Fallout

by Wil Mara

  “It can’t explode.”

  “There’s uranium here and uranium in a nuclear bomb, so how—”

  “But it’s not enriched uranium. I’m sure you’ve heard about our government getting nervous every time some country starts an enrichment program. That’s how you get weapons-grade material … and that’s not what’s used to generate electricity in a nuclear plant. If a group of terrorists flew an airplane into this reactor building right now, the material down there would not explode.”

  “But—”

  “Marla, it would not explode. It simply doesn’t work like that.”

  She pursed her lips in growing irritation and looked at the pool again. “What about Fukushima?”

  “What about it?”

  “The independent investigating commission concluded that all of the causes of the accident were predictable, that the plant did not meet the standards required to withstand the force of either the earthquake that triggered the tsunami or the tsunami itself.”

  Corwin nodded. “That’s all true. The plant’s designers did not foresee the possibility of such an unusual chain of events. I’m not sure anyone could have. First, the tsunami triggered by the earthquake actually reached over the protective seawall at the Fukushima facility. The wall was thirty-three feet high, but the tsunami produced waves as high as forty-six, which is beyond incredible. Water flooded the lower levels of the facility—including the rooms where the diesel generators were located.

  “Even though the nuclear reactors had been shut down per the appropriate procedure, they continued to produce what’s called decay heat, and therefore they still needed to be kept cool. Those generators did provide power to the cooling systems—that is, until the floodwater caused them to stop working. The backup generators kicked in, but they ran out of battery power the next day.

  “With no cooling going on, the reactor naturally began to overheat, triggering a series of hydrogen-air explosions that occurred in multiple locations at the plant over three days—including the nuclear containment areas. That’s when the radioactive material began to escape. But again, like with Chernobyl, it wasn’t a nuclear blast that caused the crisis, but rather explosions of an altogether different type that damaged the container holding the nuclear material.”

  “So it sounds again like human error was the culprit.”

  “The original designers simply did not plan for those circumstances.”

  “And it doesn’t bother you that all those deaths—”

  “Whoa, wait a second. Deaths?”

  “The deaths that resulted from all those incidents—Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island.…”

  “No deaths resulted from the Three Mile Island incident. None.”

  Marla wasn’t sure she heard this correctly. “Say that again?”

  “There were no deaths from the Three Mile Island incident in Pennsylvania. It was a partial nuclear meltdown that could’ve become much worse, but it didn’t. Two people died tragically during Fukushima—but they were killed by the tsunami while examining earthquake damage to the facility, not because of radiation exposure.”

  “And Chernobyl?”

  “In 2008, there were sixty-four deaths confirmed. And that information comes from the UN, not some pro-nuke NGO. I don’t mean to say sixty-four like it’s only sixty-four, I’m simply pointing that number out because I’ve seen estimates from some of the radical orgs in the tens of thousands.” Corwin shook his head in frustration. “I’m sorry, but that’s just ridiculous. It simply does not reflect the facts.”

  Marla opened her mouth to rebut, holding up her pen like an admonitory professor, but Corwin wasn’t finished yet.

  “I should also add that many of the Chernobyl deaths were emergency-response workers ordered to the site by government authorities who didn’t bother telling them what they were dealing with. Many of those workers were therefore under the impression they were simply putting out an ordinary fire. Some went up the ladders into clouds of toxic smoke and were never seen alive again. After their bodies were recovered, they had to be sealed into lead coffins, and a new cemetery had to be established in a remote area of the country because the corpses were so radioactive.”

  Marla felt her stomach roll, and she turned away to fake-cough behind her hand while she purged the image from her mind. At the same moment, she heard the first booming notes of thunder.

  “You can’t argue the increase in health problems around the accident sites,” she said.

  “Such as?”

  “Oh, come on. Higher cancer rates around Three Mile Island?”

  “Multiple epidemiological studies were done within a ten-mile radius of that facility in the years following the accident, and all of them concluded that any increase was so small as to be considered insignificant from a statistical standpoint, and further, that none of those increases could be tied causally to the exposure. You may remember that President Jimmy Carter visited the facility just a few days afterwards—a few days—without a gas mask or a radiation suit. If I remember correctly, he did not sprout a sixth finger or a new eye in the center of his forehead.”

  “And Fukushima?”

  “No ill-health effects have been reported, even to this day, as a direct result of the radiation that got loose. None.”

  “There were over fifteen thousand—”

  “Those deaths were due to the earthquake and the tsunami. That’s been well documented.”

  “I know there was an increased risk of various cancers—thyroid cancer and breast cancer, to name two—in people who lived in the area.”

  “Yes, that’s right. And the World Health Organization issued a report stating that everyone who had been evacuated from the area had absorbed so little radiation that the effects would be virtually undetectable. Further, the WHO supported an aggressive screening program to catch early cases of thyroid cancer resulting from the incident. And the recovery rate of thyroid cancer, when caught early, is one hundred percent. Not ninety-nine—a hundred.”

  Marla thought it over, then said, “Okay, I didn’t know that.”

  Corwin raised his hands in a what-can-I-say gesture.

  “These are the facts, Ms. Hollis.”

