by Scott Carson
“Gillian! You doing this, or you want me to?” Brett shouted.
She tore her eyes away from where the photographer sat in shadow and looked up again. The young girl stared back down at her, wide-eyed, jaw trembling. An adult woman, probably her mother, had joined her. Two pale faces in the darkness, ghostlike orbs.
“She can’t swim,” the mother said. “And there’s a baby.”
“Nobody’s going to have to swim,” Gillian said, and she started climbing, willing herself not to look back in the direction of the photographer, not even when another flash popped.
The higher she got, the less stable the ladder felt. She knew Brett and Tim were doing their best to hold the boat steady, but that was an impossible ask in water that had a current. All of the water in Torrance had a current now; it was still flowing through the valley and the town, although the worst of the flood surge would have reached the Mohawk River. Then the Mohawk would swell and carry the flood on, dumping its excess into the Hudson. Could the Hudson hold all of the water without causing a cascading series of downstream disasters? She thought so, but who knew? Every time it had been discussed before it was a purely theoretical conversation, with mathematicians showing models and equations. There had been no swaying ladders on boats, no crying babies in attic windows, no children who couldn’t swim.
She actually felt better when she reached the top of the ladder, because then she could grip the window frame. She was wearing a headlamp, and as she looked through the window and into the attic, she could see everyone: three women, two men, and seven children. She recognized some of them but not all. A baby shrieked while a father whispered unsuccessful soothings. Gillian didn’t know his name but she knew his face and she certainly recognized the sound of that cry: How many nights had she put a pillow over her face at two a.m. when that sound began from one floor below? And how foolish, almost impossible, it now seemed to think that such a thing had ever been an annoyance.
“Who wants to get out of here?” Gillian said in a voice she hoped suggested some confidence, or at least didn’t indicate the terror she felt as the ladder shivered beneath her.
A chorus of voices responded. Some grateful, some frantic. Too many to respond to directly. Gillian took one hand off the ladder and pointed at the baby.
“Her first.”
The father looked from Gillian to the baby with a strangely indignant expression.
“Trust me,” Gillian said. “I’ll take care of her.”
“He’s a boy,” the father responded.
“Apologies. I’ve never been great with kids.”
One of the women laughed at this exchange, a high nervous laugh over the absurdity of it all, and while it was near the edge of hysteria, Gillian still thought that laugh was the most beautiful sound she’d ever heard. Against the sirens and helicopter blades and the fearful shouts and drumming rain, a simple human laugh was an impossibly sweet sound.
Gillian smiled and extended her arms. “Trust me with him? Please?”
She could see the shock in the father’s face now. He wasn’t sure what to do. His town was underwater, the building he was in was collapsing, and the rescuer in the window couldn’t get his kid’s gender right. Which problem first? Maybe none. Maybe just stand here and hold tight. Gillian understood it, but she couldn’t afford to wait. None of them could.
“Please,” she said.
The father came to the window. He had the child in one of those cloth slings that parents used to find a free hand while navigating with an infant, and now he held on to the baby with his left arm while using his right to slip the sling over Gillian’s head and down to her shoulder. She heard a joist creak and felt the ladder shift and wanted to scream at him to hurry, but she understood exactly what he was entrusting to her and how hard it must be. She kept quiet and still, using the window frame to keep balance while the ladder swayed below, as he fitted the sling around her with excruciating slowness.
“He will be fine,” Gillian told him. “Trust me.”
He looked at her, squinting against the headlamp glare, and she thought of all he must see behind her: the emergency lights, the destroyed buildings, floating garbage, floating corpses. And here she was in the foreground, asking for his child, saying, Trust me.
He did, though. Very slowly, he moved the infant from his chest to hers. The baby screamed, his breath warm against Gillian’s neck. The father adjusted the sling, bringing the child in tighter. She’d never actually held a baby in one of the slings, but it seemed like a wonderful idea right now because it allowed her to keep one hand on the ladder.
