Alphie’s Recollection of the Parnell Disaster of Sixty-One ©2011Gary C. Gibson (fiction)

Governor Parnell was successful in getting the legislature of the state of Alaska in the year of our Lord 2011 to appropriate sixty-five million dollars for the construction of a dam across the mighty Susitna River of Alaska. Premonitions of Earthquakes of unimaginable scale and filtered through the Governor’s thought even as he sign the papers making the project so, yet he disregarded the warnings.

In the original Tananina language the name of the river was spelled Sushitna. That name was changed in 1847 because of the problem of its superficial meaning in English, and the meaning of ‘Sandy River’ was lost. The Parnell disaster of 2061 when the Susitna River dam broke sending a tidal wave over the shifted land to drown Willow, Wasilla and Anchorage before rush down Cook Inlet sending bodies and other debris in the wave to overturn fleeing fishing vessels and destroy a few villages was a consequence of anti-ecospheric energy planning.

It was easy to foresee that a few sub-nuclear thermite bombs dropped in the glaciers of the Alaska Range that provide water for the Susitna River drainage could overwhelm the expected spill capacity of the dam. Airborne terrorist placing aircraft on auto-pilot with inflatable blond dummies with Viking helmets in the pilot and co-pilot seats infiltrated Alaskan airspace easily. With the annual flow of the Susitna River drainage increasing annually because of global warming of the glaciers the original flow processing capacity of the dam was estimated for the condition of the second half of the century.

The Governor’s desire to provide electrical power for the ‘rail belt’ along the Parks highway could have been met by construction of fuel cell power plants or thermal energy development, yet neither provided the potential for construction kickbacks from dam construction, lake front property or dam operations that the Susitna River dam presented. Hence it was reasonable to expect that the governor would set aside troubling concerns about the effect of the weight of the water of the new dam and lake on the stability of local plate tectonic arrays or the destruction of fish and wildlife habitat.

The Susitna River drainage and Alaska Range frequently experience earthquakes. The 1964 Alaska earthquake devastated Anchorage, and the city was overdue for another large earthquake in 2011.

The completion of the Susitna River Dam in 2020 provided several ominous portents of doom over the years. Continuous subsidence of the ground under the weight of the dam and the water of Lake Parnell made the dam subject to frequent high water capacity and over stressing. Unusually arm winters brought more low pressure systems and precipitation to the Alaska Range increasing spring runoff. Then one December night, with the pull of the gravity of the sun and moon, the thinkable disaster occurred; a magnitude 8.5 earthquake centered at the dam shifted the land mass forty feet ripping a giant gash in the middle of the dam that had already been burgeoning with snowmelt.

High on a hill 2500 feet above sea level, the former Alaskan Governor was up at 3am in his mansion drinking a comforting winter cup of hot chock and jack. Looking out at the sparkling city he loved he saw amidst the sparkling lights, moonlight and night the thinkable yet forgotten possible wave of doom appear crashing through the city tumbling homes and buildings before it.

Today, we of the Flatlands coalition seek to preserve the memory of the lost former fishing villages of the Susitna with a celebration and drum of recall.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susitna_River
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susitna_Hydroelectric_Project
http://www.pbs.org/harriman/explog/lectures/crossen1.html