Walter Williams - The Rift

“I’ll just stay here awhile, then,” the man said. He sighed heavily, his body almost visibly deflating.

Larry splashed around him in agitation. “Listen,” he said. “I’m coming back for you. I’ve just got to … I’ve got to run now.”

“Take your time,” the man said. “I ain’t got nowhere to go.”

Larry loped on, gasping in the humid air. His boots had filled to the ankles with water and they were like iron weights on the ends of his legs. The auxiliary building loomed up on his right, the building that held over thirty years’ worth of Poinsett Landing’s spent fuel in its stainless-steel-lined concrete pond. Larry looked at it anxiously as he jogged past. The buff-colored aluminum siding had peeled away here and there, revealing the ugly concrete beneath, but the walls seemed still to be standing. From the stumps of steel girders tilted skyward atop the flat roof, it looked as if part of the roof had caved in.

There were two separate pumping systems in the auxiliary building to keep cooling water circulating through the spent fuel. He wondered if either one of them was working.

First things first, he reminded himself. The reactor came before everything else.

Where was this water coming from? The geysers weren’t throwing up enough water to cover the ground like this.

As he splashed around the corner of the Auxiliary Building he saw a group of a dozen workers standing behind the building. Panting, he approached them.

“Hey, Mr. Hallock.” The speaker was Meg Tarlton, one of the foremen on the fuel handling system. Her red-blond braids peeked out from the brim of her hard hat.

“Hey,” Larry said, and then he had to bend over, hands on knees, while he caught his breath.

“What was that?” Meg asked. “A bomb or something?”

“Earthquake,” Larry gasped.

“Told you, Meg,” someone said.

“How’s the …” Larry gasped in air. “Fuel.”

“It’s a mess. Roof’s caved in. Active cooling’s down. Fuel pond’s cracked in at least two places, but the leaking isn’t too bad just yet. I don’t think.”

“You’ve got…” Larry straightened, tried not to whoop for breath. “You’ve got to get in there and make an inspection.”

Meg’s eyes hardened. “You’re not getting us up on those catwalks again. Not till we know it’s safe.”

“But-”

“We had three people hurt bad. Jameel and some people just carried them to the infirmary.”

“We’re not going back in there, Mr. Hallock,” someone said. “Just look at what happened to the tower !”

Larry’s eyes followed the man’s pointing finger, and his mouth dropped open in wonder. Little trailers of steam still rose above the cooling tower- what remained of it- but the elegant double hyperboloid curves were gone. It was as if the concrete skin of the upper tower had peeled away, like the rind of a fruit, in long diagonal sections, leaving behind only a skeleton of twisted rebar.

First things first! he reminded himself.

“Look,” he said, “I’ve got to check the backup diesel. Meg, can you and a couple others help me with that?”

Meg nodded.

Larry pointed around the corner, toward where the lone survivor knelt in the flood. “There’s a man back there, been badly burned. Can someone help him to the infirmary, or wherever it is that Jameel took those other people?”

Meg, who knew her people better than Larry did, made the assignments. The others following, Larry sloshed toward the backup diesel. Their route took them around a collapsed workshop and through a parking lot- water was up to the axles of the cars, and a geyser had coughed up a cone of white sand in the center of the parking lot. The cars were no longer parked in orderly rows: the moving earth had shuffled them like dominoes.

Well before Larry reached the diesel building he could see that there was going to be trouble. The walls and roof had fallen, and the only thing that kept them propped up was the steel mass of the diesel itself.

If the diesel were operating, Larry should hear it. It sounded like a locomotive.

The surface of the water trembled as an aftershock rolled beneath the land. The aluminum and steel walls and roof of the diesel building rattled and creaked as the earth shivered. Larry stopped moving, arms held out for balance. Fear jangled through his nerves. He could hear the workers muttering behind him, and a splash as one of them fell.

The earth fell silent. Larry slogged forward.

He approached the diesel building, his pulse crashing in his ears. The steel door was crumpled on its foundation, clearly unusable, but there were wide gaps in the walls, and Larry stepped through one of these.

“Sir?” someone said behind him. “You maybe want a hard hat for that?”

Larry stepped into the broken building. His nerves gave a leap as the broken roof gave an ominous creak. The silent diesel loomed above him, tall as a house and 150 feet long if you counted the generator stuck on the end. Its mass propped up fallen roof beams.

Oily water shimmered around Larry’s boots. There was a horrible chemical smell that didn’t seem to belong in this scenario. He gave a sudden cough as something stung his throat. He tried to remember all the backup procedures he’d once memorized, the schematics of the diesel’s systems. He hadn’t dealt with any of this in years.

The roof gave another groan. Larry’s eyes watered. “Mr. Hallock?” Meg called.

Larry backed out. “Batteries have spilled,” he said.

The batteries were used to power the diesel’s control systems once the big engine started. But the diesel hadn’t started at all, which meant that the mechanical system running on compressed air had somehow failed. So why hadn’t that worked?

He turned as he heard someone splashing up through the parking lot. It was Wilbur.

“Number three diesel’s kaput,” he said. “Fuel spilled, and it’s on fire.”

So that was the pillar of smoke behind the turbine house.

“Okay,” Larry said.

“And the administration building’s gone,” Wilbur said. His staring eyes gazed out from the blood that streaked his face. “Just gone. Nothing but wreckage.”

“Jesus,” said Meg.

“It was the turbine shaft.” There was awe in Wilbur’s voice. “It must have tumbled through the air and … there’s nothing left.”

Larry put a hand on Wilbur’s shoulder. Thought about the reactor core simmering in its boric acid solution, heat and pressure building. The possibility of leaks, jammed valves, heat building in the core.

The core turning to slag. Steam exploding out into the containment building. And who could tell, the way things were going, if the containment building was able to contain much of anything?

“Waaal,” he said, “best get this ol’ boy started, then.”

He and Wilbur slipped into the diesel building again to check the compressed air cylinders. They were in a separate room, but were easy enough to find because the wall that separated the rooms had fallen to bits. In agreement with the massive redundancy that characterized the plant’s design, there were three cylinders, each big as a house. The pressure gauges showed that two had discharged at some point in the quake. The third still held its charge, but the valve atop the cylinder was in the open position, showing that it had tripped and tried, but failed, to discharge. With eyes that stung from spilled battery acid, Larry peered through the darkened, ruined building and traced the couplings that connected the diesel to the third cylinder. The couplings ran overhead, in plain sight, and Larry traced them into the diesel room, past another valve.. there.

When the roof had caved in, one of the roof beams had fallen across the valve. The weight had probably distorted the valve to the point where it wouldn’t operate properly.