Walter Williams - The Rift

Through fountaining water Larry could see that the long building that housed the 160-foot Allis-Chalmers tandem-compound turbine no longer existed. The entire central section of the building seemed simply to have been blown to confetti. The rest had collapsed, chunks of aluminum roof or concrete wall tumbled down on the hulking forms of wrecked transformers, pumps, and condensers. Twisted rebar had been sculpted into weird shapes.

Larry could see no human beings in or near the colossal wreck.

Wilbur’s footsteps, behind Larry, slowed to a halt. “Good God,” said Wilbur’s voice. “What the hell happened? A tornado?”

“Earthquake, I think.”

Wilbur looked wild, wide eyes staring from the coating of blood that rained down his face. “There must’ve been a hundred people in there. We’ve got to help them.”

Larry shook his head. “One thing at a time,” he said. “The reactor comes first. We’ve got to make sure we have an SSE. Deal with the diesels before anything else.”

Wilbur blinked blood from his eyes. SSE was Safe Shutdown, Earthquake. There were supposed to be contingencies already worked out. “Yeah,” Wilbur said. “Guess you’re right.”

“Let’s go.”

The ground was covered with broken concrete and bright sharp metal. The metal was strangely twisted, torqued and strained and drawn, as if by steel hands, into bizarre shapes. Chunks sharp as guillotine blades were embedded in the wall of the control building, as if they’d been hurled there by a hundred-handed giant. The building wall, with its shining embedded blades, looked like some weird modernist sculpture.

The turbine’s main shaft, Larry thought, had been rotating thirty times per second when the earthquake struck. If the quake had bent the turbine shaft, or if something massive had fallen on it and stopped its rotation …

Good Lord, he thought. Tons of swiftly rotating metal had slammed to a sudden halt. Turbine blades, even big ones, were notoriously delicate. Bringing the Allis-Chalmers to a sudden stop would have been like throwing a huge boulder into a 160-foot-long jet engine. The turbine would have come apart, spraying deadly metal in all directions. It would have been like a storm of ten thousand flying razor blades. No wonder parts of the turbine house looked as if they had been shredded.

And the shaft itself …? A hundred sixty feet of rotating steel?

It would have gone somewhere. Maybe straight up in the air, like a giant spear.

It sure wasn’t in the turbine house anymore.

He didn’t want to think of the people who had been inside when it happened.

Behind the turbine house, a column of dark smoke rose into the sky. Between the obscuring mist and the smoke itself, it was hard to tell just what it was that burned.

He came to the southwest corner of the control structure. His path diverged from Wilbur’s here: Larry would continue to head west to the number one auxiliary diesel behind the auxiliary structure, while Wilbur would detour south again around the remains of the turbine house to try to find the number three generator by the machine plant.

“Good luck,” Larry said.

He didn’t hold out a lot of hope for Wilbur’s success. The machine plant was too close to the turbine house. Very likely it had been destroyed when the turbine came apart, and the auxiliary diesel structure with it. One or the other structure might even be the one that was producing the column of smoke.

But still, he had to make certain the safety backup systems were working. If only one of the three backup diesel generators went on, it was enough to secure a safe shutdown for the reactor. With that necessity in mind, the three generators had been placed far apart so that the same catastrophe could not overwhelm them all.

One of them, he thought, had to have survived. It didn’t matter which one. So Wilbur had to try to get to the number three diesel, just on the chance that it was still intact.

Geysers shot out of the ground here, on the west side, but they weren’t as numerous, or as forceful, as they had been on the other side of the building. Larry loosened his collar and tie, and then he and Wilbur each chose paths between the jets of water and began to run. Larry threw his arms over his head for protection in case one of the geysers decided to spit a rock at him. Pain shot through his right shoulder.

Water splashed up around his ankles as he ran. Where is it all coming from ? Larry wondered. Underground, yes, but from a hidden artesian system that had somehow escaped the geologists’ reports, or …?

A stone as big as his head splashed down a few feet away and Larry gave a jump, his heart thudding. He decided to think only about running. Pain jolted through his shoulder at every step.

Larry cleared the area where the geyser debris was raining down, and Mississippi’s summer heat wrapped him like a suffocating blanket. He stumbled on something hidden under the water, recovered, and swiped at his glasses with his sleeve, tried to clear the droplets of spray. He panted for breath, not used to running, not used to any sort of real exercise in this heat. His heart bounced around his ribcage like a loose stone.

He blinked as he saw a bent form in front of him, A man in coveralls kneeling in the water, debris all over, his back bent, face close to the surface. It looked like he was praying.

It looked like he was dead.

Larry splashed closer. Slowed, heart rattling in his ribs. He stopped, panting for breath. Reached out a hand, touched the man on the back. “You okay?” he asked.

The man raised his head, and Larry’s heart turned over in shock. There was a dividing line across the man’s forehead, right at eyebrow level. Below the line the man’s face was very pale, and his lips a bit blue, but he seemed otherwise normal. Above the line the flesh was bright red, and shiny. It was the most unnatural color Larry had ever seen, like an overripe red plum stretched tight and about to burst. Huge blisters had exploded over his skin, and some of them had broken and were weeping fluid.

Larry saw, as the man pulled his hands from the water, that the backs of the man’s hands were bright red, too, and just as badly blistered.

“What happened?” Larry gasped.

The man blinked at him with pale blue eyes. “I was in the turbine house,” he said. “Primary steam line went.” The man’s lobster-red hands fumbled at his collar in memory. “I used to work at a plant in Santa Barbara, so I knew it was a quake right off. Soon’s I knew, I pulled my coverall over my face and ran for the door.” The man’s lower lip trembled. “Everyone else must’ve breathed the steam in, and died.”

Larry stared at him in shock. A primary steam line rupture would have flooded the turbine house with thousand-degree steam straight from the reactor. If anyone had breathed it, his lungs would have gone into instant shock and he would have died within seconds.

When the turbine had, a few seconds later, torn itself into murderous razor-edged shards of metal, everyone around it was probably already dead.

“Dang thing blew up behind me,” the man said. “I just kept running. Ran all this way.” He looked down at the water in which he was kneeling, then slowly put his hands into the water again. “Hurts,” he said. “The cool water helps.” He bent forward, lowered his blistered forehead into the water.

“You’ve got to get help,” Larry said. “You got to..” His mind flailed. “To get to the infirmary,” he finished.

“Figure it’s still standing?” the man said, his sad voice muffled by the water.

“I … don’t know.” The infirmary was in the administration building, southeast of here, behind the smoke pall of whatever it was that was burning. Larry hadn’t seen it behind the smoke.