by Fred Stenson
“What if you were to write Evert back and ask him questions? Things about sulphur plants. Get him to go into detail. The kinds of things Geoff wants to know and can’t find out.”
“Mr. Purcell said he wouldn’t help us. That wasn’t about information. That was about money. He can’t afford us, is what he said. A letter from Lance Evert would serve no purpose.”
Tom moved again. He’d lifted himself onto an elbow.
“It would, though. Geoff is close to going to court but doesn’t have an expert. If he had an expert, the folks down at Dry Fork could win. What if I was to say to him, we might be able to help you with your expert, if you change your mind about representing us? It would be a trade.”
“No,” she said.
“No to what?”
“To all of this. To your horse-trading foolishness. Just because Lance wrote us a letter years ago doesn’t mean he’d go to court against a sulphur plant.”
“Let’s get something straight, once and for all. Lance Evert didn’t write us a letter. He wrote you a letter. I think he might go to court for Dry Fork, and for us, if you asked him. Even if he wasn’t willing to speak for us in court, we would still have any letters he wrote to you. Inside information.”
“That’s dishonest.”
“There’s not much fair or honest in this situation, is there?”
“I can’t do what you’re asking.”
“You mean you won’t.”
“Who’s us, anyway? Dry Fork? Where we don’t even live?”
“No. It’s your husband and family. Help us. Be loyal to us.”
She was suddenly as angry as she’d ever been. “I am loyal! If I wasn’t, I wouldn’t be here.”
She turned her back, clung to the bed’s edge. She heard nothing but the pulse in her temple tacking against the hard pillow.
PART THREE
Carbon steel mistakenly chosen for repair. Sulphidic corrosion in heat exchanger outlet. Explosion and fire.
Force of gas dislodged particulates. Leak in finned tube. Explosion.
Flammable-gas detectors not used at time of maintenance. Red glow observed in darkness. Flames rippled through catalyst bed. Burn victim.
Outlet piping in hydrogen-treating furnace corroded. Explosion and fire.
Gas valve leak in hydrotreater. Explosion.
Pipe rupture caused hydrogen sulphide release. Explosion and fire.
Carbon steel elbow in hydrogen line fails. Explosion.
Fire in residual hydrotreater. Hydrogen sulphide escaping. Vapour cloud explosion. Four of five deceased were contractors.
1
Waddens Lake
BILL STAYED IN the Chateau Borealis for the first three nights after Donna’s visit. In the middle of the third night, he was awakened by a heavy thud. The metal hangers in his closet jangled. The clock read 1:04 a.m. There were shouts in the hallway.
“What the fuck?”
“Earthquake, man!”
Bill had been in Chiapas in 1976 when, across the border, an earthquake destroyed Guatemala City. The hotel bed under him had bobbed and danced like a boat in a wild sea. This was no earthquake.
He got up and stood listening. Cold needles from the electrical outlet sprayed against his bare ankles. He threw on his full winter battle gear, was twisting open the lock on his door when, behind him, his cell phone vibrated on the dresser.
“I just got a call from the plant.” Theo Houle.
“I’m at Borealis. It woke me up.”
“I’m in Calgary, waiting for a driver to take me to the airport.”
“What did they tell you?”
“Don Kruger says the hydrotreater blew up. That doesn’t sound right. It must have been a leak. Vapour cloud, maybe.”
“Was anyone in the unit?”
Houle blew on his phone. “Somebody outside was knocked off a catwalk. Broke his shoulder. An insulation maintenance crew was scheduled in the hydrotreater unit. It’s too dangerous to go in and see. You’ll be there soon, right?”
“Leaving now.”
“Kruger’s in the control room. Guide him through.”
Bill dropped the cell into his pocket. In the passage to the front door, crazy exchanges ricocheted off walls. Men as white as mushrooms stood outside their doors. Tattoos, fancy gaunchies.
Insulating maintenance, Bill thought. Johnny Bertram.
