“I know,” Viv said, looking unhappy.
“Well, I mean...you have the detective skills, obviously.”
“Obviously,” Viv agreed.
“But the little old lady frumpy stuff...you're going to have a hard time pulling that off,” Trish said.
“I know,” Viv said again, looking even unhappier. “I don't think I even pulled off the 'Love' bit.”
“Sure you did,” I said, rubbing her arm. “I bought it.” That probably fell under the heading of “bearing false witness,” but I felt God would understand I was doing it to lift up a friend in need.
“Oh!” Trisha said, as if she'd just remembered something. “I forgot about the videos. I'm going to send you a link to the videos I saved on our server. Wait. No, I can't give you access to that.” She stopped and stared down at her desk for a moment, thinking. “I'll copy them to my personal cloud storage and give you a link to that.”
Viv and I looked at each other. Whatever else fell under the heading of our “area of expertise,” servers and cloud storages most definitely did not. I was the least tech-savvy twenty-something in the civilized world.
Trisha clicked a couple more things, then turned back to us. She correctly interpreted the looks on our faces. “They're just videos. All you have to do is click the link I send you, and then play the videos.” She nodded toward the folder in my hands. “Those are the printed transcripts, and the videos are what we showed on the newscast, plus some links to surveillance videos from different spots around town. Nothing major.”
I stood, a bit overwhelmed at the job ahead of us. But Trisha really did look relieved, and that made me feel better. Whether we deserved it or not, she clearly thought of me as something other than a “heel-grabber,” as did Scott. Otherwise he wouldn't have called, and Trisha wouldn't have handed over all of her notes.
Now all I had to do was prove their faith wasn't misplaced. And not get myself shot at in the process, or Tony would be so mad.
Back at the Monster Carlo, I tossed Viv the keys so she could drive while I sifted through the folder. By the time we were back on the loop, I was overwhelmed again. “What in the world are we supposed to do with all this?”
“What we always do,” Viv said. “Investigate.”
“Yeah, but...” This looked an awful lot like a haystack that probably had no needle in it. “All we really do is go around and ask people nosy questions.”
“You act like that's not investigating. Let's go get a cuppa and decide what nosy questions we need to ask.”
Viv pulled into a little coffee shop on 34th Street and we carried our notes in and found a booth. A waitress came over.
“I'll have a cup of Earl Grey, hot,” Viv said.
The waitress looked confused.
“It's tea, Love. Hot tea.”
Her face cleared. “We have Lipton, I think.”
“Hot?”
She looked at Viv like she was crazy. “Um, no. It's iced.”
Viv sighed.
“I'll have coffee,” I said. “Black.”
“I guess I'll have coffee, too,” Viv said with a put-upon look.
I skimmed through the notebook. I had to hand it to Trisha. Even her borderline-paranoid ravings were organized. The stories fell under two headings, just as she'd said. The first was the Lubbock PD/Space Cop scandal, and the other was related to the earthquake and school collapse in March.
“Do you think it's weird that both stories are almost a year old?” I asked Viv.
She shrugged. “Cheers, Love,” she said as the waitress placed our coffee cups at the table. Then to me, “Not really. I mean, the earthquake was a while ago, but the fallout is still going on. That architecture firm just closed down, what—three months ago? And then Baucum's death two months ago.”
“Trisha has 'Baucum Engineering employees' on the list. I guess a lot of people were laid off when it closed.”
“It might take a couple of months for things to go off the rails for them. Picture it—trouble finding a new job, savings dwindling, the family is facing possible bankruptcy, maybe a move to a new town. Have to sell the house—the dream home they planned to retire in. The teenager who just made the cheerleading squad has to give it up, start over with a bunch of new kids she doesn't know.”
“Or he,” I said. “Don't be sexist.”
“So you can see how a desperate architect father—”
“Or engineer mother,” I interrupted, “Since it's an engineering firm, and women go to college now. Don't be sexist,” I said to the least sexist person I knew.
She went on as if I hadn't said a word, “—could get so beaten down he—or she—traces the whole disaster back to Peter Browning's investigative reports.”
“Not the guy who helped design the building that collapsed in a relatively low-level earthquake?” I asked.
She shrugged again. “For one thing, he's already gone by this time. For another, that's someone our baddie knew—”
“If there is a baddie, and if the baddie is from Baucum Engineering.” I sipped my coffee. “The Baucum Baddie. I like it.”
“It has a nice ring. The point is, I don't see anything off about the time line.” She thumbed through the papers. “Heavens. This is a lot of paper.”
“I know. Want to watch the videos first?”
“Absolutely.” She pulled out her phone and I joined her on that side of the booth.
“Let’s look at the surveillance videos first. I’ve seen all of Peter Browning’s reports, but I haven’t seen all of those.”
Unfortunately, we couldn’t get any of those links to work. After several false starts, we eventually asked the waitress for help. She tried for a few minutes, then pulled her son from the back office where he was doing his homework.
He was maybe thirteen years old and in need of a haircut. He also seemed a little annoyed to be bothered, but eventually we were able to explain to him what we wanted and he took over.
