A volcanic eruption beneath the Bering Sea triggered tsunamis. A fast-moving surge of water destroyed a lighthouse on Unimak Island, killing the five Coast Guard members inside.
The year was 1946. World War II had ended.
It was a watery bomb that exploded into Jeano Campanaro's world just off the coast of the Alaskan Peninsula, burning a memory into his brain.
"The closer I get to death, I think about that almost daily," said Campanaro, 79, who now lives in Holladay. "It really created an impression on me."
A Salt Lake City resident and son of Italian immigrants, the 19-year-old Campanaro was working for the U.S. Coast Guard on the 25-mile-long Unimak Island off the coast of Alaska.
On the day he arrived on the island via row boat, Campanaro took note of the smoking Shishaldin volcano. The word tsunami didn't come to mind.
Records would show the big wave or series of waves hit Unimak, the biggest of all the Aleutian Islands, at around 1:30 a.m., April 1.
Even with the window open and the cold outside — Campanaro liked to sleep that way — he doesn't remember hearing any loud noises.
"All of a sudden, the sea was all around me," Campanaro recalled.
There was panic among his 20 bunk mates at the two-story house, 300 yards down the beach from the lighthouse. They ran outside in their underwear with water still surrounding the house — Campanaro calmly put on his clothes, dry inside the house that normally sat about 125 feet above the sea.
Under normal circumstances, Campanaro's crew was responsible for using a high-frequency direction finding system to locate distress signals from aircraft and sea vessels.
Now, the Coast Guard was in trouble.
A few men tried to start a generator for lights at the two-story house. The wet generator started a fire — the house survived.
They sent their own distress signal, an SOS. But for those on the other end of the signal, it seemed like an April Fools' joke.
"They ignored us," Campanaro said.
Luckily, everyone in his house escaped injury. The lighthouse was destroyed. With waves sent in all directions, people as far away as Hawaii were killed by tsunamis that hit other areas.
When daylight broke, Coast Guard members combed the beach looking for his colleagues from the lighthouse.
The island was a place where Campanaro walked the beach, listening to the barking of sea lions. There were caribou, tundra, but no trees.
Campanaro found only one battered body and some parts — he took a picture of a foot and developed the photo in his darkroom at the house.
Campanaro remembers a scientist concluding that the speed of the water as it hit the island was around 100 mph.
Afterward, there were sleepless nights when tremors on the island set nerves on edge as the men huddled at the entrance to the house, ready to run if the building started coming down.
In the days that followed, Campanaro learned how to bake bread to keep the crew going. He found a box of dried fruit and threw some of that into the mix.
Back in Salt Lake City, his father, Carmen, called the commandant of the Coast Guard for news of what he feared was his dead son.
"No, your son is alive," his father was told.
After Campanaro was discharged from the Coast Guard, he enlisted in the Naval Reserves, retiring 24 years later as a lieutenant commander. He spent 30 years as a social worker for the Utah Department of Human Services.
In 1951 Campanaro got married. Through the years he would tell his story to his children. In October 2005, his beloved Dorothy died.
Sixty years later, retired, alone in his home, Campanaro can't stop thinking about that time in 1946 when the sea was all around him.
E-mail: sspeckman@desnews.com