CRESCENT CITY, Calif. — Even today, the motels place the one-page flier in each room. "TSUNAMI!" it reads. "How to survive this hazard in the Crescent City Area."
The sheet features a simple drawing of a giant wave, and a stick figure fleeing up the beach. Anyone can see that the stick figure won't make it.
Forty years after the only tsunami ever to take lives in the continental United States swept through this town, washing away 29 city blocks and killing 11 people, the calamity seems to hang in the ever-present fog.
"It came all the way from Alaska," said Wally Griffin, 80, trying to explain the tsunami's place in the culture of Crescent City. "It traveled at almost 500 miles an hour. It was an amazing thing -- an amazing, tragic thing."
When the tsunami struck, this was a fishing town and a timber town. It's neither anymore.
The slow fading of salmon fishing and the one-by-one closures of the 100-odd sawmills fundamentally changed this underemployed, underpaid town of 7,500. But neither erases the memories and awe of the nighttime waves that prompted one city official to say the next morning: "Crescent City is gone."
Humboldt State University's geology department offers a full tsunami study curriculum. The local bowling alley is called Tsunami Bowl. Every other cafe, it seems, features Griffin's black-and-white photos of the wreckage as their primary decor.
At 5:36 p.m. Alaska Standard Time on March 27, 1964, an earthquake struck beneath the seafloor 55 miles west of Valdez, Alaska. It was a magnitude 9.2, larger than this week's temblor in the Indian Ocean.
The bucking of the ocean floor and subsequent underwater landslides sent out a series of colossal waves that began spreading across the Pacific. The tsunami quickly hit Alaska, killing 106 people in two dozen towns. Over the next few hours, the waves rushed ashore in British Columbia, Canada, then Washington state, causing millions of dollars in damage but taking no lives.
Shortly before midnight, the tsunami hit the town of Newport, Ore., killing four young people who were camping on a beach. Then it headed here.
After a series of tsunami that killed hundreds of people in Hawaii in the 1940s and 1950s, scientists had by then set up a rudimentary warning system.
Late in the evening of the 27th, Bill Parker, the city's volunteer head of civil defense, got a call about the quake and the tsunami. He did not know for certain that the waves would strike the city, or when, or how high they might be. Also, he was 25 miles up the coast and without a ride home. So he hitchhiked.
