked up the birds and put them in a plastic bag. Veco left us lots of those bags after they pulled out. We used them for years afterward to keep our things dry whenever we had to do the long run into town.
Date Posted: March 20, 2014
Categories: 49 History
by Karen Brewster
With March 27 being the 50th anniversary of the Great Alaska Earthquake of 1964, check out these websites that have historical material about the quake. There is information of interest to students, teachers, journalists, historians, and the general public.
Great Alaska Earthquake of 1964, Historical Research Portal, Archives and Special Collections, Consortium Library, University of Alaska Anchorage (http://www.64akquake.org/about/)
With the website, UAA’s library provides a single location for researchers looking for primary source material about the earthquake, including photographs, books, documents, and oral histories. It represents a variety of libraries, archives, museums and other organizations around Alaska that have earthquake material in their holdings.
This is part of larger website of the Alaska Earthquake Information Center, Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska Fairbanks. It contains general information and description of events related to the 1964 earthquake and the tsunami that followed.
This website provides historical information, photos and videos about the 1964 earthquake and anniversary events. It also provides useful links to other resources.
This website provides scientific information about earthquakes and earthquake preparedness. It also contains film footage of the 1964 earthquake. The Alaska Earthquake Alliance is composed of member groups and organizations, and coordinates earthquake awareness and preparedness activities in Alaska. The Alliance is a part of a statewide alliance linking organizations and individuals that provide earthquake information, services, and who desire to improve on earthquake preparedness and awareness.
Date Posted: March 15, 2014
Categories: 49 History
by Anjuli Grantham
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Earl and Merrle Carpenter lived in Ouzinkie
in 1963 and 1964. (Baranov Museum/
Kodiak Historical Society, P-914-38) |
After living through the undulations of March 27, 1964, Kodiak elder Iver Malutin measures earthquakes based on the amount of water that slops from a full glass. For years, a local basket weaver subconsciously made sure there was an escape route from beaches where her family played. Another elder recalls the infernal heat blaring on the inside of the Navy plane that evacuated her and her children to Seattle a few days after tsunamis washed boats through downtown Kodiak. The history of March 27, 1964, like so many disasters, is crafted from individual stories and anecdotes. Personal stories collected and spun together give a sense of the fear, camaraderie, loss, and even moments of humor that percolated through the traumatic days following the earthquake and tsunami.
Recently, the Baranov Museum received a collection of images, ephemera, and objects that documented one couple’s Good Friday Earthquake experience. Merrle and Earl Carpenter were young Washingtonians, looking for adventure, when they responded to an ad in a 1963 Sunday newspaper, seeking a cannery storekeeper and postmaster in the village of Ouzinkie. Ouzinkie is an Alutiiq village on Spruce Island, within the Kodiak archipelago. The Carpenters sold their furniture and headed north, towards an adventure that they certainly weren’t counting on.
Last year, Merrle sat down with her granddaughter and recorded her memories of surviving the ‘64 quake and tsunami in Ouzinkie. The following includes excerpts from their conversation.
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Ouzinkie villagers gathered on Mount Herman as
their village was inundated by a series of
tsunamis. (Baranov Museum/
Kodiak Historical Society, P-914-8) |
“’All of a sudden the stove started to move. At first I thought I was dizzy,” Merrle recalled. Yet, like the other villages around Kodiak, the shaking didn’t cause much structural damage to Ouzinkie. Regardless, “’I decided to take pictures because I didn’t think the boss would ever believe this. Well I started snapping pictures and unbeknownst to me I was taking pictures of the bay going dry. All the water was going out and the natives told me that I’d better get up on high ground because that water’s going to all come back, and it’s going to come back fast,” Merrle said.
Merrle and Earl headed up Mount Herman with the rest of the villagers. Once above the village, Merrle snapped a photo of some of those who had gathered. What appears to be a photo of a pleasurable picnic most certainly was not.
