The Yellowstone Conundrum

by John Randall

  The tsunami raced toward the locks, smashed into it and over the top, water pouring into Lake Union before petering out. The ferry Wenatchee rode the crest of the tsunami through Elliott Bay like it was on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. North of the ferry terminal was pier 54, famous for Ivar’s Acres of Clams, long lines for dinner, an icon in Seattle.

  The earthquake’s shock wave had already softened up the massive assault of the tsunami; the seawall had collapsed from pier 63 south to the shipyards, sinking fifteen feet into Elliott Bay; the ground under the seawall became liquefied; the Alaskan Way roadway and parking lots beyond split like a soft cookie. A hundred yards beyond, sections of the Viaduct had pancaked; northbound lanes fell into the southbound lanes, which then collapsed to the ground.

  The wave rolled over Ivar’s and the other eateries along the seawall.

  They were gone in an instant.

  The initial wall of water was roof-level at Ivar’s. Anyone standing on the pier would have been hit with water fifteen feet over his head. The Wenatchee rode smack over the top of the restaurant, crunching the mostly wooden structure with its massive weight, then began to turn sideways as the water pounded inland. The ferry terminal just to the south saw the wave up-close-and-personal as well, as the crest of the tsunami came in at eye level; ripping and tearing everything it met; steel girders folded like matchsticks. A half-mile north the Smith Cove Waterway—home port for the Alaskan cruise ferries—was overrun and destroyed in less than five seconds; the only blessing being that there wasn’t a cruise ferry docked in port.

  Closer to downtown were piers 62, 63 and the Bell Harbor marina; all overtopped with the first staggering waved, boats, pier, restaurants—all destroyed. A hundred yards behind the pier were 10 condo buildings, deliberately low-topped at eight stories as to not hog the spectacular view of the Sound and the Olympic peninsula to the west.

  Aerial of downtown Seattle, Elliot Bay in foreground, Lake Washington along upper edge. Harbor Island on lower right. Shipyards middle right. Sports stadiums, I-90/I-5 interchange upper center. Permission granted by photographer Derrick Coetzee, Wikipedia administrator.

  Downtown Seattle: Alaskan Way viaduct runs along lower edge; I-5 separates downtown from medical districts and neighborhoods; Lake Washington at top; Union Bay, Montlake Cut, University of Washington along top of photo. Permission granted by Walter Seigmund, Wikipedia Commons.

  The tsunami wave overtopped the marina in one giant leap, then smashed the piers, bounced, crossed the highway, and with a whoosh landed on Alaskan Way, bounced forty feet into the air and continued straight through the artificial canyons of roads and streets, wrecking the first floor of every building in its path.

  Five blocks to the south, the Wenatchee crossed two blocks of above ground parking and slammed into the infrastructure on the eastern side of the Alaskan Viaduct, jamming its huge self underneath a section of the overhead highway’s undestroyed roadway, half of it coming through to the eastern side as the southbound traffic lane fell; like a subway coming to an abrupt stop at the end of a construction site.

  The Wenatchee slammed through the mess of parked cars and came to an abrupt stop at the foot of Madison Street, trapped by the concrete and rebar of the old elevated highway. Behind came a wave that tried to lift the Wenatchee up on the wings of eagles, but failed. The wave poured through the badly damaged boat, sweeping cars out from the lower level parking decks, tumbling them onto Madison Street; no one would survive the car decks.

  On the observation decks above, the wave rushed through the lower deck, like water pouring into the sinking Titanic; on the upper deck, the ladders and stairways leading up from the deck below were like a whale’s blowhole. On the top deck, the pilot’s house was sheered, scrunched by the impact with the northbound lanes of the Alaskan Viaduct. Captain Duvall and his crew were killed instantly, as if a building had fallen on them.

