Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

News was being gathered in Peabody round the clock. Camera crews skirmished with the Guard, and reporters addressed their audience in gas masks. Some were so affected by what they’d seen, so unexpectedly overwhelmed by the news, that they dropped their pious earnest poses and spoke like the intelligent human beings you’d always figured they had to be. They asked Guardsmen if any looters had been shot. They asked environmental officials if people living just outside the zones were at risk. They asked everyone what their impressions were. But the big question, not only for the press but for the EPA, the thirty thousand traumatized and outraged residents of Zones I and II, the citizens of Boston, and all Americans as well was: What did the management of Sweeting-Aldren have to say? And it was on Monday afternoon, when the question had become inescapable, that the press discovered that there was literally no one around to answer it. Sweeting-Aldren’s corporate headquarters, situated, as it happened, just west of Zone II, had been gutted by a fire which local fire departments, trying to fight it in the hours after the earthquake, said appeared to be a case of arson. The building’s sprinkler system had been shut down manually, and firemen found traces of an “incendiary liquid” near the remains of the ground-floor records center. The wives of the company’s CEO and of its four senior vice presidents either could not be located or else told reporters that they hadn’t seen their men since late Sunday evening, shortly before the earthquake struck.

At five o’clock on Monday, just in time for a live interview on the local news, Channel 4 tracked down company spokesman Ridgely Holbine at a marina in Marblehead. He was wearing swim trunks and a faded harvard crew T-shirt and was inspecting his sailboat for earthquake damage.

penny spanghorn: What is the company’s response to this terrible tragedy?

holbine: Penny, I can’t give you any official comment at this time.

spanghorn: Can you tell us what caused this terrible tragedy?

holbine: I’ve received no information on that. I can speculate privately that the earthquake was a factor.

spanghorn: Are you in communication with the company’s management?

holbine: No, Penny, I’m not.

spanghorn: Is the company prepared to take responsibility for the terrible contamination in Peabody? Will you take a leading role in the cleanup?

holbine: I can’t give you any official comment.

spanghorn: What is your personal opinion of this terrible tragedy?

holbine: I feel sorry for the workers who were killed and injured. I feel sorry for their families.

spanghorn: Do you feel personally responsible in any way? For this terrible tragedy?

holbine: It’s an act of God. There’s no controlling that. We all regret the loss of life, though.

spanghorn: What about the estimated thirty thousand people who are homeless tonight as a result of this tragedy?

holbine: As I said, I have no authority to speak for the company. But it’s undeniably regrettable.

spanghorn: What do you have to say to those people?

holbine: Well, they shouldn’t eat any food from their houses. They should shower carefully and try to find other places to stay. Drink bottled water. Get plenty of rest. That’s what I’m doing.

Tuesday morning brought the news that Sweeting-Aldren CEO Sandy Aldren had spent all of Monday in New York City liquidating the company’s negotiable securities and transferring every dollar the company had in cash to bank accounts in a foreign country. Then, on Monday night, he’d vanished. At first it was assumed that the foreign accounts in question were Swiss, but records showed that all the cash — about $30 million — had in fact flowed to the First Bank of Basseterre in St. Kitts.

On Tuesday afternoon Aldren’s personal attorney in Boston, Alan Porges, came forward and acknowledged that a “cash reserve” had been set up to cover the “contractually guaranteed severance payments” of the company’s five “ranking officers.” These payments amounted to just over $30 million, and Porges said that to the best of his knowledge all five officers had officially resigned on Monday morning and were therefore entitled to their cash payments effective immediately. He declined to speculate on the men’s whereabouts.

The networks had rebroadcast excerpts from the interview with Porges no more than five or six times before a new bombshell detonated. Seismologist Larry Axelrod summoned reporters to MIT and announced that he had seen evidence suggesting that Sweeting-Aldren was responsible for nearly all the seismic activity of the last three months, including the main shock on Sunday night. He said the evidence had been provided by Renée Seitchek of Harvard, “an excellent scientist” who was still in the hospital recovering from gunshot wounds. A woman from the Globe asked if it was possible that Seitchek had been shot not by pro-life extremists but by a Sweeting-Aldren operative, and Axelrod said Yes .

Police in Somerville and Boston confirmed that they had indeed widened the scope of their investigation of Seitchek’s shooting in light of this newfound motive, but added that the earthquake had thrown all investigations of this kind into disarray. They said the total breakdown of Sweeting-Aldren’s management structure and the loss of company records to various fires “could pose a problem.”

Federal and state environmental officials were encountering even bigger obstacles as they attempted to confirm the existence of an injection well at the company’s Peabody facilities. By Wednesday morning the last of the fires there had burned itself out, and what remained was eight hundred acres of scorched and poisoned ruins — an uncharted industrial South Bronx filled with murky, foaming pools, unstable process structures, and pressurized tanks and pipelines suspected to contain not only explosives and flammable gases but some of the most toxic and/or carcinogenic and/or teratogenic substances known to man. The USEPA’s first priority, administrator Susan Carver told ABC News, would be to prevent contamination from spreading into groundwater and nearby estuaries.

“It’s now apparent,” Carver said, “that this company’s immense profitability was achieved through razor-thin safety margins and the systematic deception of the agencies responsible for oversight. I’m afraid there’s a very real risk of this personal and economic tragedy becoming a true environmental catastrophe, and right now I’m more worried about protecting public safety than assigning responsibility in the abstract. For us to locate a single wellhead at the site, assuming the well even exists, is going to be like finding a needle in a haystack that we know is full of rattlesnakes.”

By and large the press and public bought the Axelrod/Seitchek theory wholesale. Seismologists, however, reacted with their usual caution. They wanted to inspect the data. They needed time to model and construe. They said the rich and swarmy seismicity of April and May could plausibly have been induced by Sweeting-Aldren, but the main shock on Sunday night was another matter.

This shock, it was shown, had resulted from the rupture of rock along a deep fault running northeast from Peabody to a point in the neighborhood of April’s Ipswich epicenters. Howard Chun of Harvard deconvolved some short-period digital seismograms and demonstrated, fairly conclusively, that the rupture had spread from the northern end of the fault to the southern — in other words, that the event had “begun” near Ipswich. A Sweeting-Aldren injection well could therefore not have “caused” the earthquake; at most it could have destabilized the fault, or provided a general instability with a path of least resistance. But the entire subject of rupture propagation was not at all well understood.