Laine detached and unpacked the trailer. He then used the full contents of the can of spray paint, covering up the “untactical” bright yellow trailer. He even sprayed the clear plastic front of the trailer, since there was no need to have visibility in or out of it. The trailer now blended in with the forest for his bivouacs.
He was anxious to set up his radios, since it was a Tuesday—one of his scheduled shortwave contact nights. He set up his pocket-size Kaito receiver on a large stump and rolled out its longwire antenna, hanging the far end up on a tree limb. He placed his overseas bag in front of the stump to use for a low chair. Then he put on his headphones and dialed in 10.000 megahertz. The WWV time signal in Colorado had a faintly audible signal, even though there was daylight between him and the United States. “So far, so good,” he whispered to himself.
Andy confirmed that the radio’s clock was set to GMT. In Germany, it was GMT plus one hour, but in New Mexico it was GMT minus seven hours—still not yet noon. Next he programmed the radio’s alarm function to wake him at 0325 GMT—4:25 a.m. local time. Andy heard it announced that it was seventeen minutes after the hour, so he continued listening to WWV for the geophysical data report that always came on eighteen minutes after each hour. They reported a solar activity of K2/K3 (“weak to unsettled”), which was marginal for long-range propagation in the shortwave bands. Andy’s face sank into a frown.
Next, Andy erected the dipole antenna for his transceiver. He lined it up so that the antenna’s broadside would face to the northwest—the “Great Circle” direction from him to Lars in New Mexico. Fortunately, he didn’t need to worry about grounding the radio, since he was using a dipole antenna.
Lars had helped Andy build and test the QRP transceiver four years earlier. It was one of a pair of kits that they ordered from Elecraft, in California. Andy justified the price to Kaylee by telling her that this radio had slightly more output power than a traditional “flea-power” rig (ham slang for a transmitter with less than one watt) but the extra bit of power would really make a difference for DX (long-distance) communications. Shortly before his departure for Afghanistan, Kaylee had decorated the exterior of the transceiver’s Tupperware box with some of her artistry: Andy’s call sign, “K5CLA,” and a humorous stylized cartoon of a flea wearing headphones, with yellow lightning bolts emanating from its hind end. Kaylee had laughingly reminded Andy to pack his “Mighty Flea” as he was preparing to deploy.
Inside the waterproof storage box, the transceiver was so small that there was enough room left over for a small spiral-bound notebook, an external power cord with both car battery clips and a cigarette lighter plug, and several small spools of wire for spare antenna or ground leads. He inserted six batteries into the battery tray and used the radio’s battery voltage monitor to verify that they were good. Andy flipped open his notepad and turned it to a page of notes from when he was explaining radio procedure to Kaylee. He paused to read it again, because Kaylee had annotated it with questions, comments, and her ever-present cartoon doodles. He missed her so much that it hurt. The page read:
Some Common Abbreviations Used in CW (Morse) Transmissions
These are sent as if they were a single character:
AR—End of message. Typically sent on your last transmission, before you send the call signs the final time.
BT—Paragraph break, or just a break in our thoughts.
Kaylee wrote: “How do you say ‘Period’? We rarely use periods (too slow and awkward to send compared to BT) unless we’re relaying literal text where they matter.”
SK—If sent after sending the call signs the final time, it means we are shutting off the radio and not accepting any more calls.
Common abbreviations, sent as words using normal characters:
ABT—About
BK—Break. This means back to you; no need to use call signs.
CPY—Copy
CU—See you (later)
DE—From. This is used between call signs.
ES—And
FB—Fine business. Basically means “That’s great” or “That’s wonderful.”
FER—For. Beneath this, Kaylee wrote: “That is goofy. Why not FOR???” Andy penned: “Laziness. It’s just quicker in Morse to send FER than FOR:
..- . . . -. (FER)
versus
..-. - - - .-. (FOR)”
HI—Laugh
HR—Here
HW—How
K—Go ahead
KN—Go ahead ONLY the station I am calling or talking to
MNI—Many
NM—Name
OM—Old man. All men are OMs in the ham world. Beside this line Kaylee drew a caricature of an old bearded man tripping on his beard.