  On open side streets water greedily gathered purchase, climbing uphill toward the main business district; cars, buses, trash cans, dead people, building debris all washed uphill toward Second Ave., which now was beyond one-way South. First-floor storefronts were ripped, scoured like Christ by the centurions, then eaten by the second and third waves of water; all flowing uphill to Third Avenue; the Blue Water Taco Grill, and a Wells Fargo bank, Sound Soups, Boka Kitchen and Bar, the Metropolitan Grill, the Library Bistro, North Face, Owl ‘n Thistle, Fado’s Irish Pub, the Cherry Street Coffee House—all were gone.

  Further south, the tsunami wiped out the lowlands first, just like the cruise ship piers to the north, and then smashed through the shipyards where boats from afar came to offload goods from Asia to US markets; rushing southwards with nothing in its way but warehouse buildings asking to be dropped like a bad habit, the tsunami completely destroyed all of Harbor Island, an island dedicated to import/exports and the shipping trades.

  Beyond, the tsunami invaded the sports complexes for the Mariners and Seahawks, bringing debris, dead bodies, building parts, automobiles, tires, tons of dead fish, pieces of boats and everything that would float into the flat areas used as parking lots; flowing all the way up to Harborview Hospital.

  Seattle’s version of the Big Dig was the on-going replacement of the Alaskan Way Viaduct and Seawall Replacement Program; a massive project that would eliminate the Viaduct and enable Seattle to have a spectacular waterfront park. The South portal entrance under the waterfront harbor began just west of the Mariners/Seahawks sports complex. Water poured into the unfinished tunnel.

  Reaching its watery fingers as far inland as it could, the tsunami rested, almost as if pausing for reflection, and then slowly began to drain back into Elliott Bay.

  The lights were out. It was 6:50 a.m. Fires had begun to break out all along the destroyed pier area as gas lines exploded. A cold, damp mist covered Puget Sound on what would have been a normal day for February. The high temperature for the day would be 41 degrees.

  Columbia Generating Station

  Hanford Nuclear Reservation

  Richland, Washington; 6:20 PST

  The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s estimate of the risk each year of an earthquake intense enough to cause core damage to the reactor at Columbia Generating Station was 1 in 47,619, according to an NRC study published in August 2010.

  The odds of winning a $10,000 prize on a multi-state Powerball are 723,144-to-1.

  Every week people win Powerball prizes.

  NRC File Photo—Columbia Generating Station

  Hanford Site Map—US Fish and Wildlife Service, public domain

  At 6:20 PST Power Control Assistant Specialist, Andy Everett, two steps below white whale shit on Northwest Energy’s totem pole of success, nearly unloaded a toxic dump into his jeans. The panels in front of him, which were straight out of a 1960s b-movie, complete with big toggle switches and push-pull knobs, blurred in his vision as everything in his universe began to dance; coffee, newspapers, books, laptop computers, regulatory documents, and clunky analog telephones, the kind mom used to have.

  “Shit! Shit!” Andy shouted as the control panel instruments began to freak. The emergency phones rang in virtual unison, adding semi-comical chorography, a different layer of background music. Andy heard the phones, but now in his new position of being flat on his ass, he looked at them helplessly.

  Andy, the youngest control specialist at age 29, a 2004 graduate of Kennewick High School (go lions!) didn’t want to think about the power of what was behind his predicament; after all, he was in a room surrounded by a lead-shielded wall of five-foot thick concrete, and being shaken, not stirred. It was as if the #4 to Yankee Stadium and the L to Wrigley were both in the same room. Andy struggled and grabbed the arm of a grey standard roller chair. As he tried to get up, the chair scooted out across the carpeted floor.

  Power Control Center, Columbia Generating Plant, NRC stock photo

  The Columbia Generating Station was severely shaken by a rapid series of earthquakes with force coming at opposite directions.
For a full two minutes the ground shook in different directions, like holding tuning forks with different pitches, one in each ear. From the east came the powerful Yellowstone quake, from the west the less powerful but damaging Puget Sound earthquake. Located close to the mid-way point between Bainbridge Island, Washington and Old Faithful Village, Wyoming, the force of the dual earthquakes was devastating to anything in a direct path.

