Quake Survivor Revisits Tragic Scene

Irene Bennett Dunn visited Montana’s Madison Valley this month to close the final chapter of the story she’s relived daily for 36 years.

Three of her four children and her first husband died there, victims of the 1959 Montana-Yellowstone earthquake.

Clutching tissues and seated in her house near Hope this week, the retired Clark Fork Elementary teacher said the trip went according to plan.

“I kept saying we’ll do the emotional part. Then we’ll have fun,” she said. “It helped a lot to prepare.”

Irene, 75, and husband Jack accompanied her one living son, Phil, and his wife to the Earthquake Area and Interpretive Center near Ennis, Mont. They visited monuments to 28 people who died in one of the most severe earthquakes (7.8 on the Richter scale) ever recorded in North America. The quake on Aug. 17, 1959, sent giant waves rushing from Hebgen Lake down the narrow Madison Canyon where Irene’s family was sleeping.

It also unloaded 80 million tons of rock from a 7,600-foot mountain into the Madison River, hurling campers against trees, cars, trailers or the canyon wall.

Purley and Irene Bennett, along with Carole, 17, Philip, 16, Tom, 11, and Susan, 6, had set off from Dalton Gardens two days earlier on a camping vacation.

After visiting relatives in Hope, the family headed east in their green Ford station wagon, undecided on whether to go to Canada or Yellowstone.

“I want to see the animals,” Irene remembers her youngest saying. “Everybody then agreed to go to Yellowstone.”

The trip included a day in Virginia City. “We did all the fun things and pulled into camp late,” she said. The whole family slept on top of a rented tent.

“At 11:37, I heard a loud bang. The earth began to shake,” Irene recalled. “My husband got up … I saw him grab a tree … that’s all I remember.” Later, sensations of being underwater and pinned beneath a tree on a sandy bank prompted Irene to pray.

“I saw the moon was out. It was a brilliant moon,” she said. “I recited the 121st Psalm, my favorite: Lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help. …”

The night of horror was just beginning. Calling in vain for her family, Irene dug her way free only to discover she couldn’t stand. Her leg was broken. She was naked, except for her broken Bulova watch, which stopped at the moment of impact.

Irene covered herself with branches.

“I just stayed there until morning; then I called and called until I heard an answer,” she said. The response came from Phil, badly hurt with head and leg injuries.

The only two survivors in the area, they were taken to Ennis Community Hospital, but not before Irene learned of her husband’s death.

“I prayed that the children would be alive, but they would slowly find a body,” she recalled. “Carole, then Tom. It was a long time before they found Susan. I prayed for her to be alive, yet I worried about her being out there by her little self.”

Relatives held a memorial service while Irene and Phil recuperated. The two eventually returned to Coeur d’Alene where Irene earned a provisional teaching certificate and Phil finished high school.

In 1961, she married her high school sweetheart Jack Dunn, a dairy farmer from Hope. Phil now works for Boeing Computer Systems.

Last week’s journey provided a bittersweet ending to the book Irene intends to write for herself and others suffering from tragedy.

“We’ll never forget them, but we’ll go on with our lives with the family we’ve acquired,” she said. “We are a family again.”