Knickers in a Twist

by Kim Hunt Harris

  The scene switched to Peter sitting across from Matthew Logan and his wife in their living room.

  “Macon has been hounding me every day for the past six months. He wants to make sure the school is going to be ready in time. He doesn't want these other two to go there and him not have his chance. He was real upset with me when we didn’t meet the original deadline.”

  Every time dad had come home with a story about a delay or a problem on the site, all three kids were up in arms.

  “Macon and Meredith knew that if it wasn't finished in time, they'd be doing school in the portable buildings, but Marcus was under the impression that we were just going to make him go to school on a working construction site. And he was okay with that.”

  The Logan family are used to construction sites. Mr. Logan has worked construction all his life. He often took the family onto job sites.

  “If we could do it safely,” he said. “After the crew was gone and I knew we wouldn't be in anybody's way. When I knew the site was stable enough for them to walk around. So, they learned early on the environment, got to see firsthand everything that goes into a project, everything that's behind the walls you see and under the floors you walk on.”

  “They have a perspective a lot of kids don't have,” Peter said.

  “They do. I'd slap a hard hat on them and we'd take a look.”

  “It wouldn't bother you any if your kids decided to follow you into the business?”

  “Wouldn't bother me a bit.” He grinned.

  “I want to go back to what you said before. You said, 'If we could do it safely.' March 11 was a day when, by all indications, you could let your kids visit the school safely.”

  “March 11 was definitely a day when we should have been able to do it safely. It was finished. All the inspections had been done. It was done.”

  “A brand new building, ready to go.”

  “Ready to go. The next day, the teachers were going to come in and tour their rooms. They had hired people to move stuff in over Spring break, and when the kids came back from Spring break, it was going to be all new stuff. The kids were excited. Everyone was excited.”

  “So, you took them all up there. Just the five of you?”

  “No, it was the five of us—my wife and I, and the three kids, along with the principal and a couple of the teachers.”

  “The ribbon cutting was scheduled for the next day.”

  “That's right. The superintendent and school board were all going to be there, news cameras and everything. This was just a sneak preview.”

  “And then...”

  “And then.” He shifted in his chair, his mouth set grimly.

  “Describe what happened.”

  “Meredith wanted to see the cafeteria, and Macon wanted to see the gym. They're side by side, so we were down there. I'd just opened the cafeteria door and Meredith ran inside, when we felt the first rumbling.”

  “Did you know immediately what it was?”

  “No. The first thought that went through my mind was that a pipe had blown somewhere. A small explosion. Meredith turned to me—she was scared and shocked, it was all over her face—but then it stopped. Got real quiet. I thought, “Was that an earthquake?” I couldn't believe it. I had been hearing, of course, about earthquakes around the area, but I'd never felt one before. And I thought, “Well, that wasn't so bad.” I started walking toward her to reassure her.”

  “And then it hit.”

  “And then it hit.”

  The screen switched to a shot of the graph that showed the quake's intensity. The first tremor they'd felt was a small red hump. Then the red line spiked.

  The wall in the cafeteria collapsed on Logan and his daughter. Out in the hallway, the rest of the family was okay. But under that wall, Matthew and Meredith Logan were trapped and hurt.

  “What do you remember from that time under the rubble?”

  “Oh, I remember all of it. I never did pass out. I had a blow to my head, my legs were stuck, and my right arm was trapped. But I could hear everything and still see some things.”

  “Could you hear Meredith?”

  “I—” He stopped. Breathed deep through his nose. His face contorted. He looked at the floor in front of him, biting his lower lip. He shifted in his chair. “I could hear her. She was calling me. “Daddy, Daddy.” I called back to her, told her it was okay, I would get her out. She said she was stuck. She was scared. “I want to go home,” she said.”

  “I want to go home.”

  The scene switched to video of the rescue workers who pulled the Logans out of the rubble. Some walls of the school stood, but the gym and cafeteria were open to bright blue sky. Mrs. Logan and the boys stood at the side of the collapse, looking shocked.

  A series of images followed. Meredith, dusty and unconscious, lying under the white sheet of a gurney, her left hand dangling off the edge. Matthew, beside her. A close-up of his hand, reaching out to take her much smaller one across the space between them, before they were loaded onto the ambulance.

  “The doctors said pretty early on that Meredith wasn't going to walk again. The kind of injury she had, it just wasn't possible. With what they were able to do now, they said that she would never walk again.”

  “Never walk again. Never dance again.”

  “Never dance again.”

  The screen filled with shots of Meredith Logan in her various dance outfits. White blonde hair, and pink, gap-toothed grin. Meredith in a pink tutu and white tights; Meredith in a spangly, fringy flapper dress, wearing a huge red lipsticked smile; Meredith in a black leotard, the background dark, her young face in somber profile, the light soft on her tender features.

  “She lived to dance.”

  “Always dancing. Always. We'd be walking down the aisle in the grocery store and she's waltzing along behind me, listening to the music in her head. All over the house. At the park. I mean, she would just tune everything out and dance wherever she was.”