Beside the road to the upgrader, the haloed lights of Waddens Village bounced across the lake ice. A slight wind shifted snow snakes on the road. Ahead, the treetops were visible against a nimbus of yellow.
At the main gate, he could see the thrashing flames. Vehicles with emergency flashers bore down on him, and he pulled to the side to wait. First came a fire truck, then an RCMP cruiser, its LEDs stabbing. By their extra light, he saw men lining the outside of the fence. Somebody was marching past them with a clipboard in his mitts. Bill couldn’t hear above the sirens but imagined the guy yelling names. Something about the gate was strange. Only half of it was standing. The other half lay twisted in the ditch.
Someone in a snowsuit and traffic vest crossed the road to him. A flashlight beam bored through the windshield into his eyes. Bill buzzed down the window and held up his ID card. Inside the hood was a woman’s face. She looked angry, but when her flashlight hit the card, her expression melted.
“How’s it going?” he asked.
“Pretty bad.”
“There’s a guy hurt, right?”
“Knocked off a scaffold. Ambulance took him to Mac.”
“Anything about an insulating crew?”
“That, I don’t know.”
“I better get parked.”
“Your unit and parking lot are off limits.” She pointed to some vehicles with their grilles to the chain-link. “I’ll meet you there.”
Bill parked at the end of the line, groped on the floor for his hard hat.
“Don’t put it on yet,” she said. He’d opened the door and she was standing there, waggling an air mask.
Bill got out of the truck and waited while she straightened the straps.
“Is evacuation complete?”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “It’s a mess. Only the upgrader personnel were supposed to evacuate but some of the contract bosses told their crews to go. Everybody came to the gate at once, and I was supposed to stop them. I got a call from my boss to take down names and check inside.”
“Contraband check? You’re kidding.”
“That’s what they asked for. I did it while the other guy took names and swung the gate. Everybody was so pissed off. One guy got out of his truck and yelled right in my face. I told him to get back in. He called me a cunt. He was the one who drove the gate down. Bunch of trucks went through after him.”
“Sort of screws your count. Is Don Kruger still in the control room?”
“Follow the ribbons.”
The lens of his mask was gletzed, as if a kid had played truck with it in a sandbox. He walked toward the flashing lights. The fire truck was hooking into a hydrant. A flat hose started to fill. Water python. When the spray hit the end and launched, the men holding the nozzle fell backward. The climbing water churned geysers of steam and smoke. Wherever water hit the cement, it turned instantly to ice. Scattered around were bits of insulation, burned back to glass. He pictured Johnny Bertram. Elmo, Shirley’s skinny son.
He kept moving toward the control room, aiming for a convergence of yellow fluorescent tape. Gid Couture, festooned with masks, appeared out of one drape of smoke and disappeared into another.
A fresh explosion whacked Bill’s ears and the murk became total. Solid flecks were hitting his mask.
A flashlight came burrowing. Another big man, not Gid, pushed Bill in the chest, blocked him backward. The light bored in through the lens.
“Ah shit. Sorry, Mr. Ryder.” Bill felt himself being turned around, then a guiding push. The control room door appeared. Bill imagined bodies on the checkerboard tiles, faces mashed into keyboards.
In the bright room, men sat before the banks of computer screens and others stood behind them. Marion was also there, taking sniffer readings in the corners. When Bill pulled his mask off, Henry Shields was looking at him. Bill took a step toward Don Kruger. Kruger’s skin was lumpy with old acne. He regarded Bill coldly. Most screens were solid blue. A couple had messages in capital letters explaining that nothing means nothing. The hydrotreater screen was dead.
On his own unit’s readout, some lines wiggled faintly, dying sperm under a microscope. Everything to do with sulphur, H2S, and hydrogen was sending distress messages. NO FEED.
He looked at Henry.
“I got most of it,” he said.
Bill rolled up a chair and poked some keys. Most of the upgrader was down, the rest shutting down. Henry had done their unit except for small things that Bill pulled the pin on now. He tried to remember who else was working. He saw Clayton, stabbing keys on his smartphone.
