The Scotch Cap Lighthouse Disaster of 1946 | Episode 89 - Doomsday: History's Most Dangerous Podcast

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Today, we're going to witness a light so bright it
would instantaneously and irreversibly turn your corneas into charcoal. And oddly,
it is the least dangerous thing about today's story. Hello,

(00:30):
and welcome to Doomsday Histories Most Dangerous Podcast. Together, we're
going to rediscover some of the most traumatic, bizarre, and
awe inspiring but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from
throughout human history and around the world. On today's episode,
we'll take a look at why the tourist bureau for

(00:50):
today's location drinks so much. Will learn how the people
in today's episode work with equipment that would rattle and
melt your skull off, and sometime they want to cry
and eat each other. And we'll learn why the phrase well,
I'm glad that's all over is rarely misapplied this badly.
And if you were listening on Patreon, you'd hear about

(01:11):
the time we've burned down a good chunk of Washington,
including the White House, and why you're welcome for it.
You'd learn about the time that Germany blew up a
chunk of New Jersey and Lady Liberty got popped in
the boob with a missile, you'd learn why people through
history were ridiculed for believing in waves, and you would
hear about an Australian bloke who di wide himself into

(01:32):
one of the most dangerous world records available. This is
not the show you play around kids, or while eating,
or even a mixed company. But as long as you
find yourself a little more historically engaged and learn something
that could potentially save your life, our work is done.
So with all that said, shoe the kids out of
the room, put on your headphones and safety glasses, and

(01:55):
let's pig in. Since a time before writing first captured language,
in an age where our understanding of the map outside
of our own homelands were little more than myth, the
bravest people in history hobbled into modest, dugout canoes and
braved the ocean's fury to behold and record lands never

(02:18):
before seen by human eyes. By now we've sought out
and named every recordable point of stone poking out of everywhere,
even though most are basically meaningless crags. These points of
rock almost invisible against the vastness of their surroundings. And
we did all of this in a time before satellites

(02:39):
early explorers sometimes drew a little sea monster into the
more featureless, landless parts of early maps, and we treated
them like celebrities for it. For every bikini or easter island,
there are a hundred nameless points where the only inhabitant
might be a bird. These are places you'd consider yourself

(03:00):
lucky to find a shadow, and nations like Spain and
France and England and Portugal used to scour the oceans
looking for these dots to expand their territory and bragging rights.
Case in point, the Portuguese tagged the island of Tristan
d'acuna all the way back in fifteen oh six, but

(03:20):
they were all kind of far and so they just left.
And to make my point, if you were standing on it,
you would be almost eleven hundred miles or seventeen hundred
kilometers closer to the International Space Station, which is two
hundred and fifty miles or four hundred kilometers above us,
than you are to the next closest solid thing that

(03:41):
you could reasonably and reliably stand on. There are parts
of the world so far away that people call them
God forsaken, a term which I will remind you literally
means abandoned by God. There are parts of the Pacific
so vast and empty they purposely deorder and crash satellites

(04:01):
into it. They won't even hit sea life. It's that
far out. I mean. Try to imagine a point in
the world's ocean so remote that even sea life won't
visit there. And just so it said, this is all
leading up to something. By the way, you ever want
to just get away from it all, like really really
get away from it all? Well, good news. Today we

(04:24):
will be sailing a few thousand kilometers north of here
to a chain of islands that I think will fit
nicely into the bottom one hundred on the list of
places you're ever likely to vacation. Ladies and gentlemen, Today,
for the first time in the show's history, we are
visiting the last frontier of America. Welcome to Alaska, a beautiful,

(04:48):
dangerous land of forest and tundra and everything in between.
It's a whole lot of wide open space with an
awful lot more than bald eagles and grizzly bears and
orcas to fill it up. It's got three million lakes,
it's got twenty seven thousand glaciers. It's got more than
thirty eight hundred mountains, and more than one hundred and

(05:09):
thirty of those are volcanoes, and only eighty five percent
of it can be reached by plane. But we're not
here to talk about big feed or jewel or wind
to go on this episode. Alaska is so barren and
empty that, in spite of being the third least populous
state in America behind Wyoming and Vermont, its violent crime
rate is more than five times the national average. Their

(05:32):
missing person's rate is two hundred and forty five percent
higher than the national average. So there's that, And I
am not bagging on Alaska. I only even bring it
up to set the idea in your mind that bad
things happen here and it's going to be okay, because
we're not even going to be spending our time on
the mainland anyways. May I introduce to you a long,

(05:55):
sweeping chain of islands that hang off of North America's
west coast like a tail, extending from Alaska's southwestern tip
all the way to Russia. When Sarah Palin says she
can see Russia from her backyard, I think she might
be talking about the Aleutian Islands. More than three hundred
of them stretch out about twelve hundred miles or nineteen

