Part 4

From his familiarity with the campground, Hanson felt that 40 campers were probably trapped under the slide. Brauer chilled as Hanson told him that the occupancy could be higher if there were groups, such as Boy Scouts, camped there. He described how often he'd found scout encampments at Rock Creek, and how one scoutmaster had told him that this was a favorite camping objective for many Utah scout troops.

While Brauer was trying for an answer as to how many, others were working on the question of just who was buried under the slide. Mrs. T. Mark Stowe of Sandy, Utah, was considered a probable from the first. Her husband was washed out from under the lower end of the slide, and it was logical to deduce that she'd been caught under the rock mass.

Volunteers from Ennis, Butte, Virginia City and elsewhere walked over the rugged slide for days searching for any kind of clue which might help. They turned up everything from fishing creels, camp equipment, and souvenir pillows to kids' shoes. One slide-walker found an exposed roll of film which was immediately heralded as a hot lead. But when developed, the film turned out to have been ruined by the water. Their findings were kept in a county warehouse in Ennis. Much of it was claimed by those who'd escaped. The debris, so painstakingly gathered, helped little in the search for identity.

The quest evolved into the painful job of waiting, keeping lists, sifting names.

From the moment the quake occurred and the fact that there were casualties became known, phone calls, telegrams, and letters began surging in from all over the U. S. wanting to know about friends and relatives who might be in the area or among the victims.

"The Disaster Service of the American Red Cross did a tremendous job through their teletype and telephone by taking over these inquiries and sending back information through the Home Service chapters," Don Skerritt, Sheriff of Gallatin County, said.

One of the leads was a spaniel discovered wandering in the slide area the day after the quake. The animal wore a Salt Lake dog license tag. This seemed like a certain clue to the identity of some of the victims.

In response to Skerritt's teletype inquiry, Salt Lake police found that the dog supposed to be wearing the tag had been killed months before. Someone had hung the collar in a gas station. Subsequently this collar was put on another dog. Further probing developed that the dog in the quake area belonged to the Ray Painters of Ogden, Utah. Mrs. Painter, one of the casualties, died in the Bozeman hospital a couple of days after the quake.

Skerritt, who's like a quieter, shorter version of Kefauver, worked all that week and for months afterwards on the identity problem. During the first weeks, Red Cross volunteers and personnel worked around the clock to answer the flood of inquiries. There were some 3,000 of them. They felt fortunate that no scout troops turned up missing.

These queries, they painstakingly sifted, sorted, and winnowed down. With tireless persistence, they kept at it, writing to the source of each of the thousands of inquiries to find out if the missing had turned up. New inquiries kept coming in--and still do, asking about people that just plain haven't been heard from, and their relatives, or friends have thought of the slide as a possible explanation.

Through tangible tie-ins, like postcards, letters, the use of credit cards in the area just before the quake, phone calls from the area, they finally got down to a list of those highly probable as slide victims whose bodies will never be uncovered.

Take the case of Roger Provost, an official at the California State Prison at Soledad, California. He had been in touch with his office up to the date of the quake. He was a methodical type. Upon leaving California, he left a planned vacation itinerary stating that the family was to proceed from Yellowstone down the Madison River (August 18, 19, 20 and 21) and to Bozeman, etc. Several cards to friends and relatives postmarked Aug. 16 at West Yellowstone, Montana, stated that the family was at a trailer campsite "on the Madison River, about 30 miles from Yellowstone."

Another family, Robert J. Williams and wife, Coy, children Michael, 7; Steven, 11; and Christy, 3, of Idaho Falls, had told relatives they planned on fishing the Madison River. They registered as visitors at the Museum in Virginia City on August 17, 1959, and weren't heard of again.

Dr. Merle Edgerton and his wife, Edna, in their car and trailer, were travelling with Harmon Woods and his wife, Edna, who also brought their car and trailer. Dr. Edgerton kept in daily contact with his hospital in Coalinga, California, up to the time of the slide. He was last heard from on August 15, giving the families' location as "on the Madison River, outside Ennis, 35 miles from Yellowstone."

The complete list of those who on such evidence are considered buried under the monumental Madison Canyon slide totalled 19. They are:

Sidney D. Ballard, wife, and son of Nelson, B. C.

Bernie L. Boynton and wife, Inez, of Billings, Montana.

Dr. Merle Edgerton and wife, Edna, of Coalinga, California.

Roger Provost, and wife, Elizabeth, and sons, Richard 16, and David, 1-1/2, of Soledad, California.

Mrs. Thomas Mark Stowe of Sandy, Utah.

