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.
[Illustration: This upside-down Cadillac and the shook-up-road
between West Yellowstone and the Duck Creek Y are typical of quake
damage. (Montana Highway Commission)]
[Illustration: Shook-up road.]
[Illustration: Several sections of road along the north shore of
Hebgen Lake just slumped into the lake. (U. S. Geological Survey)]
[Illustration: (Montana Highway Commission)]
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.
[Illustration: Standing on top the slide, with the fallen mountain
as a backdrop, Civil Defense Director Hugh Potter and Madison County
Sheriff Lloyd Brooks discuss problems created by the quake.
(Christopherson)]
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.
[Illustration: (Montana Highway Commission)]