(06:15):
hundred kilometers, and this line of islands separate the Baring
Sea in the north from the Pacific Ocean to the south.
And their American have been since eighteen sixty seven, when
US Secretary of State William ate Seward bought the mainland,
the islands, and the whole kitten kaboodle from Czar Alexander
the Second. May I introduce to you the art of

(06:38):
the deal. In eighteen sixty seven, everyone thought Alaska was
just a frozen wasteland with no practical use. So America
bought it from Russia for seven point two million dollars,
which works out to about two cents an acre. And
why so cheap, Well, Russia was still brushing itself off

(06:59):
from the Crimean War, and it left them a little
too strap to be maintaining something that far away. Again,
they didn't know it was filthy with natural resources at
the time, and plus, for reference, Alaska is as far
from Moscow as Ethiopia if you really dig into it.
They were more worried that the next time they fought Britain,

(07:20):
which they just did, they were going to take it
away from them and just make it part of Canada.
So they figured it was better to sell it than
to lose it. And Seward got skewered at the time,
but he had made one of the best land deals
in history. They hadn't discovered the billions of dollars worth
of oil and other minerals, not to mention all the

(07:42):
fish in the wood. Alaska paid for itself thousands of
times over. And not just that. Alaska became America's big
estate by far. Alaska makes Texas look like Danny DeVito
in Twins. Just kidding, Hey, Texas, I just meant that
adding Alasta made the United States twenty percent bigger in

(08:03):
a single day. Today's story will be as remote a
tail as we have ever told. We will be visiting
the Aleutian Islands, so let's just get to know them
real quick. Maybe twenty million years ago, the Pacific tectonic
plate slid under the North American plate, and these plates
are as big as continents. The slow speed collision drove

(08:25):
islands and volcanoes up into the sun from deep below
the waves. And they call this volcanic nursery the Pacific
Ring of Fire. It's home to seventy five percent of
all volcanoes on Earth, and the names a little off.
It's not really a proper ring shape. It actually follows
a contour around the Pacific that looks more like a

(08:45):
duck that's been beaten in the head with a pipe.
You'll just have to take my word for that. Among
the most northern of its offspring are the Aleutian Islands.
Just think of them like the Hawaiian Islands, but freezing
and wind swept. Every now and then. They get whipped
by winds over one hundred miles or one hundred and
sixty kilometers an hour, and slap by waves more than

(09:08):
fifty feet tall. The Aleutian Islands are ruggedly beautiful on
the days when you can see them. See they get
over two hundred and fifty days of rain and fog
and freezing rain and sleet every year. On the plus side,
we won't have to worry about crowds. And with more
than three hundred islands to choose from, we're gonna have

(09:28):
to pick one. So today we choose Unimak Island. It
sounds like the name of the computer that Kirk had
to convince to kill itself that time, but it actually
comes from the indigenous Unagin or Elude people, and it
roughly means here be sea lions. It's wild, and it's raw,
and it's big. It sits four hundred and twenty miles

(09:50):
or six hundred and eighty kilometers southwest of Anchorage, and
it's about the size of Rhode Island, about sixteen hundred
miles or over forty one hundred square kilometers of wine
oh in swept tundra, black sandy beaches, and steep cliffs.
Why black sandy beaches, you ask, well. Unimac is home
to six different active volcanoes, including Mount Sheeshaldon, which is

(10:12):
famously one of the most symmetrically photogenic strata volcanoes in
the world. Unimac is the easternmost and the largest of
the Aleutian island chain. It sits right where the Alaskan
Peninsula ends and the Aleutians begin. It's kind of like
a gateway island. To the east lay the non ironically
named Cold Bay. To the west lay open ocean as

(10:35):
far as the eye can see, and the kamcatcha peninsula.
And aside from all the bears and cariboo and foxes
and seabirds, and otters and whales. It's also home to
a few Homo erectus. They've actually been on the islands
for almost ten thousand years, and you'd imagine it's pretty
sparsely populated, maybe two thousand people in total on Unimac.

(10:58):
The only year round inhabited community on the island is
called False Pass. It's home to less than forty people,
and they call it False Pass after the first people
to pass through said, hey, it's a pass to safety,
and it was not. Around ninety three percent of the
island is wilderness, and nothing about life on Unimac is easy.