“We had some boats that were on their way back to Kodiak Island and we were concerned about them because we could hear them on the radio, calling for help and letting us know what was happening out there. Then the radio went out and the store was under water.”
 |
The back end of the cannery store went out to sea with
the retreating tsunami waters. Canned food held
within the front of the store (pictured above) was
salvaged to feed the community. (Baranov
Museum/ Kodiak Historical Society, P-914-9) |
After a series of tsunamis had washed through the cannery, the couple ran down to the store to grab supplies and survey the damage to their workplace and home. “The back half of the store became detached from the rest of the building and was floating out in the bay.” In fact, the Ouzinkie Packing Company was nearly completely washed away and with it, the livelihood of most Ouzinkie villagers. It was never rebuilt. Merrle remembered, “The company had lost everything they had there, their whole investment. The cannery went out to sea.”
Merrle continued, “When we came down off the hill early in the morning we discovered that the store was inundated with water and practically everything in the store was wrecked… We had decided that we’d take turns watching the water because it was still high tide and if it was necessary we would get out of there.” Although aftershocks continued to rattle Ouzinkie for weeks, the seismic shaking did not spur any other tsunamis.
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This $2 bill was rescued from the store’s safe and is still
covered in tsunami silt. (Baranov Museum/ Kodiak
Historical Society, 2012-21-04)
|
Most of the store goods were destroyed, but the canned food was unaffected. “A lot of the labels had come off of the cans so we had to guess what was in them, but we didn’t care because it meant there was something to eat.” The Carpenters were also able to salvage the safe, and dry out $4000 worth of waterlogged bills on top of the stove. “So that took a little while to do and I can still feel the silt on my fingers today from that,” Merrle recalls.
Merrle and Earl stayed through the end of their contract and left Ouzinkie in May of 1964. In the months to come, Merrle received special commendations from the USPS for “the unselfish devotion to the public service that was so amply demonstrated by postal people during the disastrous earthquake” and a personal note of thanks from US Senator Bob Bartlett. These documents are now a part of the archive at the Baranov Museum/ Kodiak Historical Society.
 |
The Ouzinkie Packing Company was demolished
and never rebuilt. (Baranov Museum / Kodiak
Historical Society, P-914-27) |
The Carpenter Collection is among the collections of objects, photos, and oral histories held in trust by Alaska’s historical organizations that help to preserve the story of ordinary people who lived through the spring of 1964, an extraordinary time.
Date Posted: March 6, 2014
Categories: 49 History
by Rachel Mason
I came back to Kodiak two months before the March 1989 Exxon Valdez Oil Spill to do ethnographic fieldwork for my dissertation on the occupational culture of commercial fishing. I had been going to graduate school in Virginia. When my Kodiak friends, who knew me as a cab driver and before that a cannery worker, heard that I had obtained an NSF grant and another grant to study fishing and drinking in Kodiak, they thought I must have pulled off a wonderful scam.
My plan, in the spirit of participant observation, was to work briefly on several different boats and fishing operations. I had a little bit of experience fishing halibut and hoped I could convince some open-minded skippers to take on a working anthropologist observer. I first heard about the oil spill while inexpertly helping a seiner crew prepare their net for the upcoming herring season. When the oil spill curtailed most of the Kodiak fisheries, my research plans had to change. In fact, though, the summer of the oil spill may have provided me with an even better understanding of fishermen’s occupational identity than I would have gotten by actually fishing—because I saw what they missed when they were not allowed to fish.
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| Photo credit: www.eoearth.org |
The Exxon Valdez oil spill occurred in March 1989, but the oil didn’t reach Kodiak until several weeks later, first only spotting the beaches of the northern part of the archipelago, then advancing south, plastering the coasts of northern Kodiak Island. The city of Kodiak had an Emergency Services Team in place to respond to disaster, and in the month before the oil hit, there were public meetings with representatives of city, state, and federal agencies. Exxon representatives arrived after the oil hit to take control of the response effort. Thus began a summer that one resident described as a “foreign occupancy.”
As the oil spill began to dominate their lives, many people in Kodiak thought this was a qualitatively different crisis from “normal” fishing crises, or even from the larger natural and man-made disasters of the past. The spill made fishermen see that despite their efforts to preserve a lifestyle, their lives were controlled by the actions of big corporations. They thought Exxon’s handling of the cleanup, even more than the oil itself, had a damaging effect on the Kodiak community. One man said that the Exxon’s presence and behavior during the cleanup effort made the spill different from a natural disaster because “here the guy who did it throws salt in the wound.” There was little trust in the scientific studies conducted by Exxon or government agencies to test whether seafoods were contaminated, or whether beaches were clean enough.