Robert J. Williams, and wife, Coy, and children, Steven, 11; Michael, 7, and Christy, 3 of Idaho Falls, Idaho.

Harmon Woods and wife, Edna, of Coalinga, Calif.

The other quake casualties include Mr. Purley Bennett and children, Tommy, Carole and Susan of Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, who, along with Thomas Stowe of Sandy, Utah, were found below the slide. Mr. and Mrs. E. H. Stryker of San Mateo, California, were killed by the boulders at the Cliff Lake Campground. Mrs. Myrtle Painter of Ogden, Utah, and Mrs. Margaret Holmes of Billings, Montana, died of quake injuries in the Bozeman Hospital.

The final Montana-Yellowstone Earthquake death toll stands at 28.

CD AND NATURAL DISASTERS

Natural disasters, like the Montana-Yellowstone Earthquake, are perhaps the best test of our Civil Defense readiness. Until the quake, CD Director Hugh Potter wasn't at all sure that he had an outfit at all. Operating on a short budget of $21,000 a year, with all of the third biggest, sprawled-out state to organize, he'd set up, at least on paper, state-wide and county CD groups. He'd compiled an exhaustive inventory of state facilities, resources, etc., complete to such minutiae as the number of aspirins in the state (1,657,000 5-gr. tablets), and the amount of meat Montana's abundant wildlife represented (58,517,725 lbs., including 1,000 bison, 415 grizzly bears).

The alerts he'd organized weren't notable successes, and he'd caught some hell from the higher-ups for not being current on the state-wide alerts which are supposed to be held at least once a year.

"Our people just aren't too enthusiastic about practice alerts," Potter says. "Frankly, they feel it's a waste of time. They're busy. They don't want to play war. A guy will say, 'I want to go fishing, or put up a hay crop, or something.'

"But let a real emergency happen and they're right there.

"During that first day Ed Cottingham and I were busy pulling triggers. I realized then that the most important thing I'd done during my seven years as CD director was getting around and getting to know who to phone--the people you can count on to get something done in an emergency. You can get the heck of a lot done if you know the right guy to call.

"There isn't a CD department that didn't check in right away to find out if they were needed.

"We're especially lucky to have the U. S. Forest Service (the big slide happened in the Beaverhead National Forest) in our area. Their experience and constantly organized readiness to meet the threat of forest fires right now makes them an ideal outfit for any emergency. Forest Service firefighting squads, transport, equipment, and information about the area are all set up to move in a matter of minutes. They're most adaptable to the kind of crisis the earthquake threw at us.

"You can tell the Forest Service your problem and quit worrying.

"Another important outfit is the Montana Forestry Department, which is set up to administer and protect the state's forests. Its boss, Gareth Moon, is head of the CD's Rural Firefighting Section.

"We have a good, mobile law enforcement outfit in the Montana Highway Patrol. The Montana Fish and Game Dept. men, in emergency, serve as an excellent backwoods force.

"Frank Wiley, Montana Dept. of Aeronautics director and one of the real pioneer pilots who can still fly anything from a jet to a Jenny, took over our flying problems."

At 8:45 A. M., as part of a CD emergency plan called "Operation Bulldozer," set up by the Associated General Contractors, Jack Marlowe, secretary of the Montana Contractors' Assn., had completed a list and location of all heavy construction equipment in the area and reported that all contractors were on standby in case they were needed.

The State Dept. of Health was on the ball, too. They were moving in personnel to test water in Ennis, West Yellowstone and throughout the quake area by 9:00 the morning after the quake.

At 9:15 word came in that the Red Cross was flying in emergency personnel from the west coast.

Potter was thrilled by the offers of help that kept CD HQ phones busy. General Keith R. Barney of the Army Corps of Engineers called offering any help needed. The governors of Idaho and Wyoming and three Canadian provinces asked if there was anything they could do. Idaho's highway patrol actually came up and helped keep things under control in the West Yellowstone area.

Several search and rescue outfits called, offering aid. A combined Army, Navy and Marine Corps Reserve unit from Butte gathered their medical equipment and ambulances and sped to the Ennis side of the slide as a voluntary, unpaid action.

There were offers from the crack mine rescue teams from the famous Anaconda Company mines in Butte. When a call went out on the regular radio for housing for the Ennis evacuees, several hundred accommodations were phoned in to a local Butte station. Another abortive suggestion that men on horseback might be needed to search some of the impassable back country brought over a hundred volunteers in less than an hour. A Bozeman station was overwhelmed with offers in response to an announcement that station wagons would be needed at the airport to ambulance the wounded to the hospital.

