ANCHORAGE, Alaska — A month after the second most powerful earthquake ever was recorded, the Alaska port community of Valdez remained in ruins.
A hulking Alaska National Guard cargo plane’s mission on April 25, 1964, was to deliver Gov. William Egan to oversee efforts to rebuild the town on a new site after the magnitude 9.2 earthquake.
After dropping off Egan and surveyors, the twin-engine Fairchild C-123J Provider took off in a heavy snowstorm to return to Anchorage carrying the Guard’s adjutant general, Maj. Gen. Thomas P. Carroll, and three others.
Three minutes later and about a mile due west of where more than 30 people died when the earthquake ripped apart the city dock, the plane struck the water head-on, at full speed, killing all on board. Despite rescue efforts, it quickly sank to the bottom of Prince William Sound.
Also killed in the crash were Lt. Col. Thomas Norris Jr., the pilot; Maj. James Rowe, co-pilot; and Tech. Sgt. Kenneth Wayne Ayers Sr., flight engineer.
The Valdez plane crash made national headlines but has mostly faded from memory for all but a few, including surviving family members and Chuck Volanti.
The former Air Guardsman who arranged the fateful flight as dispatcher has been working for four years from his home in Olympia to honor those lost in the humanitarian mission. On Saturday, his efforts were realized at the unveiling of a memorial that he and Valdez City Clerk Sheri Piece helped design.
“The crew, what can I say?” Volanti said. “They were decorated veterans. We were close, like family.”
Many relatives of the men killed attended the dedication of the memorial, which carries the likeness of each man.
Robin Norris Theobald, then 8 years old, vividly remembers the day of the crash, a Saturday. Her father, the pilot, came to her with a question: “You know, I have this flight, and I don’t have to go on it. What do you think I should do?”
Her answer was quick, decisive and foreboding: “Don’t go. You’ll die.”
“He was just a regular dad, and then he was gone,” she recalled this week from Graham, N.C.
She finds comfort in the knowledge that her father and his fellow Guardsmen are being honored for their efforts to help people after the disaster. In all, 131 people died in the quake or from the tsunami that killed people from Alaska to California.
“I’m just glad they remember him in that light, for the good he was doing,” Theobald said.
Ken Ayers Jr. had his entire family at the ceremony to honor his father, the flight engineer.
He was only 21 months old when the plane went down, but he learned from his mother, Nettie Jo, about his father’s love for fishing and hunting. That’s what drew the family back to Alaska after his father’s active service days in the Air Force.
One of Gen. Carroll’s sons, Thomas C. Carroll, reached the rank of brigadier general. He also became adjutant general of the Alaska National Guard and also died in a plane crash. The younger Carroll’s plane went down in 1992 near Juneau.
Rowe, the co-pilot, gained fame in the immediate aftermath of the quake. The Anchorage airport radio tower was destroyed, so Rowe circled the city in a C-123 cargo plane, warning off other aircraft from attempting to land and turning his plane into an emergency radio tower, relaying what he could see to the outside world.