(11:20):
Vessels navigating the Unimac Pass face sudden whiteouts, near zero visibility,
strong tidal currents that shift flows and push ships off
course without warning. Oh and the surrounding seafloor is riddled
with submerged volcanic formations and uncharted hull ripping hazards. Now
you remember a little thing called World War II. In

(11:43):
the years leading up to the war, the US began
to see how the islands could be useful. The Coast
Guard could use them to monitor shipping traffic and keep
an eye out for enemy ships or submarines to protect
the West coast from Japan. They started building military installations
on them as late as the nineteen thirties, and parts
of the chain were occupied by Japanese forces, making them

(12:06):
the only part of the continental US to be invaded
on foot by soldiers since eighteen twelve. I hope you
packed your warmest coat, some light bulb polish, and updated
your last will and testament. Today we will be spending
our time on the Scotch Cap Lighthouse. It was one
of the most remote outposts in the world and the

(12:28):
first outside the coast of Alaska. In the words of Congress,
lighthouses will always have a place in our history. They
have warned mariners of danger, their crews have rescued survivors
in the worst conditions imaginable, and their brilliant lamps have
comforted and reassured those who are bound homeward. At last,
lighthouses were managed by the United States Lighthouse Service. They

(12:52):
were the first organization to say you have to go out,
but you don't have to come back. The Service was
later faced into the Coast Guard, and they decided to
keep that motto. At most lighthouses, lightkeepers are able to
lodge with their families, but not here there's a tail
of one man who froze both his hands during the
blizzard just trying to go from the lighthouse tower to

(13:13):
his quarters. So yeah, no families were allowed, bachelor's and
widowers ownly. The first Scotch Cap lighthouse was constructed in
nineteen oh three. It was a simple box shaped wooden
structure on the southwestern shore of the island, overlooking the
Unimac Pass. You probably never heard of the Unimac Pass

(13:34):
before this, but it was a crucial route for US
military ships and commercial ships and fishing fleets. Entire convoys
of ships moving between the US and the rest of
the Pacific passed through here and were under the protection
of the lighthouse. It was a tight, economical little design,
and nowhere inside it are you going to find a
lot of design awards. The lighthouse was about forty five

(13:56):
feet tall and it sat on top of the lightkeeper's building.
Part of the year it was drenched in rain and fog,
like we said, and the rest of the year it
was encased in ice, and the whole time it was
visited by violent storms with hurricane force winds. It was
constantly being repaired from rot and corrosion and mechanical failures,

(14:16):
especially in the light and the fog signal equipment. So
Scotch Cap two point zero was built to replace it
in nineteen forty, and the new tower was made of
sterner stuff. They basically went from the little pig straw
hut to reinforced concrete in a single leap. It was
built with windowless walls as thick as a foot and

(14:37):
a half and reinforced with a rebar to give the
concrete the tensile strength that allowed it to actually flex
under the stress from wind or even seismic activity. They
designed the tower built right into the squat wide, fortress
like main building to reduce its wind profile, and among
its amenities included a living quarters, dining room, full kitchen,

(15:00):
the radio room and engine room, the fog horn workshop,
a boathouse and dock, and obviously the lantern room. Oh
and that's the most notable things about any lighthouse, the
light itself and the fog horn. Imagine a thousand watt
incontestent light putting out close to twenty thousand lumens of brightness.

(15:21):
Now don't quote me on this, but within three feet
of that kind of brightness you would burn physical holes
through your skull. You know where your eyes used to be.
For comparison, you know those halogen headlights that make people
want to murder you, Well, they're around eight hundred lumins
in brightness. And this thing that's blinding us wasn't a
bulb in the traditional sense. The light was produced electrically

(15:45):
and then focused through a third order fresnel lens of
what Okay, imagine a chandelier fused with a magnifying glass.
That's pretty much what lighthouse glass looks like. It's made
up of a series of glue glass rings that take
light that just wants to go willy nilly everywhere, and
bends it and concentrates all that light into a single

(16:07):
razor sharp beam. It's a kind of cleverness that I'd
easily compare to the building of the Pyramids. And then
there was the steady rhythm of the foghorn. I've heard
them described as bellowing and mournful. I'd describe it more
as a deep, guttural, dual tone, kind of a honking.

(16:28):
A modern fog horn blars at about one hundred and
forty decibels, which is loud enough to hear around two
miles or just over three kilometers away, and I should
point out at one hundred and forty decibels, there is
no such thing as a safe exposure time. Even a
single short exposure can cause irreversible hearing loss. But I
guess it's pretty amazing what you can get used to

(16:50):
listening to at work. The new station was more comfortable
than the original, but not much more comfortable. Life out
here was defined by routines and radio checks and not
being killed by the weather. People serving there could expect
supplies that came in by ship and mail that got
kicked out of an airplane about every three months or so.

