by Paul Briggs
But what was happening up north right now wasn’t a 100-year flood.
It wasn’t a 500-year or 1,000-year flood.
It was a never flood.
The deluge hitting the northern U.S. was of a kind that up until the last couple of years hadn’t even been possible in that part of the world. The band of rain stretched from the foothills of the Rockies east clear to the foothills of the Appalachians, and from just north of Kansas City and St. Louis clear up to the Canadian border and beyond — poor Canada was taking it on the chin again this year. Going from west to east, it covered central and eastern Montana, the northeast corner of Wyoming, all of the Dakotas, about a third of Nebraska, all of Minnesota and Iowa, a slice of northern Missouri, all of Wisconsin and Michigan, the northern halves of Illinois and Indiana, the northern third of Ohio, the northwest corner of Pennsylvania and parts of upstate New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. The Northern Monsoon had come to America.
Like last year’s floods in Europe and Siberia, it had snuck up on the country—half an inch of rain on Sunday, a little more than that on Tuesday, a full inch on Wednesday night, almost as much on Friday morning… and the next week, with the ground fully saturated, the heavy rains began. “We’re already seeing flash flooding in parts of New England and western Pennsylvania,” said Bird. “That’s where the worst loss of life is right now—eighty-three deaths, that we know of, so far.
“But the real bad news is that this is just the start of the third week. If it’s anything like last year’s Monsoon—and all the indications are that it’s even worse—then we have at least a month and a half left to go. Since it’s happening fairly slowly, we can make a reasonable guess as to which places are going to need evacuation, but… it’s a lot of places.
“Especially around the Great Lakes. A three-foot rise in Lake Superior is considered a five-hundred-year flood, and we’re past that now. And every drop of that water is going to flow down into the lower Lakes, which are already in a similar state.”
“Thank you,” said Pratt. “That brings us to the question of the impact, which… are we in touch with al-Harrak?”
“He’s in the Kansas City field office right now,” said Wendy. “I’ll call him and tell him to get in front of a webcam.”
“While you’re doing that,” said Bird, “may I make a couple of recommendations?” Knowing that the president was a stickler for protocol, she addressed this to Wendy, not Pratt.
Wendy looked at Pratt, who nodded. He hadn’t planned on discussing courses of action yet, but under the circumstances a little flexibility was called for.
“First,” said Bird, “we need to put somebody in charge of the NWS. Today, if possible. Second, we need somebody new at NOAA. I’ll e-mail you a list of names for both positions.” She handed a piece of paper over to Wendy, who handed it to Pratt.
It was a letter of resignation from Minsky. The short version was I’ll stay on if you insist on keeping me, but this isn’t the job you hired me for and I have no idea how to do it and a lot of lives are at stake. It would weaken Pratt to let Minsky go at a time like this, but under the circumstances it made sense.
“Mr. al-Harrak,” said Wendy, turning on a screen next to the one Bird was standing in front of to show a man sitting at the center of his own little solar system of screens, all facing him from various angles, each displaying a different emergency. He was a medium-dark, heavyset man in a sports jacket over a plaid shirt. His beard was short but thick, and his hair had only a little gray in it.
Pratt allowed himself a moment of self-congratulation for having chosen this man to be in charge of FEMA. The Moroccan-born Muhammad al-Harrak had been dealing with large-scale refugee crises since the war in Syria, and he had become a master of logistics. A lot of Republicans had looked askance at Pratt for hiring this foreign Muslim for a job that would place him squarely in the Department of Homeland Security. A lot of overseas leftists had looked even askancer at al-Harrak for accepting the position—after years of helping displaced Third World families save their children, now he was going to be “helping fat, pampered Americans save their big screens,” as some irate commentator had written in the Guardian. But al-Harrak had five children of his own, and knew enough about poverty to know he wanted as much money as possible between it and them… and the U.S. paid better than the U.N.
Al-Harrak wasted no time getting started. “Fifty million Americans are in the area being directly affected,” he said. “Right now, I’m acting on the optimistic assumption that half of them will need to be evacuated. That doesn’t include the people downstream, in places like St. Louis, Memphis, and New Orleans. It also doesn’t include Canadians, many of whom may seek shelter in the United States.”
“What would be a less optimistic assumption?”
“Less optimistically, we need to prepare housing for thirty million people. At minimum. I have a list of sites for emergency housing centers in areas that should be unaffected.”
“What about the housing itself?”
“Right now, the agency is purchasing mobile homes and RVs.”
“About how many are you buying?”
“All of them,” said al-Harrak.
Pratt blinked.
“At least, all the ones being sold by distributors—I’ve also instructed personnel to search for RVs being sold privately. It won’t be nearly enough, of course, but it will provide some housing for the first inhabitants while they build more housing. The agency is looking for contractors to supervise them while they do this.”
“So far, so good,” said Pratt, “but at some point, we’re going to need to start rebuilding. What’s the status of the National Flood Insurance Program?”
