Part 2

One stranded group, calling for help, included a wheelchair case, and, mucking shoeless through the water, they portaged him out, chair and all. George Whitmore had a badly injured eye--from running into a rope, and it looked like he might lose its sight.

They all moved to the highway, which was still dry. A motley crew they were, in pajamas, or almost unclothed, some shoeless. By this time the water had covered their cars. Some of the wounded were taken by car toward Hebgen Dam--away from the slide.

Marooned, without their cars, in a strange, shaking canyon--prisoners of a night in which everything seemed mad, somehow word reached them that their ordeal might not be over. There was possibility that a dam several miles upstream, which they'd never seen, was likely to give way any minute. So they scrambled up the sagebrush hillside and built a fire on a level and fairly open site.

Others joined the two families. One group, whose car hadn't been flooded so suddenly, managed to save groceries, a camp stove, sleeping bags, pans and a 9 x 12 ft. plastic tarp.

Without worrying about modesty, they dried themselves around the fire. There were 17 in the party. It cleared, and then clouds obscured the moon. The ground kept shaking. With almost every new tremor came sparks and puffs of dust, and the terrifying, crashing echoes of another avalanche across the valley, and the realization that the valley side above them might go any time. The air was full of dust and the sickening smell of mud and torn fir trees. All through the night they heard the haunting cries of "Help, help--we're freezing," from the Grover Maults, who'd been marooned on top of their trailer and by this time were hanging onto a tree.

They worried about forest fires, and sang hymns to keep up their courage.

At 3:00 A. M. there was a thunderstorm and a light, continuing rain. They huddled under the plastic tarp--all 21 of them--and wondered what would happen next.

An elderly couple, the Grover C. Maults, a 72-year-old retired decorator and his wife, Lillian, 68, of Temple City Calif., had parked their trailer at the scenic Rock Creek Campground for a week before the especially beautiful, bright moonlight night of August 17th. There were lots of bears in the area, and like many other campers, when the first jolt hit them, they figured that the bears were trying to get into their trailer.

"No, it must be an earthquake," Mrs. Mault said.

Looking out through the trailer window, the moon made it seem like daylight. Everything was going upside down. An instant later their trailer was tossed end over end, landing, miraculously, on its wheels. Then it seemed as though something picked the trailer up and hurled it into the water.

Mault got his "nightie-clad missus" out of the trailer and lifted her on top, and went back into the trailer to get sweaters or something. It suddenly turned dark. The moon disappeared in dust. The water had risen to Mault's chin by the time he got out of the trailer.

By the time he'd crawled on the trailer roof, put on trousers, a shirt and sweater, and wrapped clothing around his wife's legs, the water was beginning to cover the trailer roof and rising fast. They prayed that the trailer would drift toward a nearby tree. It did. The first branch broke as Mault grabbed it. He barely had time to get one arm around the tree and hold onto his wife with the other when the trailer was swept out from under them.

"It was horrible," he says. "As I tried to pull the missus up the limbs kept breaking off. I tried to grab higher limbs and cling to the missus with my legs. The limbs still kept breaking off. Finally we found a limb that would hold.

"We were surrounded by deep water. Through the night we hollered and hollered for help. People tried to get to us with ropes, couldn't reach us, and yelled that we should hang on, they were going for a boat.

"While we struggled to hold on, we could see the mountains sliding and falling every few minutes. There'd be a terrific roar, followed by more slides. I thought the world was coming to an end. It turned hazy, with thunder, lightning, then began to rain.

"As we clung to the tree, with water up to our necks, my wife slipped under three or four times. The last time she was gasping for breath, I managed to pull her out.

"'Let me go and save yourself,' she begged. 'If you go, I'll go, too,' I told her.

"About 8:00 or 8:30 in the morning they came for us in a boat. It was just in time. We couldn't have held out for another ten minutes. The water was rising so fast that the rescuers had to move their truck three times before they could unload the boat.

"At first, when rescued, we could see lights, then everything went black. We couldn't hear anything over the roar of the tumbling mountains. We were froze stiff from hanging on so long. We couldn't move our legs. The men had to help us into the boat."

In contrast to those who stood around and wondered was L. D. Smith, of Greeley, Colorado, who with his family was camped in a trailer at the Beaver Creek Campground a couple of miles downstream from Hebgen Dam. The loud noise and rumbling woke him. Outside the trailer, he found the water rising. The ground was shaking violently. He didn't know what was causing it, but his first thought was that the dam had broken. The steep-walled canyon didn't seem like a safe place for his family. As soon as the shaking subsided temporarily, he loaded his wife and two youngsters into the car and drove away from the dam, the collapse of which he instinctively felt was the greatest danger, as fast as he could.