(17:11):
It doesn't sound like that much fun, and it's not
imagine your only sources of entertainment were the deeesely hum
of the generator room, the slow tick of clocks, and
at least four or five times ships ended up wrecking
close enough to the island for them to be able
to entertain Surviving guests, and field manuals can make a

(17:31):
great way to fight insomnia. This isolation and the extreme
conditions around lighthouse duty have led to everything from complete
mental breakdowns to suicide to even allegedly a little man
on man nom nom cannibalism. I'm trying to say cannibalism.
And on that happy note, we begin our story. April first,

(17:55):
nineteen forty six. There are six enlisted Coastguard men on
duty at the lighthouse this morning, and so it said,
lighthouses are always manned by Coast Guard personnel. So let's
meet the cast of our story to day. Chief Boatswain
Anthony L. Petit, Motorist, machinist, Mate second class, Leonard Pickering,

(18:16):
Fireman first class, Jack Colvin, seaman first class, Dewey Dystra,
and Paul Ness. And their mission was simple. All they
had to do was maintain the light and the fog
equipment around the clock. Now that peacetime shipping operations had
resumed across the Pacific again. World War II only ended
seven months ago. Anthony Petit was the officer in charge

(18:39):
that night. He was an unmarried, twenty year veteran of
the Coast Guard, and he was genuinely happy to be there.
He was born and raised on Michigan's Upper Peninsula, and
he grew up around boats. He loved the service so
much that he told people he hoped to serve on
as many Coast Guard ships and stations as he could
before he retired. They say, it's not just a job,

(19:02):
it's a calling, and you have to love the job
to do the job. And service checked a lot of
boxes for Chief Petit. Getting placed out here on Yunimac
was a one year commitment. On the plus side, the
Aleutian Islands are by and large mosquito free. They're the
state bird on the mainland, so there's that. Serving at

(19:24):
an outpost like this used to be a four year stint,
but it was so hard that lighthouse keepers needed a
full year off afterwards. Why well, some people just have
an easier time coping with the severe psychological consequences of
isolation better than others. And four years is a long

(19:46):
time staying inside, not getting any sun, not making any
real social contact. It's like a how to guide for
depression or anger, or paranoia or insomnia or memory loss
or even hallucinating. And I'll warn you right now, nothing
that happens from this point forward is a hallucination. Our

(20:06):
story begins after midnight on April first. The day shift
would have been in bed while the night shift were
drawing mustaches and glasses on them for April Fools. The
lantern endlessly revolved, casting its beam across the black void
of the bearing sea, while the reassuring hehaw of the
foghorn provided a soundtrack. The beam was powerful enough to

(20:28):
shine twenty two miles or thirty five kilometers out to sea.
Not quite far enough for the purposes of today's story, though,
because thirty four miles or fifty five kilometers out to sea,
something happened in the inky darkness about sixteen thousand feet
below the waves, just off the continental shelf. Welcome to

(20:51):
the Aleutian Trench. I already said how the tectonic Pacific
and North American plates have been locked in slow speed
hand to hand combat for millions of years, and for
centuries stress built and mounted between these two plates deep
inside the trench, until it didn't. In a fraction of
a second, hundreds of years of stored energy exploded as

(21:15):
the plates slipped, and an estimated seven point four magnitude
earthquake struck only fifteen miles or twenty five kilometers below.
So it is said, right now this was going to
be a bit of an unusual earthquake. We'll come back
to that. A seven point four earthquake is no slouch.
Any day of the week. The nineteen ninety nine is

(21:37):
Met Turkey earthquake was a seven point four and that
demolished entire cities and killed seventeen thousand people. I'd say
that to point out how weird it was for the
people on Unimac, who now found themselves shaken awake and
gathered in the rec hall. Some were excited by what
just happened, while others were terrified. Some of the man
had thrown themselves out of bed and just ran outside

(21:59):
into the cold night air because they thought the building
might collapse. But the shaking wasn't that bad and it
didn't last more than thirty seconds. This was around one
thirty in the morning, and again, as far as damage goes,
it seemed like it may be messed up some papers
and knocked over a broom, so everyone calmed down. I mean,
this was nothing to write home about, and certainly nothing

(22:21):
to cause any concern. The lighthouse and the coast Guard
station and any fishing settlements around had no reason to
suspect what was coming next, So let's change our point
of view. Situated on a terrace about another one hundred
feet above the lighthouse that night, lay coast guard electrician
Hobart Sandford. He'd just been sitting in bed reading in

(22:44):
the radio direction finding building when he felt the building
creek and groan as the ground shuttered beneath him. There
were about twenty five men in the station at the time,
and they were used to working and living in a
seismically active area, but this was weird. Unimac was a
volcanic island, like we said, but it wasn't a dead one.
And because earthquakes have always been a pretty popular precursor

