Outside everything seemed normal. He got into his own station wagon to make an initial check, started out, and 30 feet later drove over the 15 feet high scarp embankment—the main earthquake fault that had dropped off between the maintenance shed and the highway.
Shaken, but not hurt, he crawled out of the car, aware that something was seriously haywire, and that he had to call for outside help.
He went a mile to the nearest telephone. It was out. In the maintenance shed, where the heavy equipment and trucks are stored, he found the 16-ton rotary snowplow had been jolted eight feet out of its position the night before.
The radio transmitter in his pickup either wasn’t working, or couldn’t reach the area Highway Department HQ in Bozeman. The road, when he managed to reach it, was shredded by long cracks, running along the length of the road.
He loaded up his family and started north to get the word out that they needed help on the roads in the West Yellowstone area. At the Y he found an overturned Cadillac that had flipped coming over a continuation of the same scarp which ran through his own yard. Driving carefully—at times it was like straddling a grease rack—he finally found a phone that worked at Almart Lodge, 40 miles north of West Yellowstone. Highway District Engineer George Barrett logged Bailey’s call at 1:50 A. M.
The quake caught Montana’s Civil Defense Director Hugh K. Potter in bed. Potter, a grizzled former Montana Highway Patrol Captain and Helena Police Commissioner, had lived through Helena’s 1935-6 earthquake. This earlier quake had logged some 3,000 recorded tremors, killed 4 people and destroyed several buildings, including Helena’s City Hall. Potter wasn’t greatly impressed by the somewhat diminished-by-distance initial shock, and went back to sleep.
At 1:30 A. M., the Helena Police rousted out city fireman Ed Cottingham and reported that fragments of information about an earthquake which had caused severe damage in the state were coming in on police radio. At 1:32 Cottingham called Potter, and they went down and set up state Civil Defense HQ in Helena’s City Hall, an Arabic-style former Shriners’ building which also houses the capital city’s fire and police department.
Standing on top the slide, with the fallen mountain as a backdrop, Civil Defense Director Hugh Potter and Madison County Sheriff Lloyd Brooks discuss problems created by the quake.(Christopherson)
For the next two hours, their life was a turbulence seething with rumors. The steep walled canyons and high mountains which obstructed normal police short wave radio added to the problem of already disrupted communications in getting information out of the quake area.