  “Does she understand what's happened? The permanence of it?”

  The parents looked at each other. The mom ducked her head quickly. Her shoulders jerked slightly as she sniffed.

  “We've been talking about that,” Matthew Logan said. “We've told her, of course. And sometimes it seems like she does understand it. When we first told her, she just...” He broke off.

  “She acted like she just didn't hear it. She just—” The mom brought a hand down in front of her face. “Shut it completely out. No acknowledgment at all.” She sniffed and cleared her throat. “I felt like...she must have overheard some of the hospital staff or someone talking about it. Because she didn't seem shocked or upset, just...completely ignoring it.”

  “So, we decided we had to give her time to process it.” He shrugged. “We didn't need to push it. She had plenty of time.”

  “The rest of her life.”

  That hung heavy in the air.

  After a few painful moments, Peter went on. “So, tell us about those first days after the earthquake. There were things going through your mind as a father, of course. And as someone who'd also been injured. What about as a construction foreman? What was going through your head as the person who'd been in charge of constructing the very wall that had fallen on you?”

  He shook his head slowly as he relived those days. “Lying in that hospital bed, I went over and over those plans in my mind. Had we followed them right? Had we screwed up somewhere? I mean, an earthquake is an act of God and you can't design for every disaster like that. You just can't. But we certainly try. We try to build things that will withstand what we know is a high risk. In this area, that's usually wind. Wind is the biggest threat to our structures. So we build with that in mind.”

  “Everyone knows we're here in tornado alley. Lubbock has had devastating tornadoes before.”

  “Right. The engineers and architects who design the plans—they design with the wind in mind. How deep do our foundations need to be to withstand 120 mile-per-hour winds? How thick
do our supports have to be? What kind of connections do we use?”

  “So, I'm going to go back to something you said earlier. You said you'd heard about earthquakes in the area.”

  His mouth flattened and he nodded.

  “This area has seen a fairly dramatic uptick in tremors over the past several years.”

  “That's right.”

  “So, it might be reasonable to assume that—” Peter shrugged, spreading his hands. “That it's time to work that into the calculations.”

  “It would be reasonable to assume that. Because that's exactly what the professionals who work in this area have been talking about.”

  “That they need to consider the possibility of earthquake now, along with the possibility of high wind?”

  “Exactly.”

  “So...did this plan include those considerations?”

  Matthew Logan shook his head. “No.”

  The scene cut to the front of Baucum Engineering, then shrank to the corner so that we now saw Peter at the news desk with Trisha and Tom Timmons.

  “Patrice and Dan, I talked to the engineering firm that designed the NorthStar Elementary building, and tomorrow night we'll see that interview, right here on News Channel 11.”

  “All right, Peter. Interesting stuff. We look forward to learning more. Switching gears now to weather...”

  I clicked the link for the interview with David Baucum.

  The story opened with Baucum sitting behind a large desk, and I realized this was the same office—even the same desk, I was fairly sure—that had been in the elder Baucum's interview, thirty-something years before.

  “Yesterday we talked to the Logan family. As you remember, they're the ones who—”

  “I know who they are, yes.” Baucum's mouth was a thin line.

  “Good. One of the things we discussed—one of several things, in fact—was the design of the school. For the benefit of our viewers who might not be familiar with architecture or engineering and building design, could you give us a layman's idea of what goes into making a building safe?”

  Baucum's expression didn't shift one iota. “No. I can't sum up years of education and experience in one pithy statement. What I can say is that there are very detailed, very considered guidelines and requirements in place, strict building codes dictated by years of experience in building design and usage, that we and every other engineering firm, architecture firm, every city government that enforces building codes, all go by. It all exists.”

  “And it's all followed?”

  Clearly holding back an eye roll, Baucum said, “Of course it's followed.”

  Peter nodded. He opened his mouth to say something, then closed it again. He took a breath. Then he said, “Let's get right to NorthStar Elementary.”

  Baucum lifted a hand in a “Be my guest” gesture.

  “In my conversation with Matthew Logan, he mentioned that buildings in this area are typically designed to stand up to heavy winds, because, well, that's what buildings in this area usually have to do. Stand up to heavy winds.”

  He stopped and waited for a response.

  “Was that a question?” Baucum asked.

  “Well, is that correct? You're the engineer.”

  “That is correct. The building code in this area stipulates that buildings such as NorthStar Elementary be reinforced to resist wind loads.”

  “Okay,” Peter said. He took another breath.

  I felt for the guy. Baucum wasn’t making it easy for him, that was for sure. I wondered if he would fold the way he had at Dorsett Oil.

  “So, can we assume that NorthStar Elementary was built to withstand—what did you call them? Wind loads?”

  “You don't need to assume anything. The school was designed to withstand wind loads of 120 miles per hour.”

  Peter nodded. “That's kind of a worst-case scenario for this area?”

  Baucum shrugged. “The most likely worst-case scenario, yes.”

  “The most likely.”

  “Sure. For instance, a worst-case scenario might be a 747 crashing into the building, but nobody designs for that, because that's not likely to happen.”

