You might call it the triple crown of disasters.
When the great earthquake began tearing apart Southcentral Alaska on that infamous Good Friday on March 27, 1964, there were plenty of tragedies to go around -- from Kodiak to Anchorage to Valdez, the town that suffered the most fatalities.
But nowhere was the destructive force of the quake as multifaceted as it was in Seward. In short order -- as an excellent new documentary appearing in Anchorage this weekend dramatizes -- Seward saw its ground rip apart, its fuel tanks explode in a huge fire and a massive, deadly tsunami roar into port.
All three calamities appear in full force in an extraordinary segment of archive footage tapped by Chugiak filmmaker Russ Weston, the producer of "Seward -- the First 100 Years," which emerged as a category finalist in this year's Anchorage International Film Festival.
Also riveting is the film's remarkable eyewitness account by the McRae family, including Doug McRae, who still lives seasonally in Seward, and his sister, Linda MacSwain, who now lives in Anchorage.
At the time the quake struck, Linda was a sophomore in high school and Doug was a young married father of two. Feeling the earth begin to shake, he quickly rushed to the door of his house in town and looked outside. What he saw, he says, was hard to believe.
"The ground was like it was alive -- buckling -- and cracks were opening. Looking at Mount Marathon, the trees were whipping violently back and forth. I mean really whipping back and forth. But the strange thing was: There was absolutely no wind. It was dead calm."
At least for the moment. In a few minutes, Doug says, he and his wife and their two children -- including their 4-week-old baby, Douglas -- were in their car and driving to the head of Resurrection Bay, where his parents lived with his sister beyond the edge of town.
From that vantage point, he says, it looked like all Seward was on fire. After dropping his family off, Doug and his dad were back in the car, driving off to help -- when they both heard a noise. It was an older couple they knew -- Bob and Blanche Clark -- inexplicably perched in the boom of an old crane nearby.
"They were screaming: 'Tidal wave!'?" Doug recalls. "Then you could hear it. It was loud -- like a jet flying over your head 20 feet above you."
Suddenly, Linda says, her dad and brother were back at the door of the family house yelling for everyone to get outside -- to climb to higher ground.
"So we jumped up on some oil barrels up to the roof (of the garage)," she says. "And from the roof we could see the bay and we could see the wave coming."
They also saw that they weren't high enough to be protected, Doug says. So one by one they began jumping from the top of the garage to the edge of the pitched roof of the house. Linda jumped with baby Douglas in her arms.
"It was just a wall of water," Doug says. "It really didn't look like water; it looked like mud. It was just straight up and down. ... I've often been asked how high it was. Some people said it was 70 feet high, but it was at least 30 or 40 feet high, because we were looking up at it -- not down."
As the wave slammed into the house, it immediately broke the structure from its moorings.
"I remember the house lifting up," Doug says. "I don't know if the plumbing was holding it, or the foundation, but it didn't stay long. Then we took off on probably the wildest ride you can imagine -- we were spinning -- I remember spinning around. We were bouncing off trees."
Through some sort of miracle, Linda says, everyone in the family managed to keep their grip. Everyone managed to survive.
"Really, for a reason that is not even able to be explained, we weren't swept off by the wave or by enormous tree branches," she says. "We all just held on, and we just rode -- sort of like Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz."
There is a lot more worth watching in "Seward -- the First 100 Years," and local viewers will get a chance when it appears with about a dozen other films by Alaskans (or about Alaskans) in the Snowdance segment of the film festival.
Other Alaska films include "To Play the Games," a celebration of the Alaska Native games -- honored as the festival's best in the Alaska category -- by Phillip Blanchett; "The Aleutian: Steaming Toward Disaster," a documentary on the discovery two years ago of an Alaska steamship lost off Kodiak in 1929; and "Echo Lake," a feature-length film ("part horror flick, part morality play, all intrigue") shot on the Kenai Peninsula.
Daily News reporter George Bryson can be reached at gbryson@adn.com.
SNOWDANCE, the Alaska film segment of the Anchorage International Film Festival, will include the following films at either the Alaska Experience Theatre or the Alaska Earthquake Theater at 705 W. Sixth Ave.
SATURDAY
12:30 p.m.: Alaska Experience Theatre: "To Play the Games," "The Iraqi Plan," "The Aleutian," total running time 89 minutes.
12:45 p.m.: Alaska Earthquake Theatre: "Ziggy Vision," "Rhapsody in Red," "Sacula," "Pantro: The Movie," total running time 80 minutes.
SUNDAY
12:30 p.m.: Alaska Experience Theatre: "Echo Lake," total running time 97 minutes.
3 p.m.: Alaska Experience Theatre: "Cantique de Noel," "Christmas in Spenard," "Alaskan Skies," "Seward -- the First 100 years (excerpt)," total running time 81 minutes.
(The schedule is subject to change.)