“You don’t need links for that,” he said. “You can type in a search for webcams and then find what you’re looking for.”
“Those would just be live feeds, though, right? We’re looking at history.”
He nodded, typing something new into the browser. “Lots of places store their surveillance history in the cloud, so you just have to know...” He tucked his tongue over his bottom lip as his thumbs danced over the keyboard. “Not all of them, but a lot of them. You just have to know where to find them.” He looked at me from under his shaggy hair and said, “I’m bookmarking it for you so you can find it again. Go to the camera you want to see, then type in the date, and it’ll bring up everything recorded on that day.”
“And how do you know about all this?” his mother asked.
He rolled his eyes. “It’s common knowledge, Mom.”
“It’s not common to me. What kind of things are you looking at through these webcams?”
“They’re out in the open. It’s not like there are any webcams in a girl’s bedroom on this site.”
She frowned but said, “Okay, you. Get back to your homework.”
He turned to follow her back to the office, then turned back and whispered, “The bedroom cams are on a different site. Let me know if you want to see them.”
The surveillance videos were interesting for about eight minutes. Basically, though, it was just watching people live their normal lives, which we could do by looking out the window. We watched the footage of the school collapse, but it was exactly like it was in the news story, so we figured we might as well get started on that.
We clicked the first link to Browning’s stories, then Viv clicked the big sideways triangle to play the video.
The first video was the story right after the earthquake. I didn't need to be reminded of that—we had all watched the footage over and over again, as one does after a huge event. But this was the report put together a few days afterward, with video from different cameras around town, and words scrolled onto the screen between vid
eos.
Browning’s somber voice began the voice-over: It began like any other afternoon.
Trisha—or Patrice, of course—sits beside the news desk, talking to the little camera girl, the one Trisha had called Jessica. Browning is behind her, talking to the sports guy.
Then the camera begins to shake. All four of them straighten, look around. Trisha and Jessica both grab the news desk. The men end their conversation, step apart, look beyond the camera.
The camera shifts, points at nothing, then at the lights on a bar across the high ceiling. The lights shake noticeably, but not wildly.
Then everything shakes. In the background, people scream.
The scene changes to the roll of a seismograph. The paper crawls across the screen and the blue line jumps, low at first, then spikes a little. Then low again. Then spikes, much larger this time. The screen pans in with a tight focus on that spike as it jumps wildly up and down.
Six-point-two on the Richter scale. The largest earthquake ever recorded in the southwest.
The scene then switches to various security cameras around town. A convenience store counter, where a man stands looking out the front window. Suddenly, he grabs the counter, trying to save overtoppling displays before he's thrown to the ground.
A used car lot, a salesman walking in the distance, two guys looking at a pickup in the foreground. They all stop, look at the sky. The salesman stumbles. The two guys crouch beside the pickup, hanging on to it.
We had never felt anything like it before.
A teenage girl's video of her and her friend showing off their new sunglasses and giggling. They stop, clutch each other, still giggling as they felt the first tremors, but then shrieking in terror as the ground quakes hard beneath them.
A mom, recording her young daughter and a grown man, as the man holds the back of the little girl's bicycle seat, encouraging her to keep peddling, keep peddling, she had it. Suddenly the bike wobbles and he stumbles. The girl doesn’t catch on at first, thinks she is just falling, but the dad grabs the bike, drags it to a stop, and looks at the camera, eyes wide. “Was that...?” the woman says. Then the ground shakes, the girl falls, the dad falls, the camera falls, pointing at blue sky and bare tree branches shaking. The girl cries while the mom tries to her reassure her, her own voice verging on panic.
Then back to Peter Browning, walking down a sidewalk on a cloudy day. An empty field spread behind him, and as he slowly walked, the corner of a building came into view, then a curb behind his feet.
“Just last year, News Channel 11 did a special report on the 45th anniversary of the EF5 tornado that struck Lubbock in 1970. I had the privilege of talking to many people who shared with me their personal stories of where they were and what they were doing when the tornado hit. I was struck by what a pivotal event that was to so many people. All those years later, they still remembered it as if it had happened the day before.”
“Little tool,” Viv said. “Forty-five years isn't that long.” She sipped her coffee.
“I could sympathize,” Browning went on. “but I couldn't relate. At least, not until March 11.”
The scene went back to the Channel 11 studio, where Patrice Watson and Tom Timmons were now at their desks, Browning standing beside them. Tri-Patrice was calm but alert, Tom was calm but alert, and Browning looked serious and thrilled at the same time.
“For those of you just tuning in, we have confirmed with the United States Geological Survey that what we experienced at 4:24 this afternoon was, in fact, an earthquake. What you just felt was an earthquake.”
Back to Browning on the sidewalk on the cloudy day, where the scene behind him is now fully revealed. NorthStar Elementary. The only building in the area to sustain major damage from the quake.
“I'll never forget the experience of my first major earthquake. Nothing can prepare you for the feeling of the very world around you falling apart. But as powerful as that experience was for me, it will never compare to the experience of one local family.”