Kodiak residents were angry that the cleanup was not directed by people with local knowledge. “All Exxon knows how to do is write checks,” one person said. With the appearance of an Exxon Command Center, with uniformed security guards, and hundreds of Veco (Exxon’s employment contractor), and government agency personnel swarming in the community, Kodiak seemed to be under foreign occupation. Some attributed the chaotic cleanup operation to Exxon’s calculation rather than to incompetence.
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Protest march against Exxon, summer 1989
(Kodiak Maritime Museum) |
Some in the Lower 48 were skeptical about the hardships suffered by fishermen during the oil spill, especially since Exxon “poured money on the spill” by chartering fishing boats at absurdly high rates and paid unskilled workers $16.79 an hour to clean up the oil. Outside Alaska, more public concern was focused on the damages to subsistence lifestyle in the Alaska Native villages affected by the spill than on damages to the lifestyle of commercial fishermen. Even in Alaska, there was little sympathy for people who made a lot of money by working for Exxon during the oil spill. Kodiak residents commented that some fishermen had the “best season ever” in 1989, becoming “spillionaires.”
Salmon seiners were not allowed to fish in the summer of 1989 because of the possibility of salmon contamination. They waited for weeks as several implausible scenarios were suggested for dealing with salmon unfit for harvest; one idea was to shred the oiled fish and dump them three miles out. Finally, the whole salmon season was closed except for a few set net sites and a terminal fishery around a hatchery. Exxon chartered some of the seine boats after that, but many seiners resented being in this position. These fishermen felt that the deprivation of their freedom to fish represented a general loss of autonomy. Even when Exxon gave compensation to salmon fishermen for not fishing, they felt they had been made into a subject people, waiting for Exxon to give them a handout. Fishermen whose boats were chartered also felt dependent on Exxon, transformed from independent competitors into time-clock employees.
During the summer of 1989, the spill was all that anyone in Kodiak talked about. It was considered the definitive event that brought people’s heads out of the sand regarding their lack of autonomy in relation to the corporate world. Community meetings, daily at first and then less frequently, continued to be well attended and to include public testimony. Fishermen and cannery workers were politicized by the spill. There was a protest march against Exxon. The Seiners Association formed that summer and agitated for a fairer system of chartering vessels. There was a short-lived Crewmen’s Association, whose meetings were always in bars and were usually disrupted by a few outspoken members with specific concerns. The Crude Women began as a group of female fishermen and fishing spouses, displaced by the spill from their usual summer work and evolving into a local environmental advocacy group.
Two years later, however, interest in the spill itself had diminished in Kodiak. With characteristic resilience, Kodiak fishermen had gone on to face other crises. In 1991, the major issue facing local fishermen in Kodiak was the impending individual quota system for halibut and sablefish.
The oil spill was a particularly dramatic arena for demonstrating commercial fishing’s transition from a lifestyle to a business that has been playing out in Kodiak since the beginning of frontier exploitation of resources. The community has thrived on cycles of crisis, resisting a progression toward regulation and efficiency. The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill, a bigger crisis than most, showed fishermen the enormous power of the corporation.
Date Posted: March 1, 2014
Categories: 49 History
Editor’s note: This month Alaskans will commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Exxon Valdez oil spill and the 50th anniversary of the Good Friday Earthquake. All month long this blog will feature posts on both events by a number of Alaska writers and historians. Check back often. We begin the series with this post by John Cloe about the military’s earthquake response.
by John Haile Cloe
The Alaska Good Friday Earthquake began at 5:36 p.m., March 27, 1964, with a force that measured at the time of 8.3 to 8.6 on the Richter Scale, later upgraded to 9.2. It lasted approximately four minutes and affected an approximately 100,000 square-mile area of South Central Alaska with the epicenter over six miles inland from College Fiord. [1]
The earthquake was the largest in North America, the second most powerful after the 1960 Chile earthquake, cost the lives of 115 Alaskans and 16 others killed in Oregon and California. Most resulted from rapidly rising waters caused by tsunami and underwater landslides. [2]
Alaska at the time had a limited natural disaster response capability. It depended for the most part on the Federal Civil Defense system set up to protect civilians from military attack. Up until the earthquake, Alaskans had never faced a natural disaster involving a populated area of that magnitude.