“Don’t text me, Clayton. I’m here.”
Bill caught Kruger’s eye. “Have the government guys arrived yet?”
“Two. They’ve given us a stop-work order. I think we could keep one train going but they’re not interested.”
“What about the insulation crew in the unit?”
The change on Kruger’s face was slight, a sort of drawing room response, as though Bill were forcing him toward an indelicacy.
“No way to know,” he said. “Camera in the hydrotreater unit kakked when it blew. I’m not sending anyone in there till it cools. Government guys can go in if they want.”
“How big an explosion?”
“Blew off the walls if that tells you something. The guy who got hurt was outside on a catwalk. Big sheet came flying. Smashed up his shoulder when he landed. Paramedics took him. Something else blew a minute ago. I’m trying to find out what.”
“Did the insulation crew sign in at the gate?”
“There was a fuck-up. Gate guy was sleeping. Something was written in his book while he was dozing but nobody can read it. Suggests someone’s in here and we don’t know who. Could be the insulation guys.”
“There must have been a permit.”
“Well, of course. It was left at the gate and it isn’t there anymore.” Gid came in. He ripped off his mask and took huge gulps of air. He looked on the verge of cardiac arrest. Bill caught his arm, pulled him aside.
“Do you know who the insulation team is? Is it Johnny Bertram?”
“Bertram and his nephew were scheduled. I don’t mean they’re in there. I mean they were the ones who got the call.”
“So nobody saw them before the explosion?”
“Nobody I talked to has been near the hydrotreater in three hours. The insulation guys could be there or not. There was a screw-up at the—”
“I heard. I also saw somebody mowed down the outside gate.”
“Right. If Bertram was in and left with that crowd, we wouldn’t know either. I tried his cell. It doesn’t ring.”
Bill and Gid were near the control room window. There were two hoses now, and they could see them arcing water. Gid tried to pull away; Bill held on.
“What’s the wind direction?”
“Hardly any,” Gid said.
“But what?”
“Southwest, zero to three.”
“That’s straight for the village. Has anyone checked it?”
Gid flared. “What do you think, Bill? Friggin’ thing blew a half-hour ago.”
“If the wind speed is three or less, and the lake’s two kilometres, and a half-hour’s gone, you could still get there before the gas.”
“What gas?”
“Fuck off. The eighty per cent H2S that must have blown out of the hydrotreater.”
“I’m not sending anybody until things are sorted here.”
“Then I’ll go.”
Gid’s shoulders dropped. “I don’t think you have to.”
“Who’s the contact there? For evacuation?”
“I don’t remember. Woman. Her name’s in my office.”
“Marie Calfoux?”
“Yeah, that one.”
“I want you to phone her and tell her to get the village ready to go.”
“I don’t have her number.”
Bill took out his cell phone, found Marie’s number, wrote it on Gid’s parka sleeve. Next, he went to Kruger and asked what his plans were. Kruger stared out the window and said nothing.
“Theo told me to back you up. That’s why I’m asking.”
Kruger rattled off some standard procedure. The only gap was the village. Bill told him he was going there now to evacuate it.
“The fuck you are! Theo didn’t order that.”
“I’m ordering it.”
“That’ll make this a bigger fuck-up. Public fuck-up.”
“You can’t assume H2S isn’t moving that way. Wind direction says it is.”
“You think you know something, I guess.”
“My assessment is that there’s a reasonable doubt about safety over there.”
“Fuck!” Kruger turned away again. His phone rang and he grabbed it.
While Kruger was talking on the phone, Bill got out. Back in the smoke and steam, he ran for the parking area. His mask was off and that was stupid. When he got where he could see, there was a crew bus among the trucks and cars along the fence. There was nobody inside. The door was unlocked; keys in the ignition. It was still warm when Bill climbed in. The engine started easily. At the gate, the woman he had talked to earlier held up her arm. He cranked open the door and told her he needed the bus to evacuate Waddens Village.