PSE—Please
R—I heard everything you said and don’t need you to repeat anything. Kaylee wrote: “So R is the first thing we’ll reply with on each ‘Over’ (or not if we need a repeat), right? RIGHT!”
TNX—Thanks
TU—Thank you
UR—Your or You’re (depending on context)
VY—Very
YL—Young lady. All females are YLs in the ham world. Kaylee annotated this line with a caricature of an old witch wearing headphones, the cable from the headphones was dipped in a cauldron.
73—Best regards. Always used singularly. (Only CB-ers and ex-CB-ers use the plural “73s.”)
88—Hugs and kisses
?—Sent by itself, it means “I’m going to repeat what I just said.” Beneath that, Kaylee had written, in larger block letters: “KL: HI 88 PSE COME HOME SOON FER 88 UR YL 73 AR.”
Common Q-signals sent as words:
QRM—Interference from another station
QRN—Static
QRP—Low-power (less than 5-watt) transmitters
QRZ?—Who is calling me? Or at the end of the contact, sent instead of SK, it means “I’m listening for more calls and would like to receive some.”
QSB—Fading
QSO—A contact (conversation)
QSY—Change frequency
QTH—Location
NOTE: Call signs are always sent in this order: {OtherGuy’sCallSign} DE {YourCallSign}. And below that, Kaylee had drawn a cartoon of an outhouse with an enormous antenna mast on top, captioned: “QTH #1—OM QSO WITH TP”
Andy laughed and closed the notebook. He plugged in the antenna and his headphones. Andy didn’t need to plug in or even carry an old-style hand key, as the KX1 had an internal electronic keyer and a set of keyer paddles that plugged directly into its case for the ultimate in portability and operating ease. The paddles were manipulated via slight movements of the thumb and forefinger (squeezing the paddles), enabling him to send Morse much faster and smoother than he could with a traditional telegrapher’s hand key. The paddles also had the advantage of being virtually silent, versus the familiar clackety-clack of a hand key.
For convenience and to allow him to keep one hand free, he attached the radio to his thigh using a Velcro strap. Andy switched it on and set it to 10.106 MHz—the international 30-meter band QRP calling frequency.
Andy put on the headphones, gave a brief silent prayer, and then whispered, “Okay, Mighty Flea, do yo’ stuff!” Squeezing the KX1’s keyer paddles, Andy remembered to add “DL/” in front of his call sign to indicate that he was transmitting in Germany, and keyed: “CQ CQ CQ DE DL/K5CLA DL/K5CLA K”
He was surprised to hear an immediate answering call, only slightly off frequency, “DL/K5CLA DE PA3ADG PA3ADG K”
As he listened, he quickly adjusted the radio’s incremental tuning for a comfortable medium-pitched tone and wrote PA3ADG on his notepad.
Excitedly, Andy replied: “PA3ADG DE DL/K5CLA FB UR 589 589 NM IS ANDY BT”
Then he quickly added: “I AM EX US ARMY OFFICER BIKING THRO
UGH DK ES F TRYING TO GET TO THE COAST TO FIND A SHIP HOME TO USA BK”
“BK R FB ANDY UR 449 BT
NM IS WIM ? WIM BT
QTH AMSTERDAM BT
BIKE OR MOTORCYCLE? BK”
“BK R FB WIM BT
PEDAL BIKE AM CAMPING BT
RIG KX1 QRP ABT 2W BK”
“BK R SOUNDS LIKE TOUGH WAY TO GO IN WINTER HI BK”
“BK R YES TOUGH HI BT
WIM PSE DO U KNOW OF ANY SHIPS FROM FRANCE OR BELG OR NETH SAILING TO THE US? BK”
“BK R WILL CHECK ES CALL U THIS FREQ AT 1845Z BT
CU ES 73 DL/K5CLB DE PA3ADG SK”
“BK R VY FB WIM MNI TNX BT
73 73 AR PA3ADG DE DL/K5CLB QRZ?”
Andy let out a sigh. He listened to the radio for a few minutes, but no other hams jumped in. He turned off the transceiver, reset the Kaito radio’s alarm to 18:42, and said a prayer. He covered both radios with a trash bag held down by his coat. While he was waiting for the follow-up from Holland, he set up his bivy bag and ground pad, and ate a can of applesauce.
