by K J Kalis
Roger glanced back at his screen and wondered what the people in the newly powered areas were doing right now. Were they cleaning their refrigerators, watching television for the first time in two days, turning on lights so they didn’t have to sit in the dark? Roger had his own questions about turning off the power. How many people had generators that could cause the same spark issue that Palm Coast Electric & Power was worried about? Sparks of any kind this time of year, from a tossed cigarette to a car grazing a guardrail, could create the same problem. Wildfires were just part of the deal in California, just like blizzards in Montana and hurricanes in Florida. Every area had their weather issue. Fire was it for California, except for maybe the big earthquake that everyone always talked about. But who knew if that would ever happen?
The room was silent for a few minutes. Roger checked his emails and could hear Candace clicking away on her keyboard. Monitoring power was like that. One minute they were busy checking specifications and power delivery, then for hours they would be quiet. It was part of the job.
“Hey Roger, did you see this?” Candace said, pointing to her screen. “I’ve never seen anything like that before.”
Roger leaned over and saw three blue dots on the grid pattern. “What are those?” He got up and stood behind her, staring at the screen.
Candace squinted and then checked a manual leashed to her workstation. “No idea.”
“Can’t say I have either. Power surges, maybe? That’s not how they normally show up, though.”
Roger sat back down at his own workstation and pulled up the same view Candace had on her screen. He zoomed in. “Why are those showing up as dots and not a stream? Normally, we can see the entire area. I don’t understand.”
Roger glanced over at Candace. A furrow had taken over her brow. She was leaning forward as she stared at the screen and typed. “Neither do I. Think we have a malfunction?”
Roger shook his head. A malfunction was the last thing they needed. He’d be stuck at work trying to sort it out. “We’d better call this in. I have no idea what that is or how to fix it.”
Palm Coast Electric & Power used an outside software package and IT firm to take care of its power management technology. They just didn’t have the staff to do it in-house, so the company had made the switch to an outside vendor years ago. Cost savings, they said. Roger had been at the company for more than twenty years. As he dialed up the technical support line, he wondered if it had been a good idea to outsource the power management software. Every time he called them for help, he wondered the same thing. Not that the people weren’t nice on the phone, it was just that he didn’t think they understood how critical it was that their software worked all the time. They said they had redundancies, but Roger wasn’t convinced. He had been called into work one too many times because the software had crashed, and no one knew what to do.
“Do you want me to reboot the system?” Candace asked. The furrow on her forehead had turned into pursed lips. “Think that might get rid of the blue dots?”
“Let me see what these morons have to say first.” Everyone who worked with Roger knew that he had no love for the technical support people. He pulled the phone away from his ear while he was on hold. “Do me a favor and take a couple of pictures so we can show them what happened, okay?”
“Good idea.”
Roger saw her lift her phone up and take a couple of pictures. He heard his phone beep.
“Just sent them to you.”
“Thanks.” The whining music on the end of the line was beginning to grate on his nerves. He was just about to hang up and start a reboot when a voice answered, “Technical support. This is Jacob. How can I help you today?”
By the sound of his voice, Roger wasn’t convinced that the person answering the phone was actually anywhere near him. The company was supposed to have locally based operations, but so many companies had outsourced even their support lines that Roger wasn’t sure how far he’d get with Jacob.
“Jacob, this is Roger over at Palm Coast Electric & Power. We have a situation.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you for using our products. Might I ask what the problem is?”
“Blue dots.”
“Blue dots?”
“Yup. They are right on our power control screens. We don’t know what they are. Blue is supposed to mean power surges, but they don’t look right.”
“Give me one moment please, sir.”
Roger set the phone down on the console, hitting the button for the speaker. The dreadful music was back on. “These guys. How are we supposed to get answers when they keep putting me on hold?”
Candace scowled and kept staring at her screen. “No idea.”
Jacob came back on the line. “Are you there, sir?”
“Yes. What are those blue dots?”
“I’m sorry, sir. Our program doesn’t generate blue dots. If you could please email in the morning our development…”
Roger didn’t let Jacob finish his sentence. He slammed the phone down. “No blue dots, huh? Funny, they are right there. You see them, too, right?”
Candace nodded.
“Let’s start a reboot. That’s all we can do.”
7
By the time half the night had gone by, Stan Lemmon realized he had a headache. Whether it was from the lack of humidity or the pile of work he needed to do, he didn’t know. Predicting the weather in California was usually pretty boring unless one of two things happened, the Santa Ana winds started their yearly blow or a lot of torrential rain. Winds meant fires; rain meant mudslides. It was a Santa Ana day.
Stan opened his desk drawer and pulled out a bottle of aspirin. He swallowed two without any water. According to his doctor, he was only supposed to take Tylenol, but it didn’t work for him. Had to be aspirin or the headache would chase him all night.
He glanced at his phone as it rang, “Hey Ned,” he said as he picked up.
“Not liking the weather we have going, Stan.”
“Can’t imagine you would.”
