Detailed simulations of the San Francisco Bay suggest that three prisoners who escaped from the prison on Alcatraz Island in 1962 could have made it safely to shore.
SAN FRANCISCO — Three inmates who escaped from Alcatraz in 1962 and set off into the San Francisco Bay on a makeshift raft could have safely reached shore if they timed their escape just right, new research suggests.
“In our worst-case scenario, they had an almost zilch chance of surviving,” said hydrologist Rolf Hut of Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. “If they left at the right time and paddled in the right direction, they had an almost 100 percent chance of making it, not including the chance of something like a leak in the boat.”
Resolving the mysterious disappearance of the convicts wasn’t the team’s intention, said coastal scientist Fedor Baart of Deltares, a research institution in Delft, Netherlands. The primary goal was to assess the impacts of future sea level rise on industries lining the banks of the San Francisco Bay. Combining detailed sonar-based maps of the bay’s bottom with simulations of ocean currents and tides, the team could project how rising sea level would impact coastal flooding during storms.
For every 30 minutes between 8 p.m. and 4 a.m. on the night of the escape, the team simulated the release of 50 boats from a range of possible escape spots on Alcatraz. Some of the test boats drifted aimlessly with the current, while some were paddled by the prisoners in various directions. A few of the boats mimicked the presumed behavior of the prisoners, such as whether they would paddle faster if they spotted land through San Francisco’s thick fog.
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