________________________________________________________________________Richard S. Kem
seven blocks up into the town, wiping out buildings and carrying the small craft that were in
the middle of that harbor into town and depositing them. Some of them were big fishing
boats. Even when I arrived six weeks later, there was a huge boat--I hate to guess, 40 feet,
50 feet long--sitting in the middle of the town.
Then the wave went back out, breaching the other breakwater. So, there was no longer a
harbor; that is, the breakwaters were down, and all the moorings in the interior of the harbor
were gone. I think there were something like 39 lives lost on Kodiak Island itself.
The channel between the town of Kodiak and the island next door had actually gone dry with
the pull-back of the water before the tsunami came in. Boats had dropped and hit the bottom
of the channel before they were then picked up and swept into town. So, it was a pretty
violent bit of energy that hit Kodiak.
My job in Kodiak was to rebuild the harbor. The Corps had a project under our PL99
responsibilities, which similarly exist today, to rehabilitate work that we'd built originally.
So, I was there as the project engineer for the contract to rebuild the breakwaters. The
contract provided for the construction company to bring in huge rock and rebuild the
breakwaters. That was really the job, but there were other aspects too.
First of all, Colonel Sawyer was piqued at the Navy because the Kodiak Naval Station,
maybe Naval Air, was just a few miles away down the coast. Right after the earthquake he
called the Navy folks and said, "Look, we've got all these damage assessment people coming
up. They're available to come out if you want them." They said, "Sure, send them out." He
put them on a commercial aircraft, flew them into Kodiak, and the Navy met the airplane and
said, "We don't need you; go home now." They wouldn't even let them get off the aircraft.
So, he was really piqued by that because he'd acted in good faith.
So, he said to me, "Oh, by the way, when you go out there, I want you to know you represent
the Corps of Engineers. So, we're going to do a bang-up job." I recognized that he wanted to
put a little competition into this atmosphere.
So, when I arrived I found out that to get the job started, the contractor had to develop a
quarry on the back side of the island to bring the rock down to the harbor. But, as mentioned,
my duties were being the Corps of Engineers rep on Kodiak as well.
Now, in the downtown area the damage was being taken care of by other federal agencies:
the Federal Emergency Management Agency of its day; the Small Business Administration to
provide monies to rebuild homes. Because the Navy was on the island, the Navy was given
overall defense responsibility for all of that, not the Corps. When all of these folks would
come to town, the fact-finding teams and the architect/engineer firm doing master planning
for developing the new central business district--I'd go to all the meetings and participate
with them representing the Corps.
I wore my fatigues and my hard hat with "Corps of Engineers" on it. We put up our project
sign downtown as we built the harbor right by what had been the main street, so everybody
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