“Give me an update.” As the fire chief, Ned had access to all sorts of weather data, but from spending time with him, Stan knew that he was old school. He wanted it from the “horse’s mouth,” and the horse he preferred was Stan.
“The winds aren’t going to get any better. They look like they will blow anywhere from twenty to fifty. Wish I had better news for you.”
“Better news would be rain,” Ned growled.
“But then you’d be complaining about mudslides.”
“True. Still, I’ve never seen it this bad. We just had a couple of fires crop up out of nowhere. They are crawling their way through the valley as we speak.”
“Under control?”
“For the time being, if the winds don’t increase or shift.”
Stan didn’t say anything. By looking at the meteorological data in front of him on the bank of screens, he knew that both were possible, even likely. “I wish I could tell you different, but it’s not looking good.” Stan heard a brief pause at the other end of the line and waited. He knew that sometimes it took Ned a minute to process. It was probably what made him a good fire chief, Stan realized. Ned didn’t do anything without thinking through the consequences, except maybe ordering a beer. That didn’t seem to take much thought.
“Give me an idea of what we are looking at over the next twelve to twenty-four hours.”
“I can, but that’s not the real problem.”
“What is the problem, then?”
Stan shifted in his seat. “The real problem is the long-term forecast. The newest one just came in from the National Weather Service. We are in a prolonged period of dry northern winds.”
“More Santa Ana…”
“Yeah, but nothing like I’ve seen before. The NWS folks are saying this could go on for weeks without a break.”
The Santa Ana winds blew each and every year without fail. It wasn’t something that was a surprise to anyone living in California. But usually, ther
e were brief breaks of less wind and rain that soaked the ground and the brush enough to reduce the wildfire risk to something more manageable. Stan stared at the screens in front of him, the new notice from the NWS in the center of the computer. “Northerly winds are predicted to continue in an unusual pattern for the next few weeks with little or no precipitation. Local residents should prepare for near-drought conditions.”
The chair creaked as Stan leaned back in it. “I haven’t seen anything like this in all my years of forecasting, Ned.” Unlike a lot of the new kids, as he called them, that were coming in with communications degrees and just read the weather, Stan actually had a degree in meteorology.
Though the weather in California could be boring — the same temperature ranges, the same sunshine each and every day — when it did change, it was big. This notice from the NWS -- Stan knew could change everything. The amount of drying wind they were predicting was unprecedented. Stan swallowed hard, wishing for an antacid. “You still there, Ned?”
“Yeah, just thinking. That’s not good news. I’ve got some phone calls to make.”
“Calling in the cavalry?”
“Not quite yet, but I’m going to get them on standby. I’ll get some crews out to keep
working on brush in the morning. As much as I’d like to do something, there’s not much to do until an actual fire starts. Can’t predict where these things pop up. Wish I could.”
“I heard the power company is doing rolling blackouts to try to prevent fires?”
Ned harrumphed. “Like that is going to do anything. Somehow, they think that shutting down power to people for two days at a time will prevent sparking of their own equipment. We’ve got people all over the valley that are using generators and building fires outside so they can cook. It’s no good.”
“Sounds like someone is trying to cover their backside if you ask me.”
“That’d be about right. They haven’t put in new power systems in decades, and now they want to shut everything off. I’ll bet the lawyers got involved.”
“No good can come of that.” Stan checked the clock on his monitor. “Listen, I gotta go get ready for the first early broadcast. Send me a text or call if you need any more information.”
“Thanks.”
Stan paused before he hung up. “Good luck, buddy.”
“I’m gonna need it.”
8
Jack jumped out of Kat’s blue SUV before she had a chance to put it into park. Tuesday was baseball night and it was Jack’s favorite. “Be careful!” Kat yelled, tucking her blonde hair behind her ear as he got out and opened the back. She reached for a folding chair and the bag that had her laptop and reading material in it. Baseball games could take a long time.
Since their move from Aldham a year and a half before, Jack had made a new set of friends, mostly through school. When they had decided to move, Jack was a mix of emotions — excited, sad, lonely. Kat knew that he’d been through a lot. He’d been kidnapped, held at knifepoint, rescued, and then discovered that his father was the one that betrayed him. Once his father, Steve, was in jail, he refused to see Jack and then was killed. It had been a lot for Jack to deal with, but Van, Kat’s new husband, had stepped in. Jack and Van had a great relationship. The last thing she wanted was Jack to feel the same level of abandonment that she had felt when her own parents had died in a car accident while she was away at college.
The memories faded as Kat slung the bag over her shoulder. She reached back into the car to get a bottle of water and walked to the baseball field, her tennis shoes crunching on the dry grass. California was never a place Kat had aspired to live, but with the success of her work and Van’s management, she and Van had an opportunity to continue to grow the paper through good reporting. But Kat hadn’t written in a while, at least nothing too serious. Van’s increased position at the paper meant that she hadn’t needed to. It had been a welcome relief.
“Hey, Kat!” called a voice.
Several women were lined up underneath the shade of a stand of trees that were just far enough away from the baseball field that they could see, but wouldn’t be in danger of getting hit by one of the many stray balls.