A mile or two before he reached the slide, he ran into heavy dust. Still fearful of what the dam's collapse would mean for those trapped in the deep canyon, when the slide blocked his path he turned off the road and drove up the north side of the canyon wall to a point where he couldn't get any more traction. He then got his family out of his car and moved them to still higher ground.

Later in the evening his family joined the Osts and Fredericks around the fire on the hillside.

At about 8:00 o'clock on the same gorgeous moonlight night of August 17, the Purley Bennett family of Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, pulled their trailer off alongside the road on the flat at the mouth of the Madison Canyon Gorge. They didn't plan to set up camp--just to rest for a few hours before continuing to the park. They talked a bit with others camped in the same informal area, then turned in. Purley, a 43-year-old truck driver, and his wife, Irene, slept in the trailer. The youngsters--Carole, 17; Phillip, 15; Tom, 10, and Susan, 5, stretched out in bedrolls outside on the ground.

They were awakened a little before midnight by a loud rumbling noise. They wondered what it was, but weren't concerned enough to get up or move their equipment. Some time later, in response to a much louder noise, Bennett left the trailer to see about the children. Mrs. Bennett was right behind him. As she stepped out of the trailer, she felt a strong wind coming up. There was a great rumbling, whooshing sound, and as the wind reached hurricane velocity she saw her husband grab a small tree for support. The wind swept him off his feet--he hung on like a flag tied to a mast. After a little bit he let go and was blown away. She never saw him again. She couldn't see her children, except one flying through the air. A car was blown by, rolling over and over, and she found herself swept along with the trees, the rocks, and water.

"When I came to," she said, "I was jammed against a tree with a log on my back. I don't know how I got out. I thought I was the only one of my family still alive."

Then, over the awful moaning of the boulders grinding and crashing and the sound of the tree trunks howling through the air, she heard the voice of her son, Phillip, calling.

Slowly, painfully, in spite of crippling injuries, they dragged, an inch at a time, toward one another over the rocky, oozy bed of the river which the huge slide had instantaneously stopped. Highway Patrolman Stevens, who found them several hours later, noticed how torn their hands were from this agonizing crawl.

That morning, in the hospital at Ennis, Mrs. Bennett told reporters, "They say my husband and my boys are dead, but I have faith. I know they will be found."

They already had been--dead.

OUTSIDE WORLD

The Montana-Idaho, Wyoming area where the quake hit is a big, sprawled-out area where it's easy to get the feeling of isolation when everything's normal--the roads open, the phone lines and lights working.

In one shattering blow, the earthquake cut most of this area's access and communication. Big sections of the Yellowstone Park roads were blocked by slides and boulders. The road north of West Yellowstone was impassable. Big hunks of the road between the Duck Creek Y and Hebgen Dam had crumbled and slipped into the lake causing four major breaks and several minor ones. The big slide formed an 80 million ton block at the west exit of the canyon, and at Wade Lake, road breakup had immobilized another group of terrified campers.

For the first few hours after the quake, one of the biggest problems for the trapped was to get word out, and for those outside to get some idea of just what had happened.

At the instant of the quake, the Berkeley seismograph showed shock in the West Yellowstone area.

The first man to get word out was amateur radio operator Warren Russell, who operates station K7ICM from his trailer house in West Yellowstone, who began broadcasting news of the quake at 11:43 P. M.

At 11:50, another ham, Fr. Francis A. Peterson of St. Anthony, Idaho, contacted Idaho State Police, who relayed the word to HQ in Boise, and thence to the National Warning System at Battle Creek, Michigan.

At 12:25 A. M. on the first detail report from the Western Section of the Alert System it was reported that Hebgen Dam was demolished and that there were 6 feet of mud and water at the town of Ennis.

When the quake hit at 11:37 P. M., it woke Austin Bailey, resident maintenance man for the Montana Highway Department at Duck Creek Junction--where the road takes off along the north side of Hebgen Lake and through Madison Canyon. He noticed the light overhead jumping, furniture moved from the wall, the lights weren't working. Realizing that such a shaking would topple rocks onto the highway, he knew that he should get out and clear the roads before the heavy tourist traffic got underway next morning.

Outside everything seemed normal. He got into his own station wagon to make an initial check, started out, and 30 feet later drove over the 15 feet high scarp embankment--the main earthquake fault that had dropped off between the maintenance shed and the highway.

Shaken, but not hurt, he crawled out of the car, aware that something was seriously haywire, and that he had to call for outside help.

He went a mile to the nearest telephone. It was out. In the maintenance shed, where the heavy equipment and trucks are stored, he found the 16-ton rotary snowplow had been jolted eight feet out of its position the night before.

