So, the hurricane. OK, let’s talk about the hurricane. We have our own weather team, a group of three guys that take eight-hour shifts to make sure there’s never a second when someone isn’t watching developing weather patterns and the like. The reason we employed three meteorologists at great expense was that someone did the math and figured out that if we were able to do a few simple things before storms hit, like cover the tables and put up the shutters out front of the stores and some other stuff, then we would not only be safer but we’d save money overall on the deal. Plus the stores could start pushing rain slickers and all that fun stuff. Allan B—we had two Allans and a Jeremy on the weather team—he was working the overnight shift, which he liked doing, and was keeping a really close eye on Sandy. Sadie? Sadie. I get my big girls mixed up some times. Allan B was all over it, and he did a good job, that boy. We called him in to the every-other-day staff meeting we have to go over the park operations, this was the day of the fourteenth, and he told us Sadie was tracking further north than they thought, but there wouldn’t be any way it would get up as high as Okeechobee county, but that he would be keeping an eye on it anyway. Either way, he said, we should schedule a test of our emergency alarms just in case something went a little goofy, which means certain managers and key personnel were responsible for a live sounding of their alarm when there were people around. It was one of Trolly’s things. He would say, “Train like it’s real as much as you can,” so we did. Well, something went a little goofy.
I don’t live far from the park, about fifteen minutes is all. That means I get calls all the time to come in and settle this, that, or the other thing, but I knew when I got a call later that night, the night of the fourteenth, that it was going to be a little different.
I know we’re getting to the part you want to talk about, but there’s one more thing you need to know about how the park is set up, OK? It won’t take long. We house about 85 percent of our workers in dormitories we call FresnoVille. It’s about a ten-minute walk away from the park, and looks a heck of a lot like a college campus. It’s got a cafeteria, recreation areas, even a fountain in the middle of the dorms. We can house 800 people there at one time, and we were right up close to that because we were just coming off peak season. We had 690 folks in the five dorms that we just called Alpha, Beta, Theta, Pi, and Zeta. We always used to joke that creativity ran out when you left the park because whatever you have in your head ’bout what these places looked like, you’re exactly right. It was concrete and stone and a few green spaces, and that was it. That was FresnoVille. That name, I’m not sure where it came from, but it was called FresnoVille before I started, so it must have come from somewhere. Why’d I tell you about that? You’ll see in a second.
So, Allan B, he sounds the alarm the night of the fourteenth and by then he called up the senior staff and started screaming that Sadie was a monster and she was going to hit us and this and that. He was laying it on pretty thick, but he wasn’t the sort to yank our chain, so I load up in the car and head down there. The first thing I did was check who had done their emergency alarm test, and we had a bunch of slackers who didn’t follow through, so the first call was to them. I like to be friendly when I can, but this was one of those times where I had to put on my Big Bad Wolf voice and make a threat or two in the right places. The hotels were always the worst about that. The manager of the Mighty Maiden wasn’t happy at all, complaining that we’d wake everybody up. I told him he should have thought of that before he blew off the test when he got the notice yesterday afternoon. Don’t procrastinate on this shit, you know? Do your job. So we got the alarm tests done, and everybody was on alert, and while I was setting that up, Allan B was showing other senior staff what was going to happen. When I was done with my part and walked into that room, I thought I had walked into a room full of ghosts. No one was freaking out. Not a single person. They were ashen, but that shook off after a while, and people got to work. Again, do your job.
I know you’re gonna have a lot of questions about what decisions were made about opening the park, who made them, and when. I’m afraid I can’t help you. What I can do, the only thing I can do, is tell you what I did and what I saw, which I’ll remember as well as I can. You can ask, but I don’t have a lot of the answers you want.
You’ve been to the park, what would you say it’s worth? Not in an abstract sense. If a mob descended on the park and ran off with all the merchandise and the food and the fixtures and all the rest, what do you think they’d get away with? Can’t guess? Well, we guessed. We commissioned a study that wasn’t the best, but it gave us a ballpark estimate that $580 million would be lost if something bad happened and gangs of looters busted into an unmanned FantasticLand. So that’s why Operation Rapture was in place. Yeah, that’s what they called it. I wish I had picked a better name, looking back. The basic idea was that the park had some of the safest storm shelters in all of Florida that weren’t built by the military. Trolly, he saw to that, and he succeeded beyond what anyone thought was reasonable. So, the thinking went, if you can be sure you have a safe place for folks to ride out the storm, you’re going to need people on the grounds after the storm to make sure the looters stay out and all that $580 million worth of “vulnerable assets” are locked down. I knew Trolly, and he set me onto this idea personally. The idea was never “fight off the barbarians at the gate”—rather, have a skeleton crew onboard to safely and voluntarily keep everything in its place. And pay them to do it.
