There was no logical explanation why the water in their shallow hiding places did not boil them alive or simply evaporate—or why the resulting shock waves did not collapse the fragile walls of their tiny makeshift trenches. Later, when they were asked about their harrowing experience, Manuel and Cathy Quintana would simply say, “God must have wanted witnesses to what happened out there that night. He put His hand down on top of Mount Wilson to protect us. That’s all we know. We have no other explanation.”

WHAT THEY DISCOVERED after it was all over, was that at 7:03 P.M., Pacific Coast time, three hundred billion pounds of blazing rock plunged into the cold waters of the Pacific Ocean, then immediately pounded the ocean floor with an explosive force equivalent to five thousand of the most powerful nuclear warheads on earth. Geysers of scalding hot steam shot up miles into the evening sky, followed immediately by a circular wall of water that rose over one mile above the earth’s surface, then spread out in every direction at lightning speed.

Within minutes of impact, petroleum products stored in California depots from Long Beach to San Luis Obispo burst into flame. Fuel lines leading from offshore oil wells had ruptured at impact. The crude oil and natural gas from deep offshore had been ignited, setting the sea itself ablaze.

Towering waves were crowned with blazing crude oil, and the massive tidal wave from hell raced across the Los Angeles Basin, burning, drowning, and destroying everything in its path. Nothing could stand against it. Nothing could have lived in its wake.

Minutes later, the boiling, surging seawater overflowed everything from San Diego to Santa Barbara. Every inch of Greater Los Angeles and Orange County was suddenly under five thousand feet of water.

The waves lashed against the San Bernardino Mountains to the east, then poured into the Imperial Valley and the Mojave Desert. Floodwaters poured through tunnels and mountain passes into Bakersfield and the San Joaquin Valley to the north.

Steadily, like the hand of a death-dealing monster, the second surge moved up the coast toward San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland, and San Jose.

Like concentric rings on a pond, massive walls of water were hurled northward toward Alaska and the Aleutian Islands; southward along the coast of Mexico and further south toward Peru and Chile; westward toward Hawaii and the islands of Polynesia; and then on to the west, where they were soon to encompass Japan, the Philippines, Korea, and the islands of the Pacific. The havoc unfolded like clockwork, and even the most hardened disaster trackers knew that nothing like this had ever before been witnessed by mankind.

Pressure from the underwater blast had been so intense that all fish and marine life within a thousand-mile radius of the Impact Zone were instantly killed.