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Operation Helping Hand, Seward
(UAF-1972-153-91) |
The military helped fill the void. Within two minutes of the earthquake, the Alaskan NORAD Command Center in the Alaskan Command headquarters building on Elmendorf AFB became the focal center for damage assessment, response, and subsequent recovery efforts. Lieutenant General Raymond Reeves, Commander-in-Chief, Alaskan Command, quickly arrived to take charge of providing military support to state and local authorities. The military re-established long-line communications within twelve minutes of the first tremor. At the time the military owned and operated the Alaska Communication System that supported civilian and well as military needs.
General Reeves conferred with state and local political leaders and sent a detailed message within hours to Washington D.C. providing an initial assessment. Based in part on the assessment, a call from Governor Egan and other actions, President Johnson declared Alaska a major disaster area March 28. [3]
Subordinate units to the Alaskan Command, the Alaskan Air Command and United States Army, Alaska, also established command centers to respond to earthquake assessment and recovery efforts. At the time, the military did not have plans for dealing with natural disasters, but it did have a command, control, and communications structure and the needed resources. In addition it had the flexibility to respond to changing crisis inherent in military planning, operations, and training. [4]
With rapidly approaching darkness, the military turned its immediate attention to the hard hit Anchorage, whose citizens were being rattled by aftershocks. The city of 100,000 had been hard hit, particularly in areas containing “bootlegger clay” deemed unsafe to build on by geologists. Most of the damages and nine deaths occurred in downtown Anchorage along 4th Avenue and L Street and in the upscale Turnagain subdivision. The control tower at Anchorage International Airport had been toppled and all but 3,000 feet of runway rendered inoperable. The low numbers of dead in contrast to the major damages were attributed to the facts that most people were at home and prepared for cold weather, most homes were built of wood that withstood shaking, and there were no fires. [5]
The military bases, built on firmer ground, had suffered moderate damages. The Elmendorf control tower had also been toppled. A transport pilot parked his plane near the operations building and began controlling air traffic with his radio until a temporary system could be setup. His wife served as a runner. A mobile tower arrived March 28 and Elmendorf became the hub of air operations for disaster relief response. [6]
Elsewhere, soldiers and airmen on the bases quickly restored order. The New York Times and later Anchorage Daily News reported that that men at the Nike Hercules air defense missile site in what is now Kincaid Park had “struggled with numb fingers” to prevent the missiles from exploding. The articles alluded to nuclear warheads, which authorities declined to confirm. [7]
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Relief supplies being delivered by
helicopter (UAF-1972-153-298) |
The Army dispatched troops including 1,350 Alaska National Guard personnel who were completing annual training on Camp Carroll, Fort Richardson to provide urban search and rescue and security in the now darkened Anchorage. The military also dispatched water trailers, generators and set up emergency kitchens and first aid centers during the night. [8] By 7:00 p.m., the military had set up an emergency shelter with kitchen that provided a place for some 1,365 people who had found themselves homeless. [9]
The dawn of March 28 found the stricken landscape plagued by marginal weather that restricted air operations. Despite this, Army helicopters from Fort Wainwright attempted to get through to Valdez, taking off shortly after midnight with medical personnel and medical supplies and equipment. They had to turn back at Gulkana. A truck convoy, which had also left at the same time, got through bringing relief the morning of the 28th. Others followed. The Army, at the request of the mayor, set up an evacuation center at Gulkana, and assisted in the evacuation of some 500 people who found themselves without shelter. Forty-five others remained in Valdez to begin the recovery work. [10]
Valdez, in Prince William Sound near the earthquake epicenter, had been hit hard with 30 lives lost to the earthquake tremors and underwater landslides. Most had gone to the dock area to watch the off-loading of the 10,815 ton M.V. Chena. The waters had receded shortly after the earthquake struck and then came back in full force in a series of huge waves that lifted the Chena 30-feet above the pier and completely demolished the dock area. The Chena survived, but those on the dock did not. One of the vessel’s crew members filmed the crowd watching the off-loading while other crew members pitched fruit to the children and then filmed the full force of the tsunami. It became part of the documentary “Though the Earth Be Moved.” [11] The raging waters also caused major damages to the rest of the town. [12]
Chenega, a Native village of 76, also in Prince William Sound, received earlier warning then Valdez and 51 made it to high ground before a wall of water destroyed the village and killed the rest. The tsunami killed another six in the Price William Sound area at Port Nellie Juan, Port Ashton, Point Nowell, and Whiteside. Whittier lost 13 people. [13]
Casualties from the tsunami would have no doubt been higher if not for the work of the U.S. Fleet Weather Station on Kodiak. Within 30 minutes of the initial earthquake shock, its personnel detected the first sign of a tsunami off Cape Chiniak and immediately issued an evacuation warning for the rest of Kodiak and mainland Alaska. [14] The destructive force of the earthquake left eleven citizens in Kodiak and three dependents at the nearby Navy base dead. The 270 citizens at the other communities on the island and outlining islands made it safety to high ground and were taken care of by the Navy before being evacuated to a temporary camp on Fort Richardson.