When folks first came on to work, we would explain Operation Rapture to them and give them a choice: if the need should arise, do you want to stay behind and look after the park? They would be given certain designations, and if the need arose they would not evacuate the park but hit the storm shelters and then be given a very specific set of duties once the storm let up. In return, they would be paid their hourly wage every hour they were in the park. It might not sound like much, but being paid $12 an hour to sit in a storm shelter, do a few chores, play cards with your friends, and then still be making money if you had to spend two or three or four days on grounds, even while you slept? That was really appealing to a lot of youngsters. Some of the older guys saw through the deal and said there was no way, no how they were going to deal with all the shit that was sure to come down if we had to evacuate the park. They were smart enough to know that if we evacuated and lost all that revenue, that the fan would have long since stopped running ’cause of all the shit that hit it. But for a young person it wasn’t a hard sell. We had tons of them sign up, so once the alarms were sounded, it was my job to help with evacuation and then implement Operation Rapture.
Of course, you can’t make anyone stay, but most everyone who signed up was still onboard. We had a few key folks stay behind too, especially in the maintenance department, as there are very bad things that could happen if parts of the park were left unattended. Yeah [laughing], like the Exclamation Point in the middle of the park falling over. That would be a big thing.
Why did the park open on the morning of the fifteenth? Good question. I’m not entirely sure, to this day, why the park gates were open after evacuation had been called for, and if I ever figure out it was one person’s decision and that person opened the doors after having the information that he or she should have had, words are going to be exchanged. Lots and lots of words, yes sir. I got there about four in the morning, and Allan B was freaking out and squawking like a chicken on a hot plate. Evacuation, by my recollection, was called for by 6:00 a.m., when it was crystal damn clear that the storm was going to take a big ol’ dump on us. The park opens at eight, and we open an hour earlier for guests staying in our four resorts. I can count on one hand the number of times we opened earlier than that, and those were big fat hairy deals with big corporate money behind it, something we all would have heard about and been ready for. The park should not have opened, period. But there was someone in charge of that, and all information of this nature flows from one person, and I’ll leave you to figure that out.
I don’t want to go on record as saying anything more about that.
Author’s note: Robert Digby, the head of Intergrounds Transportation, has claimed, under oath, that he was never told not to bring visitors to the park on September 15. There is some legal dispute over whether or not he should have been told by a superior not to run the buses or whether he should have checked before running the buses given the park’s heightened state of readiness. The civil case against Digby remains ongoing.
The first problem I saw in trying to organize the evacuation was that everyone was thinking small. One guy, whose name I won’t mention, thought we should just run the buses, and I piped up, “Where do you think they’re going? To the hotels?” That shut him up. We had to move people inland and stay there, this wasn’t a route we were running. These vehicles were going to move and stay moved, so I kind of powered through and took charge of the efforts. I had a guy tell me I sounded like Tommy Lee Jones from The Fugitive. “I want every transport van, work van, employee van that can hold more than six people; I want every limo and every luxury van and every tram that can limp out of here on a busted radiator and no muffler at the front in fifteen minutes getting people loaded up so we don’t have a riot on our hands!” I guess I sounded like I knew what I was talking about because everybody hopped to. I’m kind of proud of this: we didn’t have any problem finding a ride for everyone at the park who needed to leave, even those who came to the park first thing in the morning because some complete moron forgot to stop the buses. To the moron’s credit, the buses were really important to getting everyone out. We headed west because Allan B said if we could make it just thirty miles or so west we’d be OK, and turns out he was right on the money. We ended up taking over the gymnasium of a school in some small town, I forget the name. We got a hell of a rain storm once we got there, but that real damaging wind, Allan B was right. It missed us. It was remarkable.
OK, so, the Rapture kids. Making sure we had a seat for everyone took most of the time we had before the storm hit. The shift managers had herded all those staying behind into the Dream Pop Star Amphitheater, and they were already getting rained on and were miserable and pretty damn grumpy. I don’t want to brag, but I was out there saving folks; they could sit in the rain for a minute. Plus, if they’d read the disaster manual, they would have known where to go, which was the damn storm shelters. We put out a call on the RADs, and that finally got the ball rolling. Like I said, someone’s got to be there to point the workers in the right direction and give them the tools they need, so it was up to me.
Author’s Note: Here is the text of Phil Mueller’s speech as recorded on a camera phone by a worker in the crowd who wishes to remain anonymous.
“All right, calm the hell down, everyone. We’ve got a lot to do and no time to do it. I need you to listen closely, I need you to understand what I’m saying, and I’m sorry to say, we won’t have time for questions as Sadie is about to beat the holy shit out of us. When we leave here, you are to go to the main storm shelter just off of Golden Road. If you don’t know where this shelter is, find someone who does and stick to their ass like glue, because if you make it to the storm shelter in the next forty-five minutes, you will be safe. Again, if you are in the storm shelter in forty-five minutes, you will be safe. Inside the storm shelter is power, food, water, bathrooms, and everything you’re going to need to ride out the storm inside that shelter. Once the storm lets up, and you will know because you will have weather radios, you will all leave the shelter and report to your section of the park. There, in the storage areas, you will find food, water, toiletries, and everything else you will need for your stay, along with a disaster manual. You will be bored in the shelter, so I would recommend you spend your time reading the manual as to what you are supposed to do next. You will be paid for every hour at the park [cheering], and you will be told to leave by management personnel, who will come back as soon as we get the all-clear. I expect you to be here no more than seventy-two hours. All right, all of you, head to the shelter now.”