(23:07):
to volcanic activity, all eyes looked to shoes Sheldon about
forty miles or sixty kilometers northeast of them for signs
of eruption, but nothing. The radio down to lighthouse to
make sure they were all good, and yeah they were,
And about twenty minutes after that first tremor, they felt
a second, stronger, more powerful, but shorter quake, which lasted

(23:29):
about twenty seconds, and then nothing for several minutes until
about two eighteen in the morning when he heard a
terrible roaring sound, followed almost immediately by a terrible impact
against the side of the building, and then water appeared
on the floor. So imagine your floor is flooding when

(23:50):
you're about two hundred feet above the ocean. He ran
to the control room to get word out that they
must have been struck by a tidal wave and they
might have to abandon the state. But they didn't hear
anything from the lighthouse. And just a reminder, all of
this was happening on April the first, so he was
actually a little worried that his transmissions might be taken

(24:11):
as a kind of an April fool's choke. Let's rewind
a few minutes and try this again. From the lighthouse's
point of view. Within minutes of the quake, just over
the horizon, a wall of water had risen up in
the darkness. If this had been daytime, you would have
been able to see the surf retreating from the shore
as a wall of water more than two miles or

(24:32):
three kilometers wide, approached with ferocious speed. And when I
say a wall, I mean an embankment of ocean as
tall as forty meters or one hundred and thirty feet.
As a reminder, the lighthouse was only forty five feet
tall and situated on a cliff only thirty feet above
the sea. One moment they were inside a structure designed

(24:55):
to weather the harshest of storms. The next you know
that sense you get when you stick your head underwater
and all the sound muffles and mutes. Imagine that here,
in the first moment of impact and erasing all evidence
of the weather roaring outside, those manning the station wouldn't
have had time to register what was happening. There would

(25:15):
have been no time to react, no last messages, no
distress calls, just a quick, terrible groaning of concrete, the
roar of impact, and the sudden implosion of everything as
water exploded through every seam of the building like a bomb.
The force of the wave didn't just sweep away the lighthouse,
it pulverized it. The tower collapsed in on itself, the

(25:40):
walls were shattered, and even the foundations were ripped apart
by this deluge. And the best estimate is that this
whole thing would have probably taken three to six seconds.
The pressure of that much water driven by that much
speed would have been like being smashed by seventy fully
loaded freight railcars at the same time. That's about seventy

(26:01):
million nutans of force. That is enough energy to bench
press an aircraft carrier for an entire second. As for
the men, the force of the water would have shattered doors,
burst through walls, and filled every inch of the space instantly.
Blunt trauma and drowning would have been immediate. Mostly the

(26:21):
blunt trauma, of course, pressure aside the wave would have
contained rocks and steel and wreckage, and out of respect
for those lost, I'm just going to say these would
have been closed casket funerals. The men, along with everything else,
were most likely comprehensively dismantled and swept out to sea,
and within minutes the ocean began to recede. So you're

(26:47):
at the beach, sure on a cliff, or in a
research station, when a giant wave sweeps in, picks you
up off your feet and drags you helplessly into the
sea like it's trying to eat you. Would you know
what to do? You? It can happen in an instant.
One second you're on your feet and the next the

(27:08):
ocean has you. And before we begin, let me tell
you that this is the kind of survival that is
entirely dependent on you keeping your wits more than your strength.
And yeah, I say it a lot, but not panicking
is the one thing that might save your life. Your
instinct maybe to thrash about and fight the current, and
to be clear, this will not be helpful. The ocean

(27:31):
doesn't get tired, but you do, and panicking just burns
energy you really want to hold on to. It shortens
your breathing, and it craps on your ability to make
think good. Get out of your head. It's not a
personal failing or weakness that brought you here. Everyone from
first timers to lifeguards get caught up in currents stronger

(27:52):
than themselves every now and then. And first things first,
I just want you to float for a moment. Just
stop doing anything and just float for a moment. Most
people don't realize just how naturally buoyant they are, so
just breathe and try to orient yourself. Are you still moving?
Where's the shore? You see any other swimmers or boats anywhere?

