Then, over the awful moaning of the boulders grinding and crashing and the sound of the tree trunks howling through the air, she heard the voice of her son, Phillip, calling.
Slowly, painfully, in spite of crippling injuries, they dragged, an inch at a time, toward one another over the rocky, oozy bed of the river which the huge slide had instantaneously stopped. Highway Patrolman Stevens, who found them several hours later, noticed how torn their hands were from this agonizing crawl.
That morning, in the hospital at Ennis, Mrs. Bennett told reporters, “They say my husband and my boys are dead, but I have faith. I know they will be found.”
They already had been—dead.
OUTSIDE WORLD
The Montana-Idaho, Wyoming area where the quake hit is a big, sprawled-out area where it’s easy to get the feeling of isolation when everything’s normal—the roads open, the phone lines and lights working.
In one shattering blow, the earthquake cut most of this area’s access and communication. Big sections of the Yellowstone Park roads were blocked by slides and boulders. The road north of West Yellowstone was impassable. Big hunks of the road between the Duck Creek Y and Hebgen Dam had crumbled and slipped into the lake causing four major breaks and several minor ones. The big slide formed an 80 million ton block at the west exit of the canyon, and at Wade Lake, road breakup had immobilized another group of terrified campers.
For the first few hours after the quake, one of the biggest problems for the trapped was to get word out, and for those outside to get some idea of just what had happened.
At the instant of the quake, the Berkeley seismograph showed shock in the West Yellowstone area.
The first man to get word out was amateur radio operator Warren Russell, who operates station K7ICM from his trailer house in West Yellowstone, who began broadcasting news of the quake at 11:43 P. M.