  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. 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) Shook-up road. Several sections of road along the north shore of Hebgen Lake just slumped into the lake.(U. S. Geological Survey) (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. 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. (Montana Highway Commission) |
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