The father kept his hand on the sling, as if unable to release his grasp.
“I’ve got him,” Gillian said. “I’ll keep him safe.”
Finally he moved back. Gillian backed down toward the boat.
Please hold steady. Oh, please, please hold steady.
The boat bobbed and swayed but Brett had a tight hold on the ladder. A minute later Gillian was down, and he was taking the child from her.
“Can we get them all?” Gillian asked, looking around the boat. “It’s mostly kids.”
“How many?”
“Twelve in all, but like I said, a lot of kids. This is the only baby, but the others are young. Small.”
“Still two trips, probably,” Tim said from the wheel. “Kids first. We can’t risk—”
Two pops came from the building, joists giving way underwater with a double clap like gunshots, and the ancient building sagged. They all turned to stare at it.
“Yes,” Tim said then. “We can get them all.”
* * *
They managed it. Gillian made two more trips to guide children down, and then the older kids and the parents came down, and somehow the ladder didn’t slide free, and the old Arlington Heights Inn didn’t give up. When they were all in the boat, it felt like an overpacked tourist craft, one of those things families took in the summer to see lighthouses or lobster buoys. Gillian sat on the gunwale, ass hanging partially off the boat, while Tim guided them away.
The National Guard had set up an evacuation point on the high ground of what had once been the hilltop in a cemetery, where flags waved above the veterans’ section. Now the flagpoles seemed to mark an island instead of a hill, like territory claimed by explorers in a new world.
That was precisely what Torrance now felt like. A new world, so different from the old one that they seemed hard to bridge.
That’s because it’s not Torrance. Not anymore. Torrance is gone and Galesburg is back. Just like my grandmother always promised.
She shook her head and turned to face into the rain. There was no time for thoughts like that. Not tonight.
Not even if they were true.
55
New York City arrived at the Chilewaukee in helicopters and Humvees, and the state was already there to meet them, in the presence of one Mick Fleming, chief engineer, Albany’s finest. Many of the new arrivals had just been reminded of Fleming’s status by Ed Cochran that very day, when he’d made his calls to mobilize the next morning’s emergency meeting while reassuring them that his best engineer was already at the scene.
Ed Cochran was nowhere to be found. While no one was saying it out loud yet, it seemed likely that he was a casualty. That created a power vacuum and certainly a knowledge vacuum. In a crisis, you hungered for an expert. Mick Fleming had escaped the flood, so an expert was on scene when the decision-makers began to arrive.
He was trying not to smile. Trying to look properly grim. Grief-stricken, yes, but not overwhelmed. He had a briefing to deliver and action plan to deploy, after all.
Mick had never enjoyed speaking in front of a group, but tonight he felt relaxed, confident. That confidence came from Anders Wallace, who floated around the group, unseen by any of them, but a reassuring force for Mick.
“It’s bad, but if we don’t act in a hurry, it will get much worse,” Mick said. The group was huddled in the hastily cleared landing zone above the da
m, their shocked faces illuminated by the flickering orange light of the flares that the National Guard had used to mark the spot for the helicopters. He recognized some of the faces from personal encounters and others from television—the mayor of New York City, a senator, and at least two state representatives. The former group was going to be more trouble than the latter, Mick thought, harder to sell swiftly on his plan because they had technical understanding. He had one advantage with them, though: trust. The better they knew Mick, the more likely they were to trust his judgment.
He had two primary adversaries who needed to become allies in a hurry. One was Sandy Clemmons, who had served as Ed Cochran’s right hand for years and had drafted the state’s emergency management plan for dam failures in the upstate reservoirs. She knew the system as well as anyone. Another potential problem was Ben Quirk, of the Army Corps of Engineers. The corps had no authority over the Chill, but they did have authority of many of the nation’s dams and reservoirs, and Quirk knew his stuff.
