Whittier, Alaska: The Town Where Everyone Lives Under One Roof

Imagine an entire American city, its school, its grocery store, its police station, and nearly every resident's home, packed inside a single 14-story building at the end of a glacier basin. Welcome to Whittier, Alaska.This episode explores how extreme geography, secretive military history, and a catastrophic earthquake forged one of the most uniquely isolated and tight-knit communities on Earth. We trace Whittier from a native portage route to a fog-shielded World War II base, through the largest recorded US earthquake, to its modern life consolidated inside one concrete tower.The sub-polar climate dumping over 16 feet of precipitation a year and why the military prized that bad weatherThe colossal Buckner and Hodge buildings, once the largest structures in all of AlaskaThe 1964 Good Friday earthquake and the 43-foot tsunami that struck the townHow almost the whole population now lives in Begich Towers, with kids reaching school through a tunnelThe two-and-a-half-mile tunnel that ended Whittier's isolation and turned it into a cruise gateway