“Hey, how are you guys?” Kat asked, unfolding her chair and sitting down. She took a deep breath and pulled her sunglasses down off the top of her head, shading her eyes from the sun. “Warm one today.”
“For sure!” Sammi, one of the other moms said, taking a long drink of water. “I don’t ever remember it being this dry.”
For the next few minutes, the women chatted, covering the subjects they did twice a week at baseball. Kids, husbands, marriage, divorce, recipes, work. The conversations never got too serious, but Kat had enjoyed getting to know the women and watching the boys play. Jack’s teammates had just started pitching to each other. He was one of the pitchers. “Jack is up to pitch,” Kat sighed. She never realized how nervous it would make her to watch her child play, but the pit in her stomach told another story. She smiled and shook her head. She’d been through an IED, kidnapping and rescuing a sex-trafficked girl and the thing that would take her down would be her son pitching to other kids. She looked at Sammi, “Tell me how bad it is. I can’t watch.”
The other moms laughed, and Kat caught a glimpse of Jack on the pitcher’s mound, bent over and chewing his lip as he watched the coach’s signals like he was in the big leauge. The kids were working on basic pitching skills. Jack and Van had spent hours in the backyard working on reading the signals and how to hold the ball. Kat rolled her neck, trying to get the kinks out of it. If she really stopped to think about it, Van was probably a better dad than Steve would have ever been. God had a funny way of working.
“He’s doing fine. Just struck out Andrew. He’s coming off the mound now. Pitcher switch.”
Kat felt herself sigh in relief. As much as she wanted to watch Jack pitch, it was almost better when the spotlight was off him. She could relax. Out of her bag, she pulled a magazine.
When she had started going to baseball with Jack, she thought it would be a good time to do some heavy reading. It wasn’t. At the most, she had the focus to answer a few emails and make some notes on stories. For the most part, she enjoyed sitting with the other moms and talking about the basics of everyday life.
She heard the crack of the ball and the bat colliding and looked up. One of the kids had just hit the ball past second base. The boys were scrambling to get it and tag the runner. Jack scooped up the ball and sent it back in, just missing getting it to the first basemen to get an out. “Good job, Jack!” Kat yelled.
“Hey Kat, can we talk?” Theresa Walsh had come up behind her chair and put her hand on Kat’s shoulder.
As Kat glanced up, she could see that Theresa was upset. Though she had oversized sunglasses on that covered nearly half of her petite face, the strain was evident. “Sure.”
“Let’s go over here.” Theresa pointed to a picnic table on the other side of the stand of trees.
Kat followed as Theresa sat up on the picnic table. Kat wasn’t sure if she’d call them friends. Maybe moving toward friends was a better description of their relationship, Kat thought. “What’s going on? Are you okay?”
Theresa looked down but didn’t answer. “You were a journalist, right?”
“Still am.”
“I really shouldn’t be talking to you. Bart said he would handle it, but I’m not sure he is.”
Kat put her hand on Theresa’s arm, “What did he say he’d handle?”
Theresa started to get up, “I shouldn’t. I can’t talk about it.”
“Wait! Everything you tell me is confidential. It’s part of being in the press. I promise.”
Kat waited as Theresa settled back onto the top of the picnic table as another crack from the baseball field told Kat that someone had hit the ball. “Bart, my husband, he’s with Palm Coast Electric & Power.”
Kat nodded. She had heard that from the other moms at baseball. “Is he all right?”
&n
bsp; Theresa shook her head no. “I think he’s in trouble.”
Kat looked at Theresa. “What makes you think that?”
“There’s just something going on. He’s quiet. Hasn’t been home much. When he is, he’s short-tempered. I finally confronted him about it last night.”
“What did he say?”
“All he said was that he had to take care of something from his past. He wouldn’t tell me any more than that.” Theresa took off her sunglasses and wiped tears from underneath her eyes. “It’s got to be serious. I’ve never seen him like this before. He goes through times when he is thinking about something, but I kind of expect that. He’s the CEO. But this is different. There’s something really wrong.”
Kat knew that Bart was with the local power company, but Kat didn’t know he was the CEO. That made sense given the clothes Theresa wore and the Mercedes SUV that she drove, though. Kat hadn’t really taken time to think about it. “Why are you telling me this?”
“I guess I was hoping you’d look into it. I can’t call the police. What would I tell them? My husband is acting weird. This is California. That describes most of the population.”
“Can you give me any idea what he’s up against?”
Theresa looked up as another crack of the ball echoed through the air. She looked back at Kat. “I heard him on the phone the other day. He didn’t know I was listening. He was having an argument with someone. He said something about getting something fixed. I’m not sure what he was talking about. It sounded serious.”
“Could it have anything to do with the rolling blackouts? Isn’t his company doing that?” As soon as Kat mentioned the blackouts, she could see Theresa stiffen.
“I don’t think so. This was a mistake. Forget I ever asked you.” Theresa got up and walked away. Kat watched her as she passed the other moms, picked up her bag and walked to her SUV. The door opened and she disappeared inside.