“How will it get worse?” asked a woman whom Mick thought was in the statehouse. Allison something? Angela? He was so bad with faces. She’d come in on a helicopter that flew low over the valley, giving her an up-close look at Torrance. You could see fires burning down there now, not uncommon when floodwaters and high-voltage electricity played together.
“It could get worse,” Mick said, “if we lose the whole dam. It could get a lot worse, and in a hurry.”
“You think the rest will go,” said Sandy Clemmons. It wasn’t a question.
“Yes. All the destruction down in Torrance came from a partial breach. If the whole thing collapses, it’s a different story.” He made sure the people from the mayor’s office were looking at him when he said, “Torrance took the punch for the rest of the state, do you see? But if the rest goes, we risk cascading failures. It will flood right on down the chain, maybe into the city water tunnels.”
“It’s got more than one hundred miles to go before it gets there,” Sandy said, and Mick wanted to slap her.
“Yes, it does,” he said. “And we’ll lose a few dozen bridges, half the state’s power grid, and countless lives along the way.”
“We can open a lot of gates, though,” Ben Quirk said, his eyes far away, as if imagining each step along the chain. “Stagger capacity, stagger outflow. Evacuation first, of course. It’s the plan we already have, the one we just reviewed last year. If we follow the—”
“If we follow the plan, we risk losing half of New York City’s water supply for weeks if not months,” Mick snapped.
The mayor of New York City blanched.
“We create emergency plans for a reason,” Quirk said.
“The plan,” Mick said, “doesn’t account for the reality. I think we all need to be very keenly aware of that tonight.”
“What do you mean by that?” This came from the mayor himself, which delighted Mick to no end. The man needed votes. The man knew this. The man also knew that you could get a lot of votes with the right response to a crisis.
“The whole system is already at flood level,” Mick said. “Which means every piece of infrastructure along the way is under pressure. We can send more floodwater down and hope that every piece of the infrastructure—much of which is nearly a century old, mind you—continues to hold, or we can acknowledge that what happened here suggests that’s a really poor idea. The old infrastructure failed in Torrance. Do we really want to test it downstream?”
Mick gave them a moment to think. He felt in total command. Anders Wallace nodded encouragingly as he paced among the group, unseen by any of their eyes.
“If the tunnels go,” Mick said, “then you’re looking at a disaster that will make Torrance look trivial. You’re looking at a disaster that will make Katrina look trivial. If the tunnels go, you’ve got a city without water. It’s not a quick fix, either. There will be millions without water for a long time. Weeks, minimum. Months, probably.”
The mayor looked dizzy but he was nodding, because he knew this was true. Only two years earlier he’d been presented with an array of disaster scenarios for New York City. Everything from terrorism to hurricanes had been discussed. Biological weapons and dirty bombs. Out of all the nightmares, one had the potential to shut the entire city down for the longest time: failure of the two water tunnels that fed the five boroughs. If Water Tunnel Number 2 alone was lost, all of Queens and Brooklyn would go dry for months. Half of the homes in the city would be uninhabitable. Hospitals would shut down, disease would spread, the economy would crater, and chaos would reign.
That was the power of water.
The city’s survival rested in the remote reservoirs of the Catskills. What happened there in the next twenty-four hours dictated life or death downstream in numbers that most people wouldn’t dare consider.
Tonight they had to be considered.
“If we make the wrong choice,” Mick said, “we’ll be cutting New York City’s throat.”
Quirk, from the Army Corps of Engineers, was looking at the dam, and Mick knew he was envisioning the way it had held after the breach and, no doubt, envisioning what might happen when it failed fully. Sandy Clemmons was also staring in that direction, but she would be thinking less of the dam itself and more of the system it impacted, imagining each carefully constructed link in the chain.
“If the infrastructure was as sound as we’d like to believe,” Mick said, “then this never would have happened. We’ve got a legitimate disaster down there in Torrance, we’ve got a death toll that might be shocking by the time it’s counted, and we’ve got an overburdened rescue effort and evacuation under way. Now remember that we got all of that from a partial failure affecting a small upstate town.”