The navy also responded by bringing in construction personnel and specialists to restore services. Additional help arrived in the form of Navy and Coast Guard ships. [15]
Seward suffered 13 dead and massive destruction from submarine landslides and large waves confined in the narrow Resurrection Bay. [16] The town was hit with a triple whammy: fire, shock, and tsunami that wiped out the harbor, set the fuel tank farm ablaze, demolished buildings, and caused major damage to the utilities. The only thing remaining intact was the airport. The military put it to good use in the weeks ahead, flying in personnel, equipment, and supplies to set up shelters, provide food, and restore power. The Seward Highway and Alaska Railroad had been rendered useless by multiple avalanches and downed bridges. The military began the slow process of assisting in clearing the way and replacing bridges with temporary ones. [17]
Bad weather hampered air reconnaissance and search and rescue for most of Saturday, March 28. By late afternoon, the Army was able to launch two aerial camera equipped OV-1 Mohawks and two CH-21 Shawnee medium helicopters. The Mohawks were ideally suited for aerial photographs documenting the devastated areas and the helicopters for search and rescue and emergency evacuation. Lieutenant Gary L. Lobal, flying one of the CH-21s reported at 4:00 p.m. that Whittier looked like a “ball of fire” from the burning fuel tanks. They landed to evacuate a seriously injured woman still clutching her dead baby and her husband. On the way back to Fort Richardson, Lobal and his copilot spotted a crowd of motorist on the Seward Highway who had been stranded there since Friday. They landed and loaded sixteen women and children aboard, leaving the men to be rescued later.
The Air Force launched a U-2 strategic reconnaissance aircraft from Eielson AFB and two camera equipped B-58 bombers from Carswell AFB flew photographic missions over devastated area on March 28-29. The high resolutions photographs were immediately flown to Washington D.C. for viewing by President Johnson and senior aides. Other aircraft continued to photograph the damages during the course of the recovery effort. [18]
Weather improved the next day, Sunday, March 29, and Army aircraft took to the air in force flying search and rescue, photo reconnaissance, evacuation, and supply missions. The helicopters proved especially useful in reaching the small communities with little or no airfields. Army aviation also flew passenger missions in support of governmental officials and the media who by now were flocking to Alaska. [19] Altogether in the two weeks that followed the earthquake, Army aviation flew 589 hours in 556 sorties in support of disaster relief, airlifting 137,075 pounds of cargo and transporting 947 passengers.
The Alaskan Air Command and Alaska Air National Guard provided airlift support starting the morning of March 28 when 17 twin-engine C-123 medium transports roared down the runway on Elmendorf AFB heading for the earthquake and tidal wave ravaged communities of Kodiak, Seward and Valdez with cargo bays loaded with supplies and equipment. The airlift continued unabated for 12 days with other aircraft joining in an effort that involved transporting 875,000 pounds of cargo and approximately 1,000 passengers including evacuees from the stricken areas.
Support also came in the form of massive airlift operations flown by the Military Airlift Service, which broke all previous disaster airlift records by hauling in 2,570,000 pounds of cargo ranging from baby food to heavy equipment from Lower 48 bases. It also transported 500 passengers. [20] Members of the Alaska’s Congressional delegation were among the passengers brought up. They along with the director of the White House Office of Emergency Planning arrived the afternoon of March 28 in Air Force One. By then the Department of Interior had assumed responsibility for earthquake response and was operating out of the Anchorage public safety building where the city police department was located.