(28:14):
Just keep floating and do what you have to do to
keep your head above the water, and just keep that
breathing nice and slow. You got to remember, even Olympic
swimmers focus totally on their breathing, and you are no
Olympic swimmer. So just breathe. If you feel like your
clothing or your shoes are weighing you down, just lose
them and don't waste your time shouting unless someone is

(28:36):
really nearby. Shouting waste air and energy, which you only
have so much of. Australian lifeguards will tell you to
raise one harm high above your head and wave it
slow and languorously. But let's say no one's looking and
there's no one around. Whether you're being pulled out to
sea by a draft or a rip current, the rules

(28:57):
of engagement are the same. Do not think about swimming
straight back to shore. That is going to be like
running against a treadmill cent to ten. Rip currents are
one of the most dangerous things in the sea, and
not because it's going to pull you under and drown you.
It's because it's going to pull you away from shore
and then wear you out and then drown you. You

(29:19):
are not going to outfight the current, so you're going
to outsmart it. And I have a real easy analogy.
Think of escaping a rip current the same way you
would escape a runaway steamroller. I mean, you could run it,
but it's so much easier just to take several steps
to the left or the right, and I don't know,
maybe catch up on some on read emails or something. Well,

(29:42):
it's the same principle here. You just pick a direction
and swim parallel to the shore. Believe me, this will
save a ton of effort and probably your life. You'll
know when you've reached a safer point when you find
yourself no longer moving away from the shore. And once
you're out of that pole. Now now you can start
to make your way back to shore safely, you know,

(30:03):
swimming at an angle. And again, we talk a lot
about conserving energy in every possible way in these kinds
of disasters, so do not feel weird about dog paddling.
There are zero points for style here. Well, okay, that's
you know, pretty easy, and I'm glad we're all safe.
But that's not the nature of this show. So let

(30:24):
me add this. You can still swim pretty good with
your hands balding the fists, which is my advice if
you find yourself now surrounded by fins. My advice in
the ocean, keep your head on a swivel and never
take your eye off a shark. And if it approaches
and it gets close enough, you're gonna want to try
to punch for the eyes or the snoot. And if

(30:47):
you're too tired to swim because you just fought three
sharks to a standstill, just float there and wave for help.
And once you finally do make it to shore. Even
if you feel fine, even if you feel great, get
yourself checked by a metic especially if you swallowed water
or you were in there for more than a few minutes,
because cold water can lower your core temperature, so you're

(31:09):
gonna need to get dry and warm up as soon
as you can. So you don't have to be afraid
of the ocean. Make the ocean afraid of you. Sandford
poured the water from his shoes and nervously stepped outside
and slowly eked his way towards the edge of the hill.

(31:30):
And when he peered over, he didn't see any lights,
and the foghorn had grown silent. There was no sign
of anything, no sign of the men, no sign of
the lighthouse. All of it had been completely destroyed and
washed inland or had been pulled back out to sea.
When the Coastguard cutter Cedar arrived, only chunks of concrete

(31:51):
and twisted metal were found where the Scotch Cap Lighthouse
had once stood. The destruction had been so total that
they thought that the whole thing must have exploded. This
building had been designed and constructed to last one hundred years,
and maybe if it had been built on any other
street corner in America, but out here it had only

(32:14):
stood for half a decade. The men searched the surrounding area,
and when I said the bodies had been dismantled and
washed out to sea earlier, I meant mostly on the
hill behind the station, they found a human foot that
had been amputated at the ankle. They also quote found

(32:34):
some small bits of intestine which were apparently from a
human being, and what seemed to be a human kneecap.
Three weeks after the disaster, while installing a temporary navigational light,
a technician discovered the body of Paul Ness and without
getting into it, his body was intact, but he was

(32:56):
only identifiable by his surviving cheekbones and go tee. The
final remains found on the island were a thigh and
a second severed foot. They put the collectibles in a
mayshift coffin, but first put them into separate individual mail
sacks to keep them from slashing and slapping around. The

(33:17):
remains were buried nearby under soil and heavy stones with
white crosses and brass plates. The wave itself had been
powerful enough to radiate across the Pacific, and it washed
up in sights as far as Chili and Peru and
Japan and New Zealand, and it would go on to
kill over one hundred and sixty people in Hawaii alone

(33:40):
over twenty five hundred miles or four thousand kilometers away.
Waves as tall as fifty five feet destroyed much of
the waterfront in Hilo, and water flowed half a mile
inland Oahu and Maui faced waves closer to thirty feet,
so that's not so bad. And a fourteen teen year
old girl had been killed while swimming in Santa Cruz, California.

(34:04):
But the men at the scotch Cap Lighthouse were the first.
So what happened, Well, six men got the unluckiest posting
in all of the US lighthouse service. Then a massive
wall of water roared out of the darkness and annihilated
said lighthouse. The scotch Cap radio station had a crew

(34:28):
of twenty five men, all of whom were jolted to
life as the wave through a three thousand pound army
truck through their building, and yeah, half the men ran
outside in their underwear, but the other half were trying
to extinguish and repair the switchboard which had burst into flames.
The voltage control regular had caught on fire, and it
plunged the entire station into darkness. In the morning, while exploring,