“Bankrupt,” said al-Harrak. “No one is to blame. It could never have paid for more than the smallest fraction of this.” The unspoken part of this sentence was even if its coffers had been full, which they were not, because Hurricane Gordon exhausted our funds and you and Congress never bothered to replenish them. “And before we deal with that, we need to get people out of the danger zone in the first place. A lot of people are going to need a lot of help getting out of there. We’re mobilizing the National Guard, but they can’t be everywhere.”
“If you need more personnel, draw on the Army,” said Pratt. “Coordinate with Swanston directly.”
“I’ll do that. As for the order of evacuations, the usual approach would be to give priority to the elderly and disabled. In this case, we’ll need to start with able-bodied men and women to build the extra housing. That worries me. In Louisiana, when Katrina hit, about half the people who died were over seventy-five. Here, the same thing could happen on a much larger scale.”
“Excuse me,” said Wendy, “but it looks like Bradley has something to say.”
The deputy press secretary was Deon Bradley, a kid fresh out of College Park, black, shaven-headed, and impeccably neat. He was lifting a hand tentatively. Pratt motioned for him to speak.
“Yes,” said Bradley, his voice not quite cracking, “about that… there’s another problem I don’t know if everybody’s aware of. You see, some news orgs have decided the Northern Monsoon isn’t a thing—that last year was just a fluke. It’s a part of global climate change, and if you’re not willing to say for sure that that’s happening, and you don’t have another explanation, that makes it hard to talk about.”
“So they’re not reporting it at all?” said Pratt.
“They’re reporting the weather, same as usual,” said Bradley. “They’re telling everybody about the rain. What they’re not doing is tying it together or making any predictions beyond the five-day forecast.”
“How much difference does that make?”
“Well, from what I’ve seen… if I were living in the affected area and all I had to go on was weather reports from—say—the TKB Foundation, I’d be a little skeptical if anybody told me I needed to evacuate.”
“Thank you,” said al-Harrak, though his expression was more one of dre
ad than gratitude. “I’ll keep my eyes open for that.”
The reports from the Transportation and HUD secretaries could both be summed up in one phrase: this will be really bad, but we don’t know how bad yet. The cities—hell, the entire metropolitan areas—of Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Minneapolis-St. Paul, and Milwaukee were obviously going to be hit hard, and Indianapolis and Columbus were only a little better off. Probably worst off would be Buffalo, flooded from both above and upstream.
As for transportation, many airports and uncounted miles of highway were in the disaster zone. It was all still mostly intact, but no one was expecting that to continue. Which made it even more urgent to evacuate as many people as possible now—the longer everybody waited, the harder it would get.
Then Agriculture Secretary Kyria Hammond spoke. “The news is not good,” she said. “With the situation in the Plains and the South, we were really counting on the Corn Belt to come through this year. Most of the Belt is right under that monsoon, and most of the corn and soybeans haven’t been harvested yet. Now I assume the farmers are out there right now trying to save as much as they can, but in my opinion, we’ll be lucky to get half of it.
“Then there’s winter wheat. A lot of next year’s crop is going to be drowned in the fields or never planted at all. The bottom line is, we need to be prepared for serious food insecurity.
“And not just here, but abroad—especially abroad, in fact. The same heat-kill problem in the South has been happening in the south of China, and they’ve got a lot more mouths to feed. The wheat belt in the Ukraine and southern Russia is also being hit by the Monsoon.”
“Thank you,” said Pratt. He turned to Terry Walther. “I hate to ask you for a miracle, but…” He couldn’t think of a way to finish the sentence. Somehow his old school chum was going to have to conjure a lot of money into being without causing inflation.
“I never thought I’d say this,” said Terry, “but times like this are the reason deficit spending was invented. I think we should see how much the bond market is willing to finance before we talk about raising taxes.”
“Can you do it without raising interest rates?”
Terry steepled his fingers and thought for a moment.
“What I’m about to say is going to sound very cynical,” he said. “I mean, cynical even by D.C. standards. But if the market is really starting to think the end of civilization is coming—or even a major crisis of civilization, which is what this is starting to look like—then what’s the investment of last resort? I mean, before everybody starts hoarding gold and guns and stuff?”
“Bonds?”
“That’s right. U.S. government bonds. Because like it or not, we’re the only outfit that can actually make people give us their money—well, us and the mob, but the mob doesn’t sell bonds. Now we have seen about a dozen state governments take big hits to their bond rating just in the last year—mostly Florida and other states with a lot of coastline—but when the apocalypse hits, the federal government will be the last thing to go. So that’s… the good news, if you want to call it that. We can sell a lot of bonds without raising rates too much.”
Right at that moment, the door opened. Secretary of State Jae-oh Ahn, known to Pratt and his other close friends as “Jim,” entered the Situation Room with Defense Secretary Simon Swanston right behind him. Ahn’s salt-and-pepper hair seemed to have gotten a little saltier since he’d left D.C. last week, and his expression was grim.