  The NP-2 plant was the only one of the five planned nuclear facilities at Hanford that had made it to completion, then to actually generate electricity. Part of the nuclear boom in the 1960s-1970s (it’s alright, it’s alright, etc.) the nuclear plants of the Washington Public Power Supply System were designed to supply cheap electricity to the US and beyond.

  Over the years, failures in building design, (the whole 60s Chernobyl design), delays in construction and a series of screw-ups (low-bid contractors) let the public to view WPPSS by it’s acronym “whoops” as in what a screw-up. Added to the project’s problems, as if they needed more problems, was that they were like hitting the clown target with a baseball; Idiots on Patrol. Technology had passed them by; environmentalists both local and national had them by the short hairs. They did vent poison gasses, whoops, which poisoned the grasses to the east of the plant with high levels of radiation, which the milk cows ate, which was passed forward to the unsuspecting public.(whoops)

  In the end, the NP-2 plant was purchased by a group of power companies and renamed by a team of marketers to Energy Northwest, kind of like putting a picture of a friendly cow on a bucket of bullshit; but what the hell; the plant provided 14% of the power to the city of Seattle.

  All of which was irrelevant to Andy Everett as the chair he tried to grab scooted in the opposite direction, then did a neat flip, backside up fifteen feet away.

  Then the subway trains went further down their respective tunnels. Oh, yeah, we’re not shakin’ as much. It’s stoppin’. We’re OK. We’re going to be OK. Wide-eyed, neither Andy nor his other graveyard partner, Leon Holt had a word to say. Dry-mouthed, they slowly climbed to knees, and stood up.

  The noise of the trains, however, continued to rumble; even though each of them knew they were working in a secure Federal location in the middle of the desert of central Washington State. There shouldn’t be any noise.

  The power went out. Locked inside a secure lead-shielded control room, neither Andy nor Leon heard the other yell for momma. Did I yell? Shit no I didn’t yell. All the lights on the three-sided control panel were out. A long ten seconds passed, then like turning the tree on Christmas Eve, the panels all came back to life, and were they ever screaming! Annoying Klaxons, penetrating whiny shrieking bells, lights and whistles, everything came back on at once; including the phones, which had been silenced for the last two minutes.

  The NRC direct line was ringing as was the line to Bonneville Power in Portland.

  While the Columbia Generating Plant #2 was a DOE facility, the electrical power it generated was controlled by a quasi-public corporation, the Bonneville Power Administration, whose job it was to generate, buy and trade electricity generated from hydroelectric, nuclear and coal plants throughout the Northwest United States to other needy locations, primarily Southern California—Los Angeles and San Diego.

  Lights flashing, horns blazing, the BPA phone began to ring.

  “Auto correction in process,” shouted Leon Holt, 42, balding and single from the opposite side of the room. Leon was on the downside of a long and undistinguished career, still a power control specialist, but moved to third shift—the graveyard. “The system’s shutting down.” He added, nervously.

  Pre-programmed, the NP-2’s computers instructed the fail-safe system to begin inserting boron rods into the main core; like jake-brakes on an 18-wheeler designed to slow a heavy truck, the rods slowly entered into the core, immediately absorbing neutrons from fission process of creating steam from hot water, fully intending to bring the nuclear plant to a halt. The further the rods were inserted, the slower the fission process proceeded.

  Unsure, Andy stumbled to his feet. Just as he reached for the BPA phone the power in the room went out again, scaring the shit out of them both. Leave it to Big Al to call in sick yesterday afternoon. What timing. The control panels were dark. There was no residual light from the overhead and no window in the heavy steel door that led to the core containment. It was pitch fucking dark. Silence. Nothing. The trains had left the station; nothing but heavy breathing and an occasional fart.

  Shit

  The only source of light in the room came from a single white button, the direct connection to BPA. Andy quickly answered. “Yes?”

  “Are you all right?” asked Jake Beatty, Power Control Manager for Bonneville Power Administration a hundred miles away in Portland.

  “That depends,” Andy started slowly. “I think we’re all right, replied Andy, his BO index rising.