Nurses, doctors, National Guardsmen, skindivers--they all called in wanting to help.

At Great Falls, where the Montana Red Cross Blood Bank was holding a regularly scheduled drawing, when word came that they were flying blood to Bozeman to help the victims, so many volunteers showed up that the total exceeded 450 pints, and at closing time 150 donors were still in line.

"We had special problems--distance from any sizeable town was one. I'd hate to think of the casualties if the quake hit in a really populated area," Potter said.

"The mountains, which obstruct short-wave signals and set up all sorts of radio blind spots, made it difficult to get any sort of ground radio communication going. It was impossible from the ground, to signal to Ennis or to Hebgen Dam from West Yellowstone. The radio amateurs did a tremendous job of helping those first few hours--they set up a standby network and kept it clear for emergency messages. One ham, Father Francis A. Peterson, (W7RKI), from St. Anthony, Idaho, one of the first to report the quake, loaded up his gear, drove to West Yellowstone, and by 7:45 A. M. the morning after the quake had set up radio control at the otherwise radioless West Yellowstone Airport. Another ham, Harold L. Beddor, (W7JPD), of Dillon, Montana, handled emergency communications from Dillon the day after the quake, then flew his equipment to the West Yellowstone Airport to help out too.

"The problem was complicated by the multiplicity of wave lengths on which the various civilian and military agencies were operating. We discovered that the high frequency bands the Civil Defense uses (150 megacycles) are useless in mountain country, especially in the day time. Lower frequencies, 34.82 and 46.86 megacycles did get through.

"All that first day or so, we relied on the Highway Department plane, which was radio-equipped, to get messages across the quake area. It stayed in the air all day.

"The mountain altitude (at the dam the elevation is 6,550 ft.), presented aviation difficulties, too. Smaller helicopters couldn't make it, and some of the bigger jobs were tricky to fly in the less dense mountain air.

"We had difficulty with aerial sightseers. In spite of our announcement that the fields at West Yellowstone and Ennis were closed to all but emergency aircraft, planes flew in from all over. Charter pilots flew in from as far away as Arizona, and did a brisk business in flying the curious over the quake area at $6 a head. Including the Air Force ships, during the first few days the West Yellowstone Airport was as busy as Chicago's Midway Field, with planes taking off and landing at the rate of one a minute. With all the traffic over the slide area, it was a miracle that we got through that first week without a crash.

"But as a result of the quake we know that any area which has this kind of emergency will make out OK with the wonderful spirit of people, helping and wanting to help."

AFTERMATH

Among the cataclysms of nature, none is more terrifying than an earthquake, and huge slides, like the one triggered by the Madison Canyon earthquake, are perhaps the most dramatic type of geologic change. In one sudden, spectacular moment, changes take place that make us think of the tremendous energy released by atomic fission, the earth's mass moves in a volume that rocks the imagination, and its effect on the people who are near, or in the path of nature's huge, impulsive-seeming change helps us to realize how infinitesimal we are before the forces and laws of nature.

In 1903, a 40 million cubic yard rock slide crashed down from the crest of Turtle Mountain onto the coal-mining town of Frank, Alberta, killing 70 people.

But the consequences of such huge slides aren't completed when the cliff toppling ceases. Take the case of the famous June 23, 1925, Gros Ventre slide in northwestern Wyoming, 40 miles south of Yellowstone Park. An estimated 50 million cubic yards of rock and debris plunged down the steep canyon wall, shot across the valley floor, and rushed some 350 feet up the opposite wall of the canyon before it settled back, like water sloshing in a huge bowl.

Nobody was killed when this slide choked the Gros Ventre River. It covered parts of two ranches and buried six head of cattle. But two years later, in May, 1927, the water dammed by the slide pushed out a big section of the slide and the sudden wave of water and debris washed away the town of Kelly, Wyoming, killing seven people.

This kind of possibility was in the mind of Army Corps of Engineers Missouri River Chief Keith R. Barney as he and Lt. Col. Walter W. Holgrefe of the Corps district offices at Garrison Dam in North Dakota, discussed the Montana earthquake's action. The slide represented a double threat to people in the Madison Valley below.

As an immediate effect of the slide, the water flowing over Hebgen Dam was stopped by the slide. The formation of a lake behind the slide began the moment of the slide. When it filled, this 240-foot deep impoundment, called Earthquake or "Quake" Lake, would exert an enormous pressure on the slide. If the slide was composed of unstable material, its collapse could, in a repeat of the Gros Ventre tragedy, bring death and destruction to the valley towns of Ennis, Three Forks, and Trident below.

