Alaska: Picking up the Pieces

Alaskans always look forward to the big spring breakup, the time of the thaw that signals the end to hibernation and the beginning of the growing and fishing season. Along a corrugated street in downtown Anchorage last week a sign was posted on a store front: CLOSED DUE TO EARLY BREAKUP.

Such macabre humor was the exception in the wake of Alaska's Good Friday earthquake. More than 125 were dead or missing in the disaster, most of them in Alaska, the rest as a result of seismic sea waves that hit Oregon and California. The cost in property damage was, by latest estimate, more than $500 million. Downtown Anchorage was decimated; Seward, Kodiak, and scattered towns near the epicenter of the earthquake were all but wiped out.

All week long, red-eyed citizens wandered through their streets, looking for friends or loved ones, comparing experiences, recounting tales of tragedy and heroism. Soldiers with bayonets patrolled streets or baby-sat with begrimed children who had to be wheedled out of tears with jokes and C rations. Families fortunate enough to have heat, water or electricity opened their doors to the homeless. In the streets of the towns, volunteer workers joined military personnel in the unending job of picking up the pieces. In Seward a 30-ton fishing boat lay incongruously in a patch of woods several hundred yards from the shore. In the dockside railroad yard, a big switching engine rested on its side 200 ft. from the tracks.

Broke. The state capital, for all practical purposes, was temporarily shifted from Juneau to Anchorage's East Fifth Avenue, where, in a group of house trailers, Governor William Egan and his staff worked themselves to exhaustion to get Alaska back on its feet. They had a bleak time of it as they evaluated information feeding into their headquarters. Roughly 75% of Alaska's industrial output was crippled. Three thousand people no longer had jobs to go to. Home owners and small businessmen with mortgages were teetering on financial ruin. Banks, which hold about $300 million in deposits, feared a run of serious proportions. Said Anchorage City Councilman Sewell Faulkner: "I'd hate to think how many hundreds of people in Anchorage are bankrupt right now." In Seward, where 90% of the economy simply crumbled, City Manager William Harrison told newsmen: "Fellows, we're in a hell of a mess." He tried to read a news release; his voice broke, and he wept. "It's going to take a long time to recover," he said hoarsely.

Harrison might well have wept for all Alaska. For despite the fact that the state is twice the size of Texas (267,339 sq. mi.), its small population (250,000) and more than 60% of its business life were centered chiefly in those areas where the earthquake caused most of the destruction.