Edmonton Journal from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada • 7

ALIEBTA EDMONTON JOURNAL A7 SATURDAY. APRIL 26, 2003 100TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE FRANK SLIDE VL ii ii CANWEST Turtle Mountain stands watch over 70 people on April 29, 1903. The day the mountain moved S' -7 vVi VS America's deadliest landslide killed after the Frank Slide in 1903, "My mother always said the noise was the worst part She said it was like a horrible thunder, the loudest you could Survivor detcendant Reta Amell, of Edmonton But what was believed to be a flat slab of rock that slipped due to aggressive coal mining deep inside the unstable mountain has proven to be a wave-shaped fold oflimestone. Only a matter of time While mining may have been a consideration, scientists say that with or without human meddling, it was a geological certain-tythetrjp-heavymountain would shed some weight Onlythe time of impact was in doubt When the rock avalanche hit the townsite.it separated life and death by centimetres. Houses were split in half by falling rock, killing those on one side, sparing THE CANADIAN the rubble from the Frank Slide.

North A miner's cottage is buried in rubble heritage markers to attract attention. The Frank Slide looms out of the lush mountain valley like an angry scar, a swath of huge pale chunks altered BttJeby time. Even a century later, there's no mistaking the precise path of destruction. The Frank Slide is significant because it was so well documented," says Rejean Couture, a geological engineer with the Geological Survey of Canada. It was easily accessible, had an immediate economic impact on coal mining and the railway, there was an unusual velocity of debris and it was the first time people were witnesses to such an event" New geological autopsies have been performed and have produced new twists to theories on its cause.

The weather has been considered a triggering factor. March 1903 featured extreme fluctuations in temperature. On the night of the slide, the spring thaw ended with a snap deep freeze, drivirig fresh ice into deep fissures along the mountaintop. ii 1 I. PRESSHO-FRANK DON MARTIN Calgary Herald FRANK TAirtle Mountain shed its face 100 years ago Tuesday, raining bus-sized boulders down on the prospering town of Frank at almost 300 kilometres an hour.

The Frank Slide a cataclysmic rock avalanche created an instant cemetery of 70 graves for those unfortunate enough to be sleeping in the tents, shacks and cabins on the wrong side of a town where 600 turn-of-the-century souls lived off the mountain's lucrative coal seam. Turde Mountain always had an image problem. Kootenay natives claimed to see the image of a tur-tkinthepeakofamountainthey said was on the move, leayingbe-hind steady trickles of falling rock as the footprints of its creeping progress. They dared not strike a camp in its shadow alongariver for precisely what happened at 4:10 am on April 29, 1903, when the restless mountain lived up to its reputation for wanderlust. And felL It took just 100 seconds for a slab of rock 100 metres wide, 400 metres long and 50 metres thick to shake free of its shale moorings and tumble down the steep slope to wallop the valley floor at tremendous speed.

Landscape of carnage A recent analysis of core samples extracted from the base of the debris field show the slide squeezed enough moisture from the soggy ground to surf on a cushion of air and water. By the time it finished sliding, the debris fanned out three kflometres from thepeak, piling up intoa 150-metre wall on the far side of the Crowsnest Pass highway. In the reverse of what one might expect, the fine-grain sediment sifted to the bottom of the rolling debris, leaving the largest boul-ders frothing on the surface. That has created a dramatic landscape of natural carnage on Highway 3 for motorists entering the Crowsnest Pass a two-hour drive southwest of Calgary a historic site that hardly requires NEWS SERVICE, CALGARY HERALD PHOTO ILLUSTRATION US. expert 3 will monitor mountain :3 JUDY MONCHUK The Canadian freit FRANK Could the tragic Frank Slide happen again? Geologists have' said yes for 100 years.

But after a century of false alarms, nobody is watching for signs that could indicate in- creased danger for the tiny clus-ter of people who live at the base of Turtle Mountain. That's despite an internal report produced for the Alberta govern ment last spring urging the iein stallation of geological monitor ing systems that were halted dtfN ingTory government ccutting in the early 1990s. Geotechnical engineer Rod I Read, who studied the mountain in 1999 for the province, pro-J duced a report last year warning of a major slide of five million cu- bic metres of rock. It followed; three rockfalls in 2001 on the north peak of Turtle Mountain. The mountain's south peak is the one that crumbled in 1903 and that has been viewed as unstable.