The camera rose, away from Browning, taking in the front of the school building, pristine and new, the ground still bare of grass, a few little twig trees surrounded by their round water moats. We saw the flat roof of the long, wide school building, where it was easy to imagine hundreds of noisy kids running around inside, moving between classrooms, school bells ringing, teachers herding kindergartners.
Then, with a rise in perspective of a degree or two, the scene took in the devastation at the back of the building—the gym wall collapsed, a pile of rubble, a gaping hole where a gymnasium roof should have been.
“Camera drone,” Viv said. “Fancy.”
The scene switched once again: the same location from a slightly different perspective, ambulance and police car lights flashing brightly against the darkening night. A small crowd gathered behind the police car. Stretchers being rolled down the new sidewalk. A man, face and head bloody and covered with white dust, the lower part of his body draped by a white sheet. He was looking back, though, twisting on the gurney even as one of the women pushing it was trying to get him to straighten and face forward.
A second gurney enters the scene now, the body on it much smaller. Half covered. Not fully covered, thankfully. A small blond head showed, dusty and still, streaked with blood, above the blanket.
As the camera closed in, the second gurney drew even with the first, and the man reached out, grappled with the blanket on the second stretcher, and took hold of the small hand he found there.
Browning came back to tell about Matthew Logan, the foreman of the construction company that built the school. He'd been the man on that first stretcher, and his daughter was the small blonde on the second one. They'd both been crushed under the collapsed gymnasium wall. He had a broken leg, broken ribs and collar bone, but expected to recover fully. His daughter's recovery was not quite as easy to predict, Browning said.
“Hmm,” Viv said. We both knew now what Browning had not when this video was made: the girl lived, but would never walk again.
That video ended and Viv clicked the next one. In it, Browning interviewed the man and his wife in their home, a few weeks after the quake. The man wore a cast on his lower leg, and the cuts on his face and head were mostly healed. He was the foreman for the construction company that had built the school, which was scheduled to open the week after spring break. He and his family had been in the school building when the earthquake hit. His wife and two other children were in the hallway of the school and had been safe. He and his eight-year-old daughter had gone into the gym and were buried under the rubble of the collapsed roof and wall.
Viv and I were both holding back tears by the time it was over. The man choked up when he told about how proud he was to be able to show his family the building he'd been working on for the past year, the building they would attend school in for the last part of the year.
Why was it so much more awful when men cried than when women did? Viv sniffed hard, blew her nose into a napkin from the dispenser on the table, and clicked the next link.
This time, Peter Browning was interviewing a USGS expert who said that earthquakes were certainly rare in our area, but the possibility shouldn't be ruled out, especially considering the increase in hydraulic fracturing, injection wells, and tremor incidents in and around Texas.
Another interview with the same USGS guy, who talked about the increase in small earthquakes and how we need to accept that tremors and injection wells go hand in hand, and either adapt to that or ban the use of injection wells.
“What are injection wells?” I asked.
Viv shrugged. “Something to do with fracking,” Viv said.
But as she said it, Browning went into a description of the wells.
“Hydraulic fracturing—or fracking, as it's widely known—is the process of shooting water, sand, and chemicals into shale beneath the earth's surface in order to break up and extract petroleum from the shale layers deep underground.”
In the background,
an animation ran of a pipe drilling into the ground, past different colored layers of earth, deep under a thick blue layer marked with the words “ground water,” through a few more layers, and then sideways. Blue dots representing water then shot down the pipe and out of what must be tiny holes in the end of the pipe. Tiny cracks appeared in the rock layer. Fractures. The tiny blue dots were then joined by black and brown dots, and the process reversed itself, back up to above ground. The dots then separated, with the black going into one tank and the blue and brown ones into another.
“Back above ground, the oil is separated from the water and sand, which is either used again on more fracking, or disposed of according to EPA regulations.”
“That seems like an awful lot of trouble,” I said.
“Getting oil has never been the easiest job in the world,” Viv said. “Jed Clampett made it look too easy.”
On screen, Browning gestured with his hands as he tried, emphatically, to educate his audience.
“For several years, as you probably know, there has been speculation about the link between fracking and increased earthquake incidents. Scientists now believe it's not the actual fracking process that is causing the quakes, but rather the process of injecting the waste water from the drilling back underground. In other words, the use of injection wells.”
On screen, the black dots were pumped into a little cartoon tanker truck, which drove away as the blue and brown dots were once again pumped down to rest below the ground water table.
“The EPA has determined that the disposal of this waste water is not a threat to our drinking water, but what is coming to light now is that this process—this practice of pumping that water back underground—is actually lubricating these layers of rock that have, for thousands and millions of years—”
“Thousands and millions,” Viv scoffed.
“Rested against each other.” He pointed out the layers in the picture. “The pressure of these enormous layers of rock, stacked so far below the earth's surface, has kept them from shifting.” In front of him, Browning held his hands flat, palm to palm. His upper arms stiffened as he increased the pressure. “What scientists are saying is that these layers of water between rock are decreasing that pressure –” He drew his hands slightly apart. “and making it easier for them to –” He slid his hands apart. “slide against each other. As they did the afternoon NorthStar Elementary collapsed.”
Knickers in a Twist Page 13