  Yes they are, Marla thought, but not all of them, Mr. Corwin.

  6

  “The culvert that runs under Lenox Avenue over here may be too small for the expected swell,” Joey Sharpe told Sarah from the other end of the line. His voice sounded older than his twenty-four years, probably the result of too many Friday nights sitting with his buddies around a campfire up on Francine Mountain, with a bottle of Jack in one hand and an oversized joint in the other.

  “That’s the one from 1959, right?” Sarah asked. Sharpe had been in Sarah’s class at Silver Lake High until he’d dropped out in the middle of junior year. Recently he’d cleaned up his act and managed to land his current position on the town’s maintenance crew. But no one who knew him—including Sarah—expected that he’d be riding the wagon of sobriety for very long. She hoped he would at least stay sober through this crisis.

  “Yeah,” Sharpe said. “It’s badly in need of an upgrade. State recommendation is one and a quarter the width of the stream under normal flow. This thing is actually smaller than the stream’s width.”

  “It probably wasn’t in ’59,” Sarah said. Her cellphone buzzed to indicate the arrival of another text message. Outside, the rain drove against the windows as if the town was being run through a car wash.

  “No, probably not,” Sharpe agreed. “Has this road flooded before? Because if it has, I should probably get some barricades ready.”

  “Hold on a sec and I’ll check. It’ll take a minute; the records are in the mayor’s office.”

  “’Kay.”

  Setting the handset on her desk, Sarah left her cramped, messy office and walked quickly through a paneled anteroom, where two secretaries sat behind matching desks just a few feet apart. The woman on the far side, in her midthirties, was heavy beyond the
point of good health and wore her brown hair in a bun that came to a point on top. The other, who was well past retirement age, had her glasses perched on the end of her nose and was staring into her computer screen.

  Sarah smiled as she breezed by, turned left, and opened the door next to the rectangular placard on the wall that read, HARLAN J. PHILLIPS, MAYOR. The heavyset woman, who had been eyeing Sarah from the moment she appeared, rose with surprising fluidity. Sarah ignored her and continued on.

  Phillips’s office was just as disheveled as her own, every surface covered with papers and folders and whatnot. The prominent odors in the room were stale coffee, copier toner, and the oiled leather of the oversized chair tucked behind the mayoral desk. Knowing exactly where the information that she needed was stored, Sarah went to an ancient filing cabinet and opened the top drawer. Quickly fingering through the files, she removed a single manila folder, opened it, and flipped several pages before she came to the appropriate report. Nodding to herself, she returned the folder to its place and shut the cabinet.

  As Sarah left the office, the heavyset woman said, “Excuse me.”

  “One sec, Barb,” Sarah told her, speed walking back to her office. “I’ll be right with you.”

  She snatched up the phone and said, “It has, Joey. During Sandy in 2012, and twice before then, in 1993 and 1971.”

  “Okay, I’ll take care of it,” Sharpe said just as another text arrived on Sarah’s cell. It caused the phone to buzz like a small cadre of angry hornets was trapped inside. She grabbed it, read the message, and responded, all within a span of about five seconds.

  “Thank you.”

  She returned her attention to a spiral-bound notebook, which was open to a page so thoroughly covered by her manic scrawl that it was hard to tell what color the paper was. On the computer nearby, a PDF document titled “Silver Lake Storm Preparedness Procedures” filled the screen.

  “Okay, all the town generators have been filled with propane or gasoline,” she mumbled, starting at the top of a checklist she’d reviewed at least a dozen times already. “All the emergency-response vehicles are—”

  “You’re not supposed to go in there.”

  Sarah turned around and found Barbara Magnus filling the doorway and looking more than a little peeved. Her navy polyester pants did not match an already unflattering green camisole, and the white-socks-and-Velcro-sandals assemblage acted as perfect punctuation to the eclectic ensemble.

  “Excuse me?” Sarah said.

  “The mayor’s office. You really shouldn’t go in there without permission. I know you’re acting in that capacity today, but still.…” The woman was trembling, although Sarah couldn’t quite tell if it was out of fear or anger.

  “I’m sorry, Barbara. I needed an answer on something fast, or of course I would’ve asked. It’s a little crazy today.”

  “Still, we have a procedure around here.”

  “I know, and I apologize,” she said.

  Magnus gave her a last dirty look before turning and drifting away.

  That woman has hated me for as long as I can remember, Sarah thought, and I’m still not sure why. Others had given their opinions on the subject—you’re pretty … you’re young … you’re smart … you’re thin … you’re in a position of influence … any combination thereof—but Sarah refused to adopt them as her own. She continued to hold out hope that, just maybe, Magnus’s attitude toward her would defrost at some point. She and the other secretary, Lorraine Harris, had a very pleasant working relationship, but none of Harris’s fondness seemed to have rubbed off on her colleague.

  The cordless phone rang again; the call was from a FEMA agent in Washington Sarah had been dealing with for the last few days. Bud Kline came across as sympathetic enough, but his personality was so flat he made Robby the Robot seem like Little Richard. He was calling to request a copy of the latest state assessment of the Silver Lake dam, which sent shivers down Sarah’s spine.