The radio transmitter in his pickup either wasn't working, or couldn't reach the area Highway Department HQ in Bozeman. The road, when he managed to reach it, was shredded by long cracks, running along the length of the road.

He loaded up his family and started north to get the word out that they needed help on the roads in the West Yellowstone area. At the Y he found an overturned Cadillac that had flipped coming over a continuation of the same scarp which ran through his own yard. Driving carefully--at times it was like straddling a grease rack--he finally found a phone that worked at Almart Lodge, 40 miles north of West Yellowstone. Highway District Engineer George Barrett logged Bailey's call at 1:50 A. M.

The quake caught Montana's Civil Defense Director Hugh K. Potter in bed. Potter, a grizzled former Montana Highway Patrol Captain and Helena Police Commissioner, had lived through Helena's 1935-6 earthquake. This earlier quake had logged some 3,000 recorded tremors, killed 4 people and destroyed several buildings, including Helena's City Hall. Potter wasn't greatly impressed by the somewhat diminished-by-distance initial shock, and went back to sleep.

At 1:30 A. M., the Helena Police rousted out city fireman Ed Cottingham and reported that fragments of information about an earthquake which had caused severe damage in the state were coming in on police radio. At 1:32 Cottingham called Potter, and they went down and set up state Civil Defense HQ in Helena's City Hall, an Arabic-style former Shriners' building which also houses the capital city's fire and police department.

For the next two hours, their life was a turbulence seething with rumors. The steep walled canyons and high mountains which obstructed normal police short wave radio added to the problem of already disrupted communications in getting information out of the quake area.

Trying to piece together just what had happened, the damage, and what help was needed was like a horror movie about "THE THING," with the exact nature of the horror emerging through the confusion and hysteria in small clues and fragments.

At CD HQ, Potter realized the possibility of Hebgen Dam's collapse, bursting, shattering, breaking in the quake. It's an un-reinforced concrete-core earthfill dam 721 feet long, built in 1913 by the Montana Power Co. to regularize the flow of the Madison for downstream power generation. Its failure would threaten the tourists in the valley, and the sleepy 600 population town of Ennis, 65 miles below the canyon mouth.

Conflicting rumors filled the air--that the dam was destroyed. By 2:00 A. M., the police and Highway Department radio frequencies were zinging with these and other unconfirmed reports leaking in about the plight of the dam and the canyon. In Helena, Potter struggled with a vision of a smaller re-enactment of the Johnstown Flood in Ennis if the dam did, or had, let go.

FIRST PATROL

Montana Highway Patrolman Glen Stevens made the first probe up the Madison Valley after the quake. In response to a request for help from Madison County Sheriff Lloyd Brooks in Virginia City, Stevens and Deputy Sheriff "Dutch" Buhl wheeled down to Ennis, arriving at about 2:30 o'clock. The telephone lines were out. It seemed important to warn people farther up the valley of the danger they were in. Some of the folks had already fled. One ranch family was still in bed. There were three groups of sleeping campers. They didn't argue or waste time. When Stevens suggested they get out, they just left.

As Stevens and Buhl proceeded up the valley, they radioed in at frequent intervals that everything seemed normal. They reported rock on the road at various intervals from 26-mile hill on south to the place above Hutchins Bridge, where boulders tumbling from a rock cliff made the road impassable. Cabin camp operator Otto Kirby had got his people out, but there were two house trailers parked farther up, near the river. Stevens warned the occupants, and got them started out. They gassed up at Kirby's ranch. It was cloudy and dark. At 3:15 o'clock Stevens radioed in that the water was muddy but otherwise seemed OK, and that he planned to cross the bridge and drive up along the river on an old road on the south side. Sheriff Brooks tried to discourage them, shouting via radio--"Don't do it, you crazy bastards, the dam's broke, and you'll get killed too. Come back!"

It was this message which, picked up on other radios, and relayed to Helena, sparked CD director Hugh Potter to order the evacuation of Ennis.

With Sheriff Brooks's warning fresh in mind, Stevens says, "Every turn we got off that bench, I thought we were going to meet swimming water."

As they moved up the valley, they got the message that a couple of people had been killed in the campground at Cliff Lake, to the south of the Madison, so when they hit the Raynolds Pass road, they headed that way.

They got there at daybreak, about 4:45 A. M. They found that a rock cliff had fallen across the road which ran along the lake, marooning the campers.

