J. Curtis - Calexit - The Anthology

Frio shook his head, then ran a hand through his short hair. “No idea, but we’ve finished evacuating everyone we can on our side downstream. It won’t take much to overtop it, will it?”

Parker looked odd compared to Hoover and Glen Canyon, set lower in the water and hiding most of its mass within sediment under the lakes. Dark brown, rugged rock on both sides showed why the cleft had been perfect for a dam. No cars moved on the switch-backs on the California side, or drove across the dam. Well, the road had been closed since Cali’s departure, so that was not new. The additional pale grey superstructure above the roadway reminded Dominic of a crown, almost white against the dark blue of Lake Havasu and the downstream river, and the brown-red rocks on the opposite side of the lake. The water always looked too high against the dam, even at low water.

Dominic had shrugged. “Not much more, but they don’t have the gates fully open yet.” They should have, but this was Cali, after all. What did the government care if people downstream drowned so long as Sacramento, LA, and the Bay got their power, electrical and otherwise?

Now Dominic wondered if Mr. Babbage had gotten his message. If he had, then he probably had something to do with the odd numbers and the stopped flow at Parker. If not, then Cali’s lack of repairs were about to bite them, hard. Concrete high-arch dams could take a lot, they had to. But the water would win, possibly in thousands of years, perhaps overnight if something geologically exciting happened. As the Chinese had rediscovered the hard way. Was that why the Chinese liked Cali so much? Neither one cared if their people all died so long as the Party and the military, or Brownshirts, got what they wanted? Dominic filed the thought away and returned to what he was supposed to be doing. Floods came, and floods went, and he needed to run those numbers for the next restoration release, based on the new data.

Just after noon the next day, Andy McDavitt cracked his knuckles. Started typing, and slipped in through the back door he’d found in the MWD’s security net. They’d managed to get one of the gates at Parker, but his blocking code held steady on the other motors. He shook his head again and sipped his mid-day pick-me-up. They’d had access to Imperial as well because of the tunnel and canals stealing water from the Colorado and sending it to the Bay and LA. He’d been alternating using the Bay Area Water Authority and MWD, just in case someone wised up and started looking at either one.

Thus far, he’d only found another hacker, probably a bored Russian. Andy wondered idly if the MWD even had computer security, then shrugged. Not his problem after today. Today, June seventh, the wild river would run once more. He smiled and typed command codes, then waited, one eye on the feed from the security camera at Parker, the other on the code screen. One minute passed, and nothing happened, other than a bird flapping past the lens.

Parker wasn’t opening. Andy glanced from the camera display to the code screen again. What was going on? He’d entered the commands and everything looked good, so why wasn’t the blasted thing opening? He gulped some of the high-test coffee and started entering the command again.

A light on second-order river-system display that he’d rigged caught his eye, and he turned to see what was going on. He tapped the alert light. A message flashed up, brilliant red. “Emergency spillway activation. Evacuate downstream communities.” It was Cooledge, downstream of Parker on the Gila. Ooh, double whammy!

He glanced back to the video feed and saw water starting to jet out of the emergency spillway, and the power tubes. “Oops,” he whispered, grinning “patience, Andy, patience.” He erased the half-entered command and backed out of that file. Two down, one to go.

He opened Imperial and locked it open. Then he left a present for the Brownies in the Imperial Valley, bypassing the flood-alert systems and silencing the auto-broadcast warning system “This one’s from Mr. Waters. He says eff you.” He closed his eyes, imagining the water racing through the valleys, bursting out of the dams and canals, and rejoining as it danced into its true delta. He’d been re-reading that chapter in Aldo Leopold’s book. It would be so beautiful, oh, so beautiful, water free of man’s chains.

Dominic was in his office, watching the water-levels when he heard voices rising in the hallway. “What is it?”

“We don’t know, but the guys at Imperial can’t close anything. It’s like someone welded the gates open.”

“Well, remind them to go to manual.”

“That’s the problem. The Calis wouldn’t let us maintain anything after they seized the diversions and dams. Apparently they didn’t know how, or didn’t have enough people, and their computers have gone tit’s—er, belly-up.”

They killed off everyone who knew their ass from a flood-gauge , Dominic snarled inside his head. Like Monica and her kids and the poor souls with them. And Mom.

Kira Nguyn’s voice, much closer, said, “Have they been able to evacuate the Arizona side?”

“Oh yeah, moved the last people out a week ago because of worries about Parker. The repairs after the last big water didn’t look so good,” Rick replied, stepping into view. He tapped on Dominic’s doorframe. “You have any monitoring real-time readouts from between Parker and Imperial?”

“The ones that are about to wash away? Yes.”

“Patch them into the conference room and set it up so we can talk to Denver and DC as well, please. It looks as if Parker Dam is going, and Imperial’s having some kind of trouble already.”

Dominic acted confused. “I thought they reported normal yesterday?”

“They did.”

“Huh.”

As he patched the data through to the main conference room, Dominic let himself imagine the chaos unfolding as the Colorado’s waters began pouring through the dams and canals. The tunnel and diversion to the coastal cities, and the All-American Canal, were not meant to take this kind of flow. Thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of gallons of water at tens of thousands c-f/s poured through them, overtopping the canals, racing across the desert lands, seeking the old channels, looking for a place to go. He idly wondered how high the Salton Sea would get this time, or if the river would take the primary channel, and punch south to the Mexican delta. He hoped most of it would go south. After drowning every single Hermano de la Tierra in the Imperial Valley.

He heard yelps as he got close to the conference room. “That’s not supposed to happen!”

“You see it, I see it, it ain’t CGI. Blessed Mary, Mother of God be with everyone downstream.”

A quieter voice—Frio—said, “Yes. Yes. I don’t know, ma’am, but if it does back up the Gila, it will flood so badly that we’ll probably have cacti running for high ground. Yes, ma’am, I’d do that.” Dominic found Frio in the hall on the phone. Frio covered the phone, “Governor De La Cruz,” he mouthed. “Yes, exactly, ma’am. Yes. I will. Yes, ma’am.”

Dominic stepped into the conference room, saw the main screen, and whistled. “That’s not supposed to happen.”

The eastern flank of Parker Dam seemed to be tearing out. The brown rocks on the Arizona side had disappeared under water. It overflowed the shoulder of the dam, and a chunk of stone ripped free of the hillside and crashed into the river downstream of the dam with an almighty splash. “And here I was worried about the western bank.”

“What western bank?” Kira Nguyn pointed. “It seems to be coming from between the turbine house and the main dam. The army’s trying to get a drone up for a look, but I don’t think there’s much left of Parker Dam resort.” White spray and foam surged and bubbled. “It overtopped even though the gates opened.”