  “The A/C is out,” Leon added from across the room. “There’s no circulation.”

  “The plant?” asked Jake, hearing Leon’s voice.

  “Unknown,” answered Andy, truthfully. “We have no power in the control room. I can’t open the door to get outside. We have no lights. I have no monitors. I don’t have jack shit. There’s noise out there that shouldn’t be there and nobody’s picking up any of the in-house lines.” Andy added. “I’ve never felt anything like it. My gut tells me we’ve taken a big, big hit.”

  Not good; neither needed to add that the Columbia Generating Station needed electricity in order to properly shut down the nuclear power plant. Andy’s shirt showed sweat circles through his undershirt and long-sleeved white shirt. He’d made it a policy of his to dress one level higher than his co-workers. Being the youngest, he’d learned that in government, you did your job and kept your mouth shut. It was OK in business to assert oneself, but in the government, jobs were held by tenure. (See Holt, Leon)

  Working in the belly of the beast from ten-thirty PM to seven AM, going home when the sun hit you in the eyes, sleeping during the prime of the day; having cocktails at 8 AM while cooking a steak on the Barbie, all took getting used to.

  “I show you’re--”

  The line went dead.

  It’s OK the emergency power will come on and the door will open. The darkness of the room didn’t do much for his confidence. It’s OK the emergency power will come on and the door will open.

  “We’re off grid,” Andy let the words trail off. Shit was the magic word of the morning. The line to Portland went dead as did the only light in the control room, cutting off Jake Beatty in mid sentence.

  Andy’s mouth was cotton-dry; his pits were soaked and he had to pee out of his ear.

  “Ok then,” Andy started, his words a little more than a croak. “Leon, what’s the manual say about this one?

  He’d always been thin; while turning into a bean pole wouldn’t happen until he was 18 and a senior, at age 15 he was just a sprout and in the ninth grade. If he’d been a green bean he’d be part of what went into the trash. As a freshman he was a full head shorter than the average ninth grader; and, when you’re in the ninth grade all you want to do is be average. All the good-looking ninth grade girls all wanted to sneak out of home and date seniors, while the rest of the dorky girls were just as dorky as the dorky boys. Just be average and get through it!

  But, it was not to be. Little Andy Everett had grown up to be six-two, thin as a rail at 160 pounds, but had paid attention in math and science classes and had gone to Columbia Basin Community College across the river in Pasco. After two years he had an Instrumentation and Control Technician degree in the Nuclear Technology School and had submitted a resume to Columbia Generating as well as to several of the other contractors responsible for the clean-up of Hanford’s nuclear waste. In 2008 he’d started working third shift in Maintenance, then two years later applied for a third-shift position in the power control center earning $38,000. Turnover was slow. Everyone else was a decade older, at least. There was little-to-no movem
ent to a first- or second-shift job.

  Andy had one little problem. He was claustrophobic.

  On Tuesday December 21st at 4:45 in the afternoon, freshman Andy Everett, star of the fall freshman cross-country team, was mugged inside Kennewick High School by three football players. This was a time when hazing—although gone for the large majority of high schools—still existed. Andy had finished cleaning out his sports locker and was returning to his book locker. It was the last day before Christmas vacation. The three football players, urged on by who else but two good-looking nine-grade girls, decided to teach the little nerd a lesson in humility. Too many of his ninth-grade classmates looked up to Andy, who didn’t act out, went to class, just wanting to be average.

  In the matter of five seconds the three older boys had Andy secured, his head covered with a balaclava turned backwards, which made breathing extremely difficult. His feet never touched the ground. The girls screamed and urged the boys on. They went down two hallways, then up a flight of stairs, and down another hallway. Snap-snap-clank went the book locker lock.

  “Hurry up!” one of the football players urged.

  “Shut up!” replied another.

  “Do it!” urged one of the good-looking girls.

  Andy heard a locker being emptied by brute force, imagining books, notes, unwashed gym clothes, a semester’s worth of fruit drink cartons, a book bag, maybe an old iPod being scattered across the hallway floor.