He watched that sink in.
“The emergency plan trusts an enormous amount of old equipment,” he said. “At each stop downstream and all the way through the city, all the way underneath Manhattan, it trusts antiquated equipment. Some of which has never been inspected because it can’t be reached.”
They all knew it was true. They’d known it for years. He wanted to scream that at them—wanted to scream, This is what you’ve fucking ignored, don’t you see? How do you like it?—but he couldn’t afford to lose them by showing anger.
“I think we have two choices,” he said. “We can wait for morning, which means trusting the rest of that dam to hold and trusting that the Chilewaukee is the only weak link in the whole hundred-year-old chain, so that even if the rest of the dam goes, it won’t set off cascading collapses from here all the way into the city. Or…” He swiveled his head, making direct eye contact with as many of them as possible. “… we end the threat right here.”
Overhead, the air shivered with yet another approaching helicopter. The governor, maybe. Hell, the president. Mick had no idea how many they’d send, but so long as he was the lead engineering voice, he didn’t care. The problem would be more engineers. They would come, and they would disagree.
Maybe. Maybe not. Because the plan is good. The plan, if you do not know what the people of Galesburg have been up to, is actually very good.
“How do we end it here?” Sandy asked. Mick was pleased to see the trust in her face. She didn’t want to depart from her treasured EMP—Sandy loved that emergency management plan—but she’d relied heavily on Mick’s opinion while creating it, too.
“We open the tunnels,” he said.
“I thought that’s exactly what we were afraid of!” one of the mayor’s deputies blurted, but Sandy’s eyes showed that she understood. Sandy’s eyes actually seemed to glimmer with the idea.
“You’re thinking of the city tunnels,” she told the deputy. “Mick is talking about the Chilewaukee’s.”
Bless her, she remembered the map. There weren’t many people who remembered how far the work at the Chilewaukee had gone before it was abandoned.
“Yes,” Mick said. “One domino doesn’t necessarily touch the others. Not up here at the surplus reservoir.”
“How much do you think they can hold?” Sandy asked.
“Fifty million gallons.”
“You can’t be sure of that.”
“Yes, I can be. It’s what they were designed to do. Those tunnels were supposed to move between fifteen and fifty million gallons of water per day out of this reservoir. So we can move fifty million gallons into them right now, and in just the right spot—away from the dam. That’s the key here: reduce the pressure against the dam. Agree?”
There was a pause and then some nods.
“It’ll give the dam a pressure release, certainly,” Quirk said. “We’ll give it a chance to take a breath, and that’s all it needs.”
“Won’t it just be replaced?” Sandy asked. “We’re redistributing the water, that’s all. More of the lake drains down, but the same amount of pressure is on the dam.”
“No,” Mick said. “You’ve got to remember what’s beneath.”
Quirk was now nodding in a methodical drumbeat of agreement.
“It was one of the original problems with using the Chill as a supply reservoir,” Quirk said. “The valley that makes up the lake bed is like a tilted bowl, and it tilts away from the dam, which means away from the tunnels, too. If this reservoir had been truly needed during a drought, it would’ve been a challenge. Things were never done right up here.”
“Agreed,” Mick said. “But we can capitalize on the old mistakes now. Open the tunnels, siphon off water that’s currently pressing against the dam, and then create a temporary structure inside of the dam to help channel the flow. The combination of the water already lost downstream, the water we can siphon out through the tunnels, and that tilted lake bed will give us time to work.”
“Foolish question, maybe,” the mayor said, “but once those tunnels are opened up, where does the water go, exactly?”
Mick pointed into the mountains.
“Explain,” the mayor said, and Mick was struck by how patient his voice was and how engaged he seemed to be, even while the new chopper was settling down just behind him. The man would do just fine in front of the cameras tonight, Mick thought. He might even say Mick’s name as a means of reassuring his nervous constituency. Wouldn’t that be something? Lori would be so proud.