5:50 - 6:10 p.m. - Water receding. 



6:10 p.m. - Water at lowest level, approximately at 10 feet below 

 MLLW. (Owing to land subsidence, this level would be 15.2 

 to 15.8 feet below MLLW.) 



6:15 p.m. - Wave moved in from south as large swell. 



6:15 - 6:20 p.m. - Water rising at initial rate of about 15 feet 

 in 5 seconds. 



6:20 p.m. - Wave crested. 



The times are estimates, and comments in parentheses are partly ours and 

 partly Kachadoorian' s . Tilley's observations, plotted in Figure 90, are 

 only qualitatively supported by the evidence of Chuck Powell and Commander 

 Miller (Chance, 1968) and that of Fred Brechan (Norton and Haas, I966). 



Discussing Tilley's observation of a 13-foot tide at the city dock 

 at 5:^5 p.m. (effectively a T.2 to 7- 5-foot tide in relation to water 

 level before the quake), Kachadoorian and Plafker (196T) and Plafker and 

 Kachadoorian (1966) speculate on the reality of the tide and its possible 

 relation to a submarine slide or to seiching. The black boil of water 

 reported by Tilley might suggest a submarine landslide, but this may 

 reasonably be discounted on the basis that the water was too shallow and 

 the sediments too thin to sustain so large and gentle an effect on the 

 sea. The wave could be explained possibly as a phenomenon of seismic 

 seiching, related to the tilting of the land by tectonic subsidence and 

 regional horizontal displacement. The black boil could have resulted 

 from the sudden upwelling of water containing mud and debris from the 

 floor of St. Paul Harbor (Figure 89). The horizontal thrust of the land 

 in the Kodiak Island region was probably almost southwest, in a direction 

 parallel to the coast of St. Paul Harbor and thus, through the inertia of 

 the water, would have favored a piling of water to the northeast. This 

 explanation, however, encounters the difficulty that the water must 

 inevitably have drained from Womens Bay, even though, inside of the Nyman 

 Peninsula (Figure 88), it would also have been heaped to some extent 

 toward the Naval Station. It is possible that these effects were self- 

 compensating in Womens Bay to the extent of causing only a minor drop 

 of water level as shown in Figure 38. 



Whether this first wave was real or not is of more than casual 

 interest. If a reality, it would show that a great many people in that 

 time of stress and anxiety were unaware of what was really happening 

 around them. Mayor Peter Deveau left the cannery of King Crab, Inc. 

 shortly after the earthquake in expectation of a tsunami. He travelled 

 the road toward Kodiak, overlooking the Inner Anchorage and Boat Harbor 

 (presumably Shelikoff Street or South Benson Avenue, Figure 89) (Norton 

 and Haas (1966). That he failed to notice such an unmistakable sign of 

 imminent seismic sea waves as the rapid draining of water from the boat 

 harbor is particularly puzzling. 



Text resiomes on page 1^3 

 I 38 



