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National Geographic : 1964 Jul
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Raging Wall of Water Topped by Flaming Oil Sweeps Into Seward Fleeing for their lives, dock workers race frantically for high ground. Behind them a thirty-foot-high wave, covered with burning oil, surges at a speed of more than 100 miles an hour across the railroad tracks and into the port's east end. Locomotives and boxcars, their wheels shorn off by the impact, hurtle ahead of the comber. Twisted rails, oil drums, and pier pilings ride the lip of the fiery flood, second and larg est of a succession that swept over the ill-fated town. Railroad agent Earl Cham bers witnessed this never-to-be forgotten moment. He watched the wave swallow the workshop at left and bear down on his au tomobile as he and his wife sped for the hills. Artist Pierre Mion-one of a six-man NATIONAL GEOGRAPH IC team that flew to Alaska to cover the disaster-interviewed Mr. Chambers and other resi dents on the spot. From their recollections he re-created the climax of Seward's agony. salmon boats were bucking at their moorings. Quickly, unbelievably, the first high tide dis appeared, and for a brief time Kodiak's fleet looked as if it were all in one gigantic dry dock. Then the sea came back, and in moments Alaska's largest king-crab fishing center was all but wiped out, boats, canneries, and all. No one argues about Kodiak's big wave it was a cresting, thirty-foot-high wall of water that thundered up the channel, lifting 100-ton crab boats on its shoulder and flinging them like empty peanut shells over the har bor's stone jetty and sometimes two or three blocks into town (page 116). "Couple of boats went over the jetty and come back without a scratch," one crab-boat skipper remarked dryly. "But that's nothing -Kraft's store, she done it twice." Another saying grew up in town that night: "Come to Kodiak to see the tide come in and the town go out." Selief logged a good many hundreds of yards by wave action that night. At one point Captain Cuthbert remembers a breather be tween waves, or tides, when he ran out a mooring line to the nearest thing at hand-a telephone pole. Finally he came aground sev eral blocks in from the waterfront. 129
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