Victor Fischer, who was among the group arriving in Air Force One, found everyone calm and pitching in to help where they could in the recovery effort. In the weeks ahead, various federal and state agencies worked together to restore essential services and rebuild. [21] The military began winding down its ground support by April 3, but continued to provide air support when required. [22]
In the end, the earthquake provided a significant boost to Alaska’s economy, which was suffering from the end of major military construction and smaller than expected oil revenues. Federal assistance released reconstruction funds totaling hundreds of million of dollars to rebuild the shattered infrastructure. It helped sustain the economy until the discovery of oil at Prudhoe Bay on the North Slope. [23]
In the years that followed, Alaska greatly improved its disaster response capabilities. A Department of Defense directive in 1965 assigned the National Guard with coordinating military disaster response. The Alaska Guard established the Alaska Division of Emergency Services manned by a full time staff with augmentations that could be brought in. The larger communities also established emergency response centers. Training events and exercises were routinely conducted to insure everyone was ready for the next major disaster. [24]
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[1] Grantz, Arthur, Plafjer, George and Kachadoorian, Reuben, Alaska’s Good Friday Earthquake, March 27, 1964, A Preliminary Geologic Evaluation, Geological Survey Circular 491, Geological Survey, U.S. Department of the Interior, Washington DC, 1964; www.aeic.alaska.edu/gqukes/Alaska_1964_earthquake
[2] Report, Committee on the Alaska Earthquake of the Division of Earth Sciences National Research Council, The Great Alaska Earthquake of 1964, Human Ecology, National Academy of Science, Washington DC, 1970. pp.ix-xiii.
[3] Report, HQ Alaskan Command, Operation Helping Hand, The Armed Forces React to Earthquake Disaster, not dated, pp. 2-3.
[4] John Weidman, PhD and MSgt Charles Ravenstein, Hist., Alaskan Air Command, 1946, p. 776; Truman Strobridge, Operation Helping Hand, The United States Army, Alaska and the Alaskan Earthquake, 27 March-7 May 1964, p. ii.
[5] Grantz, Plafjer and Kachadoorian, Reuben, Alaska’s Good Friday Earthquake, pp.14-15.
[6] Weidman and Ravenstein, Hist, AAC, 1964, p.476
[7] “Missiles in Alaska Damaged by Quake,” The New York Times, April 5, 1964; “Flashback: Nukes at Kincaid? ’64 Quake Could Have Set off a Cataclysm,” Anchorage Daily News, Apr 1, 2007.
[8] Report, HQ Alaskan Command, Operation Helping Hand, p. 2-3; Strobridge, Operation Helping Hand, p. 9
[9] Weidman and Ravenstein, Hist, AAC, 1964, p. 476.
[10] ALCOM, Operation Helping Hand, p. 69.
[11] Geological Survey Circular 491, pp. 16-24.
[12] ALCOM, Operation Helping Hand, p. 69-70.
[13] Geological Survey Circular 491, pp. 16 and 25.
[14] Ibid., p. 11.
[15] ALCOM, Operation Helping Hand, p. 42-44.
[16] Geological Survey Circular 491, p. 15.
[17] ALCOM, Operation Helping Hand, p. 50-52.
[18] Weidman and Ravenstein, Hist, AAC, 1964, p.476.
[19] Strobridge, Operation Helping Hand, pp. 27.
[20] ALCOM, Operation Helping Hand, p. 15.
[21] Victor Fischer with Charles Wohlforth, To Russia With Love, An Alaska’s Journey, University of Alaska Press, Fairbanks, AK, 2012, pp.199-210.
[22] Strobridge, Operation Helping Hand, p. 93.
[23] Terrence Cole, Paper, Blinded by Riches: The Permanent Funding Problem and the Prudhoe Bay Effect, prepared for Understanding Alaska Program at Institute of Social and Economic Research University of Alaska Anchorage, Jan 2004.
[24] John Haile Cloe, ALCOM J79 (Historian), Talking Paper, “Civil-Military Disaster Response and Planning in Alaska,” 15 Nov 1990.