(34:52):
the crew did feel some mild aftershocks, and an aircraft
overflew the station to survey the damage. There had been
in an earthquake, which I said, was originally assumed to
be a magnitude seven point four. But here's the thing.
Have you ever heard of a tsunami earthquake? Probably not

(35:13):
well in an age before the continent was coated in seismographs,
Determining the magnitude involved a little guesswork, so based on
all observations, they came up with the number seven point four.
Like we said, a tsunami earthquake's a slow, sneakier kind
of earthquake. It doesn't shake the ground very hard, but

(35:33):
deep underwater, it quietly and slowly does its thing. And
what it does is packs a punch that moves the
seafloor enough to push a massive wall of water ahead
of it. It basically trades shaking for giant waves. And
when these plates slipped, a section of the seafloor two
miles or three kilometers wide thrust upward as much as

(35:55):
fifty feet that is taller than three Dodge caravans parked
vertically bumper to bumper, and this displaced a surreal amount
of water. Let me say this, If you were to
picture a one foot square column of water sixteen thousand
feet tall, that would weigh almost five hundred tons, and

(36:16):
that would be pressing down with almost seven thousand pounds
of force per square inch. And it's doing this along
a huge section of seabed. And I can't tell you
how strong the thrust would have had to have been
to lift all that real estate, but I can tell
you the amount of energy released was about the same
as sixty five hundred Hiroshima bombs. And the result was

(36:40):
a huge tsunami. And because of the nature of tsunami,
earthquakes feeling deceptively calmer than they really are. At worst,
they were maybe waiting for an aftershock, but had no
clue what was coming. And because the set happened so
close to shore, there would be no time to react
even if they had. And the phrase well I'm glad

(37:03):
that's all over is rarely misapplied this badly, and because
it was so close to shore, that meant that the
approaching water had no time to lose any of that
energy and fan out to reduce its height before it's
spacked into the shore. In the open ocean, they say
tsunami waves can travel as fast as seven hundred and

(37:25):
seventy kilometers or four hundred and eighty miles per hour,
and they do slow down obviously. I imagine if they didn't,
they'd magic erase everything for three hundred miles inland anywhere
they touched, and that is still spectacularly fast. For reference,
the fastest boat in the world only went three hundred

(37:46):
and seventeen point six miles or five hundred and eleven
kilometers per hour. Now, what we learned after the two
thousand and four Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami was as
the wave approached the shallows would have slowed to as
little as one hundred kilometers or sixty miles per hour,
and worth noting that still highway speed. It slowed because

(38:09):
it had to try to hump all of that weight
as it rowed up to the island. Now, the walls
of the lighthouse had been designed strong enough to withstand
artillery fire, but the water's touch shattered the concrete like
it was pottery. Machinery and steel fixtures were ripped from
their foundations and hurled inland. And where once had stood

(38:30):
a beacon of safety now was described as a ragged
wound carved into a hillside. Jagged concrete slabs, mangled pipes,
a twisted stair rail, and fragments of the generator shed
were found buried under driftwood and sand, while twisted riebar
poked at a debris like broken ribs. And like I said,

(38:51):
this thing had been built to withstand everything from hurricanes
to earthquakes. But tsunamis, well, they weren't really that well
understood in nineteen forty six, so there were no construction
standards taking them into account. And when I said they
originally believed that this had been a seven point four
magnitude earthquake, well, it was later analyzed and reclassified as

(39:14):
powerful as an eight point seven. And because of the
weird nature of logarithmic scales like the Richter scale, this
is a eight, eight hundred and ten percent jump in power.
This is the kind of earthquake that scientists maybe expect
every decade or two. And when you take into account
all of this power, the earthquake that destroyed the lighthouse

(39:37):
would sit in a three way tie for tenth place
in the top ten strongest earthquakes of all time. All
kinds of agencies were involved in the follow up investigations.
Survey teams examined the debris and the surrounding landscape. Geologists
and hydrologists analyzed the tsunami and the earthquake, and what

(39:57):
they found well, pretty much much exactly what we said.
The lighthouse crew didn't ask for this, didn't know it
was coming, and there's nothing they could have done to
protect themselves from it. This tsunami might as well have
been a laser from space. The US Geological Survey later
found a mountain of rocks on the seafloor that appeared

(40:19):
to be from a massive underwater landslide, which some believed
contributed to the tsunami. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
modeled the way the wave ran up to the island
and determined this was among the highest ever recorded in
North America. And in the wake of this disaster. This
was the first time that the Unimac Pass had gone

(40:40):
dark since the lighthouse was originally built. A newer permanent
structure was built in the early nineteen fifties, and by
nineteen seventy one the whole operation was replaced with an
unmanned skeletal tower. This disaster checks a lot of the
boxes that we use on this show. It obviously, he
was bizarre, and it remained largely unheard of because the