It was almost dark. Andy could hear what sounded like a dove or pigeon cooing in the trees above. He felt chilled after sitting still while sweaty, so he peeled off his Windbreaker and rain pants and wrung out his socks. Then he crawled into his sleeping bag to wait.
He half-dozed for the next hour. The Kaito’s alarm went off, and Andy crawled out of the bag. He picked his way toward the dim outline of the stump in the dark, and switched off the alarm. It was getting colder, so he put his coat on. Again seated on the overseas bag, he fumbled to put on his headphones and turned on the KX1 transceiver.
Right on the dot at 18:45, Andy heard Wim’s crisp Morse code:
“DL/K5CLA DL/K5CLA DE PA3ADG KN”
Laine replied: “PA3ADG DE DL/K5CLA FB WIM UR 589 BK”
Wim answered:
“BK R BAD NEWS ANDY BT
NO SHIPS SAIL TO US OR CANADA BT
INSURANCE COMPANYS SAY ITS TOO DANGEROUS BT
SRI BT
PLANES STILL AGROUND INDEFINITELY BK”
Andy sent back: “BK R OK WIM TNX MUCH FER CHECKING BK”
Wim added:
“BK R I THINK UR BEST HOPE TO FIND SHIP TO UNITED STATES IN HAMBURG OR LE HAVRE OR MARSEILLES BT
BONNE CHANCE TO U ANDY BK”
After exchanging a few pleasantries, Andy signed off. He reset the Kaito’s alarm to 0325 and again covered the radios to protect them from the weather.
He slept uneasily, waking several times to glance at the tritium markings on his watch dial. When the alarm went off again at 0325 GMT, he was better prepared, with his red lens subdued LED flashlight close at hand.
Blinking, he said to himself, “I need a cuppa java.”
Andy switched the transceiver to 10.128. This was prearranged as the primary contact frequency for the Laine brothers. His notepad included a list of alternate frequencies, to use in descending order, in case of interference.
At 0330 GMT (9:30 p.m. in New Mexico), Andy heard a weak Morse code signal: “K5CLB DE K5CLA, K5CLB DE K5CLA” The transceiver’s signal strength indicator barely lit up. That did not bode well, since Lars had a 200 watt transmitter.
Andy reached for the paddles and replied, “K5CLA DE K5CLB KN”
Lars repeated his “K5CLB DE K5CLA, K5CLB DE K5CLA” transmission.
Again Andy replied, but it was apparent that his transmission was not propagating with enough strength to be heard above the static noise floor. After ten minutes of this frustration, Andy heard:
K5CLA DE K5CLB BT
IN CASE U CAN HEAR ME BT
ALL IS WELL WITH US AND KAYLEE BT
LOCAL POWER IS UP BUT US GRIDS DOWN BT
SITUATION LOOKING VERY MAD MAX ALL OVER THE US BT
KL SAYS LUV ES 88 ES HURRY HOME BT
PSALM 91 TO U AR DE K5CLB SK
After three more attempts to make contact, Lars repeated the same brief report and then signed off.
Disgusted at his lack of success at two-way communication, Andy packed up his transceiver in the zipper bags. Realizing that he probably wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep, he moved his ground pad and bivy bag closer to the stump and, being careful not to snag the antenna lead, he crawled in, cradling the shortwave receiver in his left arm.
Andy tuned through several bands, searching for English broadcasts. He caught a brief news summary on BBC at 0430 and a more lengthy news show on Radio Netherlands at 0500.
None of the news was good. The disruption in civilian air traffic in Europe was expected to continue for at least several weeks. Yesterday there had been a simultaneous pair of bombings by al Qaeda in Bonn and Frankfurt. Hundreds of Arab immigrants were rioting over the currency inflation. In Paris and several other large cities in France, they were back to their old tricks: torching dozens of parked cars. Meanwhile, New York City, Baltimore, Chicago, Dallas, and “Loss Angie-Lees” were in flames.