  Peter nodded and smiled as if the guy wasn't being a complete jerk. “So you take whatever is the most-likely event to occur and design for the worst-case scenario for that event?”

  “To a reasonable extent, yes. For instance, if that school was being built in Minnesota, we would have considered what kind of load a significant snowfall accumulation would put on the roof. We don't have to worry about that much here.”

  “And if you were building a school in say, California?”

  Baucum eyed Peter for a second. He knew a gotcha question when he saw it coming.

  “We would design for seismic loads.”

  “Seismic loads. Like earthquakes.”

  “In layman's terms, yes.” His smile was chilly.

  “But you didn't consider seismic loads in the design of this school?”

  “No, because that's not the most-likely event to—”

  “But isn't it true that seismic activity has become more common in this area, with the increase in fracking and injection wells?”

  I had to admit, I felt pretty proud of myself for knowing what he was talking about.

  “To an extent, yes. Seismic activity is more common, but it's not been of an intensity strong enough to take into consideration—”

  “But isn't it true that we don't, in fact, know for sure that buildings in this area are designed to withstand this—this increased seismic activity, even if it isn't, as you say, of significant intensity?”

  “No, that isn't necessarily true. We do know that structures built to the current code will withstand up to—”

  “And isn't it true that architects and engineers were, quietly, out of the public eye, discussing amongst themselves the very real possibility that what happened at NorthStar Elementary could happen here, before it did happen?”

  “You make it sound like we were skulking around in the shadows, with secret handshakes and—”

  “But this wasn't public knowledge, was it?”

  Baucum shook his head, his mouth growing even thinner. “That would depend on your definition of “public knowledge.” We formed a committee to study the issue. We invited people we thought could contribute.” His eyes flashed anger. “We did not invite investigative reporters because it wasn't immediately apparent what their contribution would be.”

  Peter grinned, and I wondered how he would feel if he knew how apparent it was that he got a kick out of goading the guy. I mean, Baucum was a bit of a jerk, but Peter Browning suddenly looked like that horrible middle school boy who loved to torture you until you cried.

  “Hey, no hard feelings,” Peter said. “And what did this committee find?”

  “Nothing. At least nothing conclusive. We were still in the middle of it when the—when the building failed.”

  “Isn't it true, Mr. Baucum, that you had concerns over the design of NorthStar before it failed?”

  Baucum sighed. “Look, there are things you just don't know until they present themselves. We designed that building—”

  “Isn't it true that you had concerns, specifically, about NorthStar Elementary?”

  Baucum frowned again. “It's true that I thought the situation bore further investigation. The school was built on soils that are subject to—”

  “Subject to liquefaction,” Peter interrupted. He pulled a white page off his lap and slid it across the desk toward Baucum, with the air of someone who had just dealt the death blow to a sworn enemy.

  Baucum stared at the paper, then at Peter. “Where did you get that?”

  “This is your email, isn't it?”

  “Yes, it's my email. I wrote it—”

  “You wrote it to another member of the committee regarding concerns you had about the increase in injection wells in the area. Here you say, and I'm quoting you directly, 'Some areas that weren't even red flags a few years ago co
uld be ripe for a disaster now that we see the possibility of everything coming together the way it has—a kind of 'perfect storm' of conditions that weren't considered ten years ago or even two years ago, when the site was chosen for NorthStar. That whole neighborhood is built on land reclaimed from a dried riverbed. I would definitely consider that soil susceptible to liquefaction. Something that can be designed for, unless we're bringing seismic into the mix. Now that we are bringing seismic into the mix...”

  Baucum opened his mouth to speak, but Peter held up a finger.

  I paused the video.

  “Liquefaction?” I asked Stump. She looked as clueless as I was.

  I searched ‘soils subject to liquefaction’ and ended up losing half an hour looking at bizarre videos of water that seeped up through the earth and dirt that rippled like water when it was jumped on. It was pretty freaky stuff.

  “Okay,” I said to Stump. “We learned something today.” I flipped back to Browning’s interview with Baucum.

  “The person you were corresponding with here responds, 'Who's going to be the one to tell Daniels that his school is going to be delayed again? Because it sure as'—and here I'll just say blank— ‘it sure as blank isn't going to be me.' Then you respond, 'I don't want to do it, either. And I don't know that a delay—at least not a significant delay—is necessary. But I'm beginning to think we do need to hit the pause button and study the situation a little closer, especially with the school.’”

  Peter laid the paper on the desk and looked at Baucum. “Did you hit the pause button?”

  “No.” Subdued now, Baucum shook his head and stared at the desk. “No, we...” He trailed off.

  “By Daniels, in that message, of course, you were referring to Michael Daniels, the LISD School Board President.”

  Baucum gave a slight nod.

  “Did you alert him?”

  Baucum took a deep breath, then shook his head. “No, we hadn't really had time to—” Peter leaned forward. “This was written on December 28th. The earthquake happened on March 11. That’s...” He looked up like he was calculating in his head. “Nine weeks, give or take?”