The second and greater threat was the discovery that when Quake Lake filled, its impounded water would lap at the foundations of Hebgen Dam, and quite possibly undermine it, releasing a volume of water seven times that of the earthquake-caused reservoirs, which could also sweep part of the slide along in its mad rush.

Like the threat of a time bomb, the rising level of Quake Lake, and the increasing pressure of the water against the slide, augmented by rumor, kept the downstream towns in constant anxiety.

The Army Corps of Engineers rushed into emergency action. They flew in a 50-man-staff, and set up headquarters in the Stagecoach Inn at West Yellowstone.

The mines in Butte were on strike, and huge earth moving equipment from the open pit operations, along with rigs from other contractors, worked around the clock to cut a 250-foot wide and 14-foot deep channel across the mile and a half long slide and armor it with rock so the water couldn't cause sudden erosion of the rest of the slide before the water topped the huge natural dam.

On September 10, water licked over the new spillway, running into the river bed just below, which had been dry since the quake. To the Corps's great surprise, severe erosion tore the downstream face of the slide. To remedy this, they launched another crash program to cut a 50-foot deep channel across the top of the slide. It was completed October 29.

The Corps's operations on the slide took a total of close to $1,700,000 of funds set up for such emergencies. As a result, the towns below the slide are safe from the flood threat the slide might represent.

LIVING GEOLOGY

Just how common are mass earth shakeups like the Montana-Yellowstone Earthquake, anyhow?

Geologists tell us they're frequent, with a dozen or more major quakes, and thousands of minor tremors happening each year.

Earthquakes are the natural outcome of the fact that the earth, while seeming substantial and changeless, is constantly, if most gradually, in the process of change. Mountains are thrust up. Glaciers carve them down. Volcanoes pour out their molten rock. Rivers and floods scour their erosive paths. Sediments slide and settle.

The enormous masses which great internal earth forces have raised up to mountain height, create counter stresses. These forces build up for years, sometimes for centuries or longer.

Eventually something has to give. When this happens on a grand, or spectacular scale, we call it an earthquake.

Whether you're a connoisseur, expert, or not, the spectacular 1959 Montana-Yellowstone Earthquake was a beaut. Geologists call it a "textbook earthquake," because it included nearly all of the classic actions, or results which quakes are likely to cause.

It ranked right along with San Francisco's 1906 shakedown as among the severest earthquakes on the North American continent.

In seismic measurements, it rated 7.8 on the Richter Scale, as compared with San Francisco's 8.2.

It set up so called tidal waves, or seiches, on Hebgen Lake. There were at least three of these huge waves--20-ft. high--which overtopped the entire 721-ft. length of the dam by four feet. Eyewitness statements relate that the velocity of the tidal wave was so great that it caused the water literally to leap over the top of the dam. It filled the small generating plant with a 2 to 4 ft. deep layer of rocks.

Although the dam stood, the quake caused several fractures in the core wall, one of which showed a 3- to 4-inch separation, and shattered the dam's concrete spillway.

The earthquake created three major faults, with displacement on the Red Canyon Fault running as much as 20 ft., which stacks up impressively alongside the 26-ft. maximum displacement resulting from San Francisco's quake. (These two earthquakes differed, however, in that the Montana displacement was vertical, while San Francisco's was horizontal.)

According to the Society of Military Engineers, surveys from benchmarks outside the earthquake-affected areas show that the earth in the Hebgen Dam Quake area near Hebgen Dam has settled between eighteen and nineteen feet from its level before the quake.

It wasn't uniform, though. The quake caused tilting, which showed up in the way the north side of Hebgen Lake had sunk eight feet, while the south side of the lake, docks, boats, etc., were sticking eight feet out of the water.

The quake also caused many sink, or more properly, blow holes. These phenomena are also known as sandspouts. Water, compressed and forced up and out by quake action washes out layers of sand sub strata. The overhead surface areas naturally drop into the hole, leaving a puzzling hunk of slumped ground--separate from the normal scarps--as big as 15 x 50 ft. in area.

The Montana-Yellowstone quake sent seismographs jiggling as far away as New Zealand. It caused fluctuation of water level in wells as much as ten feet in nearby Idaho, a tenth of a foot in Hawaii, 3,200 miles away, and .01 ft. in Puerto Rico.

The huge concrete Hungry Horse Dam, near Columbia Falls, Montana, 250 miles NW of the quake area, showed measurable displacement as a result of the quake. In remote Seattle, the diminished tremors were still strong enough to break loose the floating amphitheatre in Lake Washington.

But by far the most spectacular effect of Montana's Earthquake was the huge landslide at the mouth of the Madison Canyon.