I made my speech, I sent them off, and that’s when the bad news comes over the radio that the last buses are leaving. I had made a deal to hitch a ride back to my house with a fella I knew, and he was screaming at me to get on the bus, so I literally sprinted back to the front gate. Did we have a hierarchy among the workers who stayed behind? Well, we were supposed to! Everyone had a level based on their experience, pay, and something we called “job vitality,” which basically means how important you are. As I was sprinting back to my ride, I wasn’t thinking about that, honestly. I knew there might be an issue or two to clean up when we got back to the park, but I was mainly concerned with how fast the wind was whipping already. We were about out of time.
A lot of people ask me when I knew things were going to go bad. That’s pretty easy to answer, if I’m being honest with you: right away. I gave that speech to the kids staying behind, and I knew they were going to be alone in the park for a few days, at least that’s what I thought, and I kind of had a moment of clarity, as it’s called. I knew this was a bad idea, but I also knew that my wife hates storms and that she would be freaking out and that my sixty-two-year-old body was going to need some time to make it to the front gate and to catch my ride, even though, as you can tell, I take care of myself. So I left. What else was I going to do?
The other time I knew we were in trouble, I am hesitant to tell you about. You have to understand, FantasticLand reinvested a lot of money back into the park. A lot. More than our shareholders and our board of directors wanted, and we did that because that’s what Johnny Fresno did and that’s what Ritchie kept doing. They called it the “competitive advantage,” and Mr. Fresno, he’s going to be super hot under the collar that I’m telling you this, but we had a contract with a private company that gave us live, up-to-the-second satellite imaging over the park. We did it because it gave us great data in terms of park traffic and where the lines were. Well, I had access to that satellite imaging, and I kept an eye on it, and I knew we were in trouble when I saw three things happen.
First, we saw Golden Road flood about eight hours after we evacuated. That blew my hair back because it meant that even with all our planning and all our improvements, no one ever thought this level of water would get to our front gate. Turns out there’s a big dip going from the top of the main [parking] lot to about the first row of stores which means, eight hours after we left, there was a small lake between the park and the road. Second was when the same thing happened between the park and FresnoVille. There was damn lake between these kids and their beds and their phones—we don’t allow those in the park. I knew the sides of the park would be hard to get through, but I always thought those employees, I need to stop calling them kids, those employees would have a back door out of the park.
Last thing was when the power grid went down. I honestly did not see that coming. Once the power went out, I was thinking to myself, “We’re fucked. We are good and proper fucked.”
INTERVIEW 5: SAM GARLIEK
First-shift manager of FantasticLand.
Before FantasticLand, I had been in a hurricane before. Hurricane Leo glanced off the coast near Miami when I used to live down there. I was working as a manager of a hotel restaurant and had to herd everyone out when it was evacuated. I was the last person out and ended up spending the night in a walk-in freezer, of all places. It was not pleasant. My doctors told me I had frostbite in a couple of my toes, but I told them it was fine. I’m rugged like that.
FantasticLand wasn’t nearly as bad an experience at first because everyone knew the protocol and knew where to go. I made sure of it. Mr. Mueller talks a lot in training about pointing workers in the right direction, and that’s exactly what we did, and everyone from the girls in the shop to the guys in the rides reacted exactly like they were supposed to. It was my job to keep the head count. That was important, because even though we had over four hundred people who had signed up to stay at the park—we called it “Operation Rapture”
—we needed to know how many actually stayed. It’s human nature to want to run in the event of an emergency, and we saw our fair share of that. I was told we would have between 420 and 450 people, and we ended up with 326. The space was equipped for more than that, so we weren’t even “cozy.” Everyone had their own space, and I noticed right away that groups sort of clustered together. Everyone realized right away that as far as storm shelters go, you could have done a whole lot worse. The biggest hardship everyone went through was that the park’s Wi-Fi didn’t work in the storm shelters.
Mr. Mueller had given a speech that let everyone know they were in a serious situation. That was so important because many of the employees who live in FresnoVille, they might not be the most up to date on current affairs. Some of them are partiers, some of them are studiers, some of them constantly have their nose in a phone or a tablet. You get that with any group. My fear was that one or two of them wouldn’t make it to the shelters, and we’d have employees in the park, and they would have to fight to survive or get stranded someplace, and then they’d find themselves in a really bad situation. Luckily, we didn’t have to deal with anything of the sort. Everyone showed up, everyone listened to Mr. Mueller, and everyone made it to the shelters. No exceptions, I’m proud to say, at least none that I’m aware of.
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