The bus was huge on the ploughed main street. All the house lights were on. The community centre was lit up inside. Bill parked there and left it running.
The main hall was white-lit from a bank of hanging fluorescents. Marie came from the back, arms full of air masks. She had on a purple parka.
“Thought it might be you,” she said.
She told him she’d ordered the town’s younger people to wake the old ones.
“We’re going to be short of cars.”
“I brought a crew bus.”
He tried to take some of the masks but she shrugged him off.
“There’s a bin back there. Bring the tanks.”
The lid of the bin was open. Marie had tossed things out to get at what she needed. In the swath of stuff on the floor, he spotted sniffer boxes, and stuffed some in his pockets.
Back outside, Bill armed one of the sniffers and carried it down an outhouse path. Standing in a drift, he broke the tip and aimed the tube at the plant. After the tube took its breath, he held his pen flashlight over it, and felt relief and disappointment in equal measure. The tube was reading clean. No evidence that what he was doing was necessary.
By the time he got back, Marie was guiding the last elder up the bus steps. All the masks were distributed. The trucks and vans had already left. Someone had turned on the interior lights, and Bill counted eight heads, all old folks.
“That everybody?” he asked Marie.
She was looking at a list. “All accounted for.”
“Where are we going?” He sat in the driver’s seat.
Marie was standing on the steps. “The evacuation plan that Dion gave me says McKay but everyone here has relatives closer,” she said.
“Where, then?”
“Six of these people want to go to St. Bernadette. Two have relatives in the bush near there.” She came the rest of the way in and sat. “I’ll help you find it.”
An old lady the size of a child was worrying about her cat. Marie ran to her house and got it: a hissing, scratching evil until the old woman hushed it like a baby.
“Turn the light out,” said the only man. Marie snapped a toggle above Bill’s head.
The village of St. Bernadette was not far. Marie had phoned ahead to the families of the six who wanted to be dropped there. The rendezvous was a wooden church, and the hand-off went smoothly. The las
t two were on a bush road just outside. The old man was first. He got out and followed a curved path to a door with a light over it. The last was the woman with the cat. A lady wearing a ski jacket over her nightie stood in the doorway as Bill helped the woman up the shovelled path. At the door, the cat leapt and raked Bill’s hand, skittered through the door. The old lady shrugged. “Can’t do anything with her. She doesn’t like white people.”
Then it was Marie and Bill in the hollow bus.
“Where do you want to go?” he asked her.
“You tested at the village before we left? What did it say?”
“Clean. It might not be now.”
“Let’s go see.”
They did not talk on the trip back. Marie sat on the first bench seat, leaned toward the windshield, probably worried that he’d hit a moose.
Bill had lots of sniffer tubes, so he tested the last two kilometres into Waddens. He tested again near Marie’s house. That tube showed sulphur dioxide. No hydrogen sulphide. They continued on to Marie’s path.
“You haven’t told me what happened,” she said.
“Didn’t Gid tell you when he phoned?”
“Whoever phoned said there was a possibility of poisonous gas and someone was coming to help us evacuate—as a precaution.”
“There was an explosion, in the unit called the hydrotreater. Hydrogen gas is reactive. If it gets loose, it often explodes.”
“And it’s poisonous?”
“Not hydrogen. It was hydrogen sulphide that I was worried about. A couple of lines in the unit would have been full of H2S. The fire was still burning when I left.”
“Why do you think the gas didn’t get here?”
“The fire was hot. With not much wind, maybe the H2S converted to sulphur dioxide in the fire. Or maybe it went somewhere else.”
“Will you know for sure when you get back?”
“It’s not possible to know that.”
They continued to sit in the bus, the engine drumming. Bill pulled out his cell and pressed the power button.
Marie laughed. “It was off?”
“Wouldn’t have made much difference. Looks like the battery’s dead.”
She held out her own cell. He poked the number for the control room. Kruger answered, and Bill asked for Houle.