Thenrtsaysitwillcostmore than $1 million for monitoring I systems with early-warning ca- pabilities, although that figure could be reduced substantially if shared by government univer-sity researchers and industry. Government spokeswoman AK ison Gates-Kriston says Alberta i will rely on an American geoleK gist at Iowa State University to provide the first monitoring. Neal Iverson plans to set crack meters in fissures at the summit this summer after learti1 ing during a field trip that node-" vices were operational that could trackrockmovement He will take over sites abari-doned in the early 1990s by David Cruden, considered the foremost expert on the Frank Slide when funding was cut by Alberta En vironment This is a very famous landslide and there's some potential for an- other landslide," said whose $16,000 US grant Iowa State will allow him to in-staHahandMofinstrumentsthat record minute movements. 8IGN UP AT: Th TELUS 8tor For addresses and hours call 1-877-877-5552 BRITISH COLUMBIA Vancouver Island Hillside Centre Mall Lower Mainland Metropolis at Metrotown 1 555 Robson Street ALBERTA Calgary Chinook Centre Market Mall Edmonton Kingsway Garden Mall TELUS Plaza North Retail Partners people on the other. Only 12 bodies were recovered.

The rest re-mam entombed under rockup to 20 metres thick in places. An unlucky trio on their lunch break outside the coal mine were swept to the hereafter, while 17 miners trapped inside spent 13 hours digging to freedom. The engineer of a freight train loading up at the mine throttled up to escape the slide's impact by a few seconds. His brakeman achieved heroic status when he scrambled over rocks still hot from the fall's friction to warn an oncoming passenger train of the blocked rail line ahead. The noise was otherworldly.

"My mother always said the noise was the worst part," recalls survivor descendant Reta Amell, ofEdmonton. "She said it was like a horrible thunder, the loudest you could imagine." Her mother, Cassie, then a young bride, found the front door of her cabin blocked by rock and escaped through abedroom window. Her father, Edgar, the mine's pit boss, was in the town-site when the slide hit and earned a place in the history books for rescuing miracle baby and lone family survivor, Fernie Watkins, from the rubble. Asaneyewitnessblessedwitha keen memory, Edgar Ash was pressed into service in the 1930s to help negotiate a road through the debris field. During excavations, he discovered a house in which the roof had been flattened with such precision, the original floor beneath it had remained free of dust "When they lifted up the roofing they found three skeletons in one bed and one in Reta Amell recalls.

"Dad found an old clock that had stopped at roughly the time of the slide. He kept it on our mantle for years. I'm not sure where it is now. Maybe in the museum." Recent rock slide Geologists remain alert to the probability Turtle Mountain has not yet finished nodding its head. A mid-sized rock slide in 2001 backs up their theory.

"On the south peak there's a large volume of rock roughly one-sixth the size of the original slide that could fall," says Rod Read, a Calgary engineer who pro-ducedastudyon the mountain in 1999. "If that were to leave the mountain as a single block, it has the potential to cross the river and end up where there is new development or even the railway." Talk of blasting down the overhang has gone nowhere. For now, scientists have opted to keep a vigilant watch byplacing motion detection and fissure-measuring devices on the mountain. Had today's technology existed in 1903, the Frank Slide death toll might haw been eliminated. "Today's instruments wouldVe shown that major changes in the physical structure of the mountain were there and were accelerating," Read says.

"We wouldn't have predicted it exactly, but we certainly woukfve known something bad was For the dead of Frank who never knew what hit them, early-warning technology arrived a century too late. CanWett Newt Service H0IE ALIEITA 17, 112 call 310-4NET. the future is friendly Block with Freedom computer viruses Anti -Virus instead. Help protect your e-mails, attachments and Internet downloads from viruses that could damage your computer. THUS Velocity ADSL Internet service makes it simple with Freedom Anti-Virus.

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