16
Grid Down
“Whole nations depend on technology. Stop the wheels for two days and you’d have riots. No place is more than two meals from a revolution. Think of Los Angeles or New York with no electricity. Or a longer view, fertilizer plants stop. Or a longer view yet, no new technology for ten years. What happens to our standard of living? Yet the damned fools won’t pay ten minutes’ attention a day to science and technology. How many people know what they’re doing? Where do these carpets come from? The clothes you’re wearing? What do carburetors do? Where do sesame seeds come from? Do you know? Does one voter out of thirty? They won’t spend ten minutes a day thinking about the technology that keeps them alive.”
—Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, Lucifer’s Hammer (1977)
Bloomfield, New Mexico
November, the First Year
The collapse of the power grids was a turning point in the Crunch. Before the grid went down, life in the U.S. went on with just the stress of mass inflation. But after grid power disappeared, life changed radically. The Texas grid was the last one to go, just a few days after the eastern and western grids failed in rapid succession.
The cities of Farmington and Bloomfield had power supplied by the Farmington Electric Utility System (FEUS), a local power co-op that had its own production capacity from three natural-gas-fired plants, as well as a hydroelectric plant at the Navajo Dam, on the San Juan River. These provided nearly all of the power needs for their 1,700-square-mile service area. The remainder of their power was purchased from the western grid at wholesale rates. When the western grid collapsed, the FEUS was able to get local power—detached from the main grid—back online within a minute. If it were not for this local production capacity, the cities of the Four Corners region, as well as many farmers and ranchers, would have run out of water. Meanwhile, most other cities in the nation only had a three-day supply of water in the gravity tanks that provided pressure to the municipal lines. When the grid went down, the municipal water systems in those cities failed.
Robie Laine had carefully researched and chosen Bloomfield for relocation, primarily because of its local power generation capacity and agriculture. The communities’ growth in the 1980s and 1990s eventually outstripped the local power production capacity of FEUS. However, by removing daytime service to some industrial customers and begging the local community to take extreme conservation measures—by asking customers to refrain from using electric heaters and to not use electric kitchen ranges during daylight hours—the utility was able to meet local needs. The local public relations ad campaign emphasized: “Save power, so we’ll have water, and save water, so we’ll have power.” That message was heeded by most customers and power consumption dropped by 20 percent.
The other reason that Robie Laine had picked the Bloomfield area was that the region was served by a num
ber of irrigation ditches that ran year-round. These were entirely gravity-fed as diversions from the San Juan River, far upstream to the east. The ditches north of the river were administered by the Bloomfield Irrigation District (BID) and ditches south of the river by the Hammond Ditch Association. The maze of ditches included the Porter Ditch, Citizen’s Ditch, Jacquez Ditch, and the Pumpa De La Sequia. Thanks to fairly reliable rains that kept the Navajo Dam full, and seasonal releases from the dam, the irrigation ditches never went dry.
Throughout the United States, EPA water quality standards instituted in the 1980s and 1990s forced even cities with gravity-fed water systems to install electric pumps for water filtration. Older gravity filters were replaced with new filters that met the 0.3 nephelometer turbidity unit (NTU) standard filters. In most cases, this meant that new filters that were pressurized with electric pumps had to be installed. When the grids went down, many city water utility engineers were reluctant to bypass the pressurized water filtration systems for fear of being fined by the EPA. So people who otherwise would have gravity-fed drinking water available were no better off than those who lived where electrically pumped water from aquifers was the norm. This needlessly turned millions of additional people into refugees.
The San Juan Generating Station, on Navajo tribal land fifteen miles west of Farmington, near the town of Fruitland, was a coal-fired plant with four operating units that together could produce 2,000 megawatts of power, making it one of the biggest coal-fired generating stations in North America. After the western grid failed, the plant’s managers took the plant offline. For the grid to function, nearly all of its production units had to be online: it was essentially an “all or nothing” grid, and the catastrophic grid failure of the Crunch was something that had never been fully anticipated.
In normal operation, the San Juan Generating Station consumed 15,000 tons of coal per day. The plant was the first of several western “mine-mouth” co-located power plants that drew from contiguous deposits of sub-bituminous coal. Much of the coal came directly to the plant by way of a 2,800-yard-long conveyor belt system.
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