At the campground they found two campers dead, killed in a bizarre and gruesome accident. The E. H. Strykers of San Mateo, California, were camped on an improved campsite, with a fire site, a picnic table, and a place to park their car. Their three youngsters slept in a tent 100 feet away. The quake dislodged huge, eight-ton chunks of rock, and set them bounding downwards in a freakish, crescent shaped path, tearing the ground, and toppling 60-year-old fir trees in their downward rush. Nimbly, two of these boulders bounded over the picnic table, stacked with food, and landed squarely on top of the sleeping bags in which the Stryker parents slept.

"It wasn't pretty," Stevens said. "But there wasn't anything we could do. The rocks were too big to move, so we went down toward the Shaw Ranch and got Frank Shaw to take his 4x4 truck up and move the rocks off them.

"We drove back down to the highway to continue up to the canyon. In the freshening daylight on the way down from the high bench back into the valley we could see a couple of trailers down the highway near the mouth of the canyon. A Fish and Game Commission plane flew over, radioing something about an obstruction across the lower end of the canyon, and having two to three hours to get the people out. We had no idea what they meant. We got to the trailers. They wanted to know how to get out--the next section of the highway was blocked with rocks and boulders. We routed them across the river and out Raynolds Pass way into Idaho.

"One of the guys said he thought there were a couple of people still alive across the river. We got to the slide about 5:45 o'clock--the huge pile of millions of tons of rock where the highway used to be. You couldn't believe what you were looking at.

"Somebody said something about a 'little slide'.

"'Little!' I said to Dutch, 'I'd hate like hell to see a big one!'

"The after-shocks that kept happening--with rocks crashing down and dirt and dust blowing up--didn't contribute to our peace of mind, either. But we didn't have much time to look.

"We struggled across the river--the slide had stopped the water, but left a muddy ooze and some water lying around in pools as much as three feet deep. We found Mrs. Irene Bennett lying in the rocky stream bed. She was cold and shivering. She didn't have a stitch on. Neither did her son, Phillip, who was lying near her. Both of them were bruised and bashed. The Bennett boy had a broken right leg, shoulder, etc. We put Mrs. Bennett on an old wooden frame canvas cot and started across the slippery river bed with her. She must have weighed 180. As we struggled through the slippery muck she kept apologizing for causing us so much trouble, and told us about her husband and three other children, the other folks who were camped near her, and the tremendous spurt of wind and mud that threw them out from under the slide. She told how she'd come to--believing herself the only one of her family who'd survived. Despairing, she heard Phil calling from a spot 75 feet away where the water had thrown him. Their torn hands gave the story of the agonizing effort these crippled survivors had made to drag themselves together over the rocky stream bed.

"By radio we asked the Fish and Game Commission plane flying overhead to go to Ennis and get Dr. Losee and fly him back, and land him on the highway nearby. We didn't want to disturb Mrs. Bennett by moving her off the cot, so we put her into a station wagon. Morris Staggers, who lives nearby, showed up with an old iron bedstead, older than anyone there, and heavier, too. I'll never forget the struggle we had carrying the Bennett boy across on it.

"We took the Bennetts up to where the plane landed on the highway and turned them over to the doctor. Returning to the slide area, the increasing light made the slide seem even more formidable. That morning, working with Fish & Game Commission, etc., we found all of the people Mrs. Bennett had told us about except one. Like Mrs. Bennett and her son, all of these bodies had been stripped of their clothing and showed the effects of being beat to hell by wind and water. The coroner said all five of them died by drowning. We never did find Mrs. Marilyn Stowe, wife of Sandy, Utah elementary school music teacher T. Mark Stowe, whose body we did find--she must still be under the slide.

"I just don't care to go through any more mornings like that," Stevens said.

CD'S PUZZLE

At 2:00 A. M. Potter called in Montana State Highway Engineer Fred Quinnell, Don Brown of the Montana Fish and Game Department, and Captain Alex Stephenson, Chief of the Montana Highway Patrol, to help sort out the rumors in the tense hours ahead. At 2:15 A. M. George Barrett, highway engineer in Bozeman, radioed to Helena Austin Bailey's report on road conditions in the West Yellowstone area.

Another report from a road maintenance man in the Ennis area brought some word of a rise in the Madison, way downstream from the Canyon. When asked by phone, Jack Corette, president of the Montana Power Co., said that he felt it unlikely that the dam had gone out. As a precautionary measure to protect communities farther downstream on the Madison, an immediate drawdown of Meadow Lake and Canyon Ferry reservoirs was begun.

At 2:53 Bozeman Sheriff Don Skeritt reported that through the ham radio net that was rapidly taking up the slack in communications, he'd messaged his deputy, Everett Biggs, in West Yellowstone. A short time later he'd received word that there was still much violent shaking in the area ... that the lake had gone down substantially ... and the dam was still holding.