Read Online Cascadia's Fault by Jerry Thompson - Free Book Online Page A

wrongly assumed the danger had passed. Curiosity and bravado drew them to the inky rubble.
    â€œFive 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.
    Measurements were made by a network of seismic stations around the globe, but