  Does he know something I don’t? Is he under the impression it might give way? She had read the report when it was first issued, a few months back. The engineers made it clear that the structure currently holding back the body of placid water from which the town had taken its name was in the lower twentieth percentile of hazard classification, which meant it was not a significant risk. So what’s his concern? She wanted to ask, but there wasn’t time for such a conversation right now. She promised to fax the report ASAP.

  When she picked up her cellphone again she found no text messages waiting for a change. Returning to the checklist was tempting, but she decided to lean back in her chair and close her eyes instead. She took several deep breaths and thought about her warm bed, the one she shared with the man she had loved all her life—from a distance until high school, then up close and personal. She still marveled at the person Emilio had become, at once slim and masculine, shy and gentle. It wasn’t an act, unlike so many young men who wanted only to lure a lover and decided a sensitive facade was the best bait for the hook. He was the real deal from top to bottom. One in a million. No, a billion, she thought.

  A gunshotlike crack! from the courtyard below yanked her out of this pleasant reverie. She leapt from her seat and went to the window, trying to see through the sheets of rain driving against the glass. It was only then that she realized how bad the storm had become. The skies were a churning and ominous black swirl, the cloud cover so heavy that it looked more like late evening than midafternoon. The only street sign in sight—a yellow pedestrian crossing at the corner of Trudeau and Morris—was gyrating in the wind like a drunken dancer. And the gutters were filling up fast, with flash-streams roaring into the sewers.

  Shifting her gaze left, Sarah found the source of the whipshot—a maple tree of modest height was leaning at a new angle, half its base torn out of the earth. The marble-and-bronze commemorative marker that stood in front of it had toppled forward and lay facedown in the waterlogged grass.

  “Oh, shit,” she said softly. Her cellphone trilled and she looked down to see the name of Harlan Phillips on the caller ID.

  “Shouldn’t you be resting?” she asked without bothering to say “Hello.”

  Phillips chuckled in his deep, geriatric basso. “That’s a nice greeting from the person to whom I so generously handed the mantle of power.”

  “Yeah, thanks a lot. How did you know the storm was coming? Pretty convenient, having a heart attack the week before.”

  “You know us politicians, we’ll do anything to get out of our sworn duty. How are you managing?”

  Sarah sighed mightily. “I have no idea. I feel like I’m trying to hold the tide back with a broom.”

  “That’s normal. You’ll get used to it.”

  “I’ve read every page of the preparedness manuals, contacted state and federal agencies for support, talked to the head of every department fifty times, and made a checklist that seems to keep growing instead of shrinking.”

  “Sounds to me like you’re hitting for par.”

  Sarah laughed without the slightest trace of humor. “Great.”

  “Are the emergency-response teams fully staffed?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “All the generators gassed up and ready to go?”

  “Yes.”

  “Everyone in town has received their communiqués via email, text, and telephone?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And there’s plenty of food and water in the shelter?”

  “Enough for a month.”

  “Then you can’t do anything more,” Phillips told her.

  Sarah massaged her forehead. “I don’t know. I feel like I should—”

  “Trust me—you can’t do anything more. Only so much preparation is possible, and you’ve done it. Now it’s in God’s hands. The storm’s going to do what the storm’s going to do. If you can find a way to control the weather, let me know. Otherwise, just being ready will have to suffice.”

  Another sigh. “I guess.”

  Th
e cordless phone rang. “Hang on, please,” she told him before answering. The call was from an AT&T repair crew, letting her know service had gone out on one of the southwest grids and that they were working to fix it as soon as possible.

  “Ugh,” she said when she returned to Phillips. “We lost phone service in region six.”

  “It always goes out there first.”

  “Yep.”

  “Speaking of which, why are you answering the phones there? Don’t tell me no one else came in.”

  “No,” Sarah said, “Barbara and Lorraine are both here. They’re working.”

  “So why—”

  “In a crisis like this, I just feel like I should be the one who picks up as often as possible. The answers should come from me. Or from the mayor, anyway.”

  “You are the mayor at the moment. It’s all there on the paper I signed. Until I get back, you’re the boss.”

  “I hope you don’t live to regret that decision.”

  “No chance. You’re going to be elected after I leave office anyway, so what’s the difference?”

  A rush of emotions came to the surface when she heard this—that peculiar combination of incertitude and excitement. She had dreamed of the job since she was a child, watching her father carry those obligations with grace and dignity. He believed that serving the public through an elected position was a noble undertaking. She remembered him muttering obscenities under his breath when he came across yet another news report about some corrupt selectman or assemblyman. If he caught so much as a whiff of impropriety among his subordinates, he wouldn’t hesitate to make changes. His reputation for integrity became widely known, and he was adored for it. His genuine love of Silver Lake was part of Sarah’s life from infancy, and it was no surprise that she, feeling similarly about the town, wanted to follow in his gigantic footsteps.

  “Think of it as on-the-job training,” Phillips said, his smile audible.

  “Half the homes in Atlantis are going to flood.”

  “You can’t stop nature.”

  “Still, I wish we could at least shore up the bank over there—”

  “Sarah.”