“I gather the news is bad,” said Pratt.
Jim nodded. “The situation in the Balkans isn’t the problem,” he said. “To the extent that it is a problem, the nations of Europe have it in hand. I have a more detailed report here”—he placed a folder on Pratt’s desk—“but what we need to focus on is North Korea.
“The meeting was… slightly worse than the usual standoff. They spent several hours threatening us with an immediate nuclear attack if we didn’t ship them food right now. I kept reminding them we had barely enough food for ourselves and our trading partners, but we did have a very large nuclear arsenal that we would be happy to deliver free of charge.” Swanston’s pinched, humorless face managed a grim smile at this. “They kept saying China would defend them.”
“What did the Chinese say?”
“They were a little more reasonable. The foreign minister said—I’m paraphrasing—‘Are you sure you don’t have anything to spare? Because they’re really losing everything in the floods this year.’ That’s the trouble with being an American—nobody believes you when you plead poverty. Especially when it comes to food.”
“I take it China doesn’t have anything to spare?”
Jim shook his head. “Normally, President Ma would like nothing better than to wrap North Korea around his finger a little tighter in exchange for a few shiploads of rice. This year the problem is coming up with those shiploads of rice. See, the problems we’ve been having in the South with heat kill—they’ve been having the same problems in their southeast, and they’ve got a lot more mouths to feed.
“And North Korea really is in a bad way right now. According to my sources in China, they were already closer to famine than we knew before the floods even started.”
Pratt nodded. “Socialism.”
“Socialism can never fail,” said Jim, “it can only be failed… apparently by everyone in the world. And even a capitalist country would have had trouble coping with that kind of damage. Especially since one of the few things they export is coal, which China is trying to cut back on.
“Here’s the upshot. In the event Pyongyang launches a first strike, China will stay out of it. And unless they really are suicidal, they’re not going to launch that strike.”
“In case they do,” said Swanston, “we will be ready. In fact, with your permission Defense will begin developing a plan to forestall them.”
Jim nodded. “But whatever happens, a lot of people in North Korea are going to die this winter. And by ‘a lot’ I mean somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of the population. And I can’t even begin to speculate about the repercussions of this.” He sighed. “Rogue states, unstable countries… at times like this, they’re the first ones to fall apart. Let’s just hope they’re the only ones.”
Like most rivers, the Mississippi does not lie easy in its bed. It is in the nature of the river to flow to the sea by the shortest and steepest path, but with every ton of sand and silt it brings from the north to accumulate in its lower reaches, it gradually lengthens its own path, forming a long tongue of low-lying ground that extends into the Gulf of Mexico. One year, during a violent flood, the river breaks through somewhere along its banks and finds a shorter route to the Gulf. The old course becomes a backwater, the tongue of land is slowly eroded away by ocean waves and the story begins again.
The cycle takes about a thousand years. As it happens, the last time the Mississippi made a major change of course was about a thousand years ago. Left to itself, by now the river would probably have shifted to the Atchafalaya and entered the Gulf at Morgan City, La. But the cities and industries that have grown along the river’s lower course need that river to survive.
And so, in the mid-twentieth century, the Old River Control Structure was built. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers took on the task of holding the great river prisoner in its old bed, allowing only 30 percent of the Mississippi to flow into the Atchafalaya, preventing the Father of Waters from turning deadbeat dad on the millions who needed it right where it was.
From then to the present day, despite the worst floods Nature can send, the Corps has never failed this charge… yet.
* * *
Isabel was jarred awake by the sound of two hands clapping about a foot away from her left ear.
She sat up abruptly, and was rewarded with a jolt of pain from the back of her neck as she pulled her head up from the pillow on her desk. The thin, bestubbled face of Luke Roth, her supervisor for the morning shift, was looming over her.
“Sleeping on the job?
”
Isabel did a triple-take. First, she was horribly embarrassed at having in fact been caught sleeping on the job. One second later, while her face was still halfway done turning red, she thought I sleep at my desk because I can’t leave my damn post! HOW DARE HE and then she noticed the look in his eye and realized he was kidding. Figuring that witty banter was called for at this point, Isabel tried to think of some.
“I could sleep a lot better if they hadn’t taken the beds out,” was the best she could come up with. She gestured toward the end of the RV where the beds had been replaced by extra hard drives, giving her computer more storage space. For a moment, Isabel glared out the window at yet another beautiful, sunny Louisiana morning which had come to mock her for having to spend yet another day cooped up in this air-conditioned veal pen. Then she turned back to her computer and sent a file to Roth’s smartphone.
“Here’s the latest projections,” said Isabel. “They’re not good. We’re looking at a flow rate well over 2.5 million cubic feet per second. There’s a 96.2 percent chance the river crests over the top of the ORCS after midnight tonight, and a 62.5 percent chance the structure fails completely. That’s up from 96.0 and 61.4 from the one a.m. data. Have you heard if they’re going to open the Morganza the rest of the way?”