(41:04):
death toll in Hawaii completely overshadowed anything that happened to
us here in the Aleutians. Today, a memorial honors the
six Coast guardsman who perished and remains as a grim
reminder that nature reserves the right to erase anything we
can build. Chief Anthony Petite died doing what he loved,

(41:26):
keeping a light burning for those in trouble at sea,
and to remember his sacrifice and passion. Fifty three years later,
they christened a boytender, the USCGC Anthony Petit, which is
stationed in Ketchikan, Alaska. In scientific and historical records, this
disaster is most commonly referred to as the nineteen forty

(41:50):
six Aleutian Islands earthquake and tsunami or the nineteen forty
six Unimac Island tsunami, but because the wave caused widespread
destruction across the Pacific, including in Hawaii, it is sometimes
referred to more broadly as the nineteen forty six Pacific tsunami.
The only upside of the disaster was it became a

(42:12):
cornerstone of tsunami's science. It led to the creation of
the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, which has gone on to
save an untold number of lives. And here is something
interesting about this disaster. This was not the last time
Alaska would be slapped stupid by a murderous pile of
water taller than your imagination, but that will be a

(42:35):
story for another time. Today, the sight of the scotch
Cap Lighthouse still bears the scars from that morning, and
whatever you call it, this disaster remains the first and
only time a tsunami has destroyed a lighthouse and killed
its entire crew. The scotch Cap Lighthouse disaster of nineteen

(42:58):
forty six also remains the deadliest tsunami related incident in
American history. For most of us, our commute is the
most dangerous part of our jobs. For others it's the mental, physical,
or emotional stress of chasing the almighty dollar every day

(43:21):
of your life until you die. But for these guys,
it was being assaulted by the combined weight of fourteen
and a half billion Dodge caravans full of water at
highway speed. It's not the fate I'm looking for. But
at least with no mourning. They died instantly. I was
going to say painlessly, and yes, your brain can't retain

(43:43):
a memory for about a minute after aggressive unconsciousness, and
they would have been so overwhelmed so quickly that yeah,
they wouldn't have felt a thing. That said it otherwise
does sound like an incredibly painful way to die, And
I want to be respectful of their sacrifice. These were
men who saved lives, and they did it under the

(44:04):
banner of service to their country. Those remains I told
you about were eventually repatriated to their home states, except
that one coffin full of parts that went to Nebraska.
But I think they all deserve to be buried at
Arlington for their service. But what's done is done, and
off topic. If you like the show enough to think

(44:26):
that I should be buried somewhere meaningful or even just nice.
But don't think it should happen too soon. Why not
consider becoming a supporter of the show. The best way
to support the show is to share the show. But
the best way to keep your favorite host from having
a stress related heart attack, Well you can visit buy
me a Coffee dot com slash doomsday and just make

(44:48):
a one time donation. But if you think getting episodes
a little early, with no sponsor interruptions and with additional
ridiculously interesting material in each new episode is worth it,
why not head over to Patreon dot com slash funeral Kazoo.
I want to offer my quick heartfelt shoutout too Miko Thompson,

(45:09):
Susannah Black, Stealthy stem Cell, Galatea Grimm, James Wahlberg, and
Phil Vi God for helping support the show. Again, there
is no show without you, guys, So for those of
you generous enough to help keep it alive, please pack
yourself on the back. You can reach out to me
on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook as Doomsday Podcasts, or you

(45:30):
can just fire an email to doomsdaypod at gmail dot com.
Older episodes can be found wherever you found this one,
And while you're there, Please leave us a review and
tell your friends and I always thank my Patreon listeners,
new and old for their support and encouragement. But if
you can spare the money and had to choose, I
ask you to consider making a donation to Global Menic.

(45:53):
Global Medic is a rapid response agency of Canadian volunteers
offering assistance around the world to aid in the aftermath
of disasters and crises. They are often the first and
sometimes the only team to get critical interventions to people
in life threatening situations, and to date they have helped
over six million people across eighty nine different countries. You

(46:15):
can learn more and donate at Globalmenic dot ca. On
the next episode, we're traveling back to visit the greatest
power plant on Earth, but sadly, as part of our tale,
the plant is going to go from hydroelectric to just hydro.

(46:37):
It's the Niagara shoal Cop pause. It's the Niagara shoal
Cop power station disaster of nineteen fifty seven. We'll talk soon.
Save degaggles off and thanks for listening.

All Episodes

The Scotch Cap Lighthouse Disaster of 1946 | Episode 89

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

Stuff You Should Know

Dateline NBC

On Purpose with Jay Shetty

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}The Scotch Cap Lighthouse Disaster of 1946 | Episode 89