by Lou Cadle
She turned again to talk to someone, then back. “We’re on it.” A voice behind her, distant but shrill. She yelled at him, “Be right back,” and then she was gone.
Another face appeared, one of the city clerk’s assistants, and she cautiously started picking shards of glass out of the broken window, using the sleeve of her cardigan as a glove. She stopped for a second, then came back, holding her shoe and began whacking at the remaining glass. Gale stayed well clear as bits of glass rained out.
In a few moments, the woman was replaced by Angela. Her voice was steady as she said, “Evelyn’s office is totaled. I don’t see how she could have made it, unless she’s unconscious under a bunch of debris. I’m sorry, Gale. It’s not safe to try and find her. The floor is tilted out toward the back.”
“Shit.” Poor Evelyn. Her poor twins. He thought of the fire truck he had seen with a twinge of regret. They had their own priorities — the survey, any real emergency that could kill hundreds, like a toxic chemical leak to be sealed, then a more careful check of schools and hospital, power plant and water treatment plant, trying to keep basic services up. Only then they could start pulling debris off people, starting with the schools and police station. If Evelyn were hurt and awaiting rescue, she’d have to keep waiting a little while. Just like everyone else, probably everyone from St. Louis to Nashville, and beyond. Gale and the surviving City Hall staff were on their own. There was no 911 to call, no rescuers to rely on, only yourself and the people standing next to you and whatever tools you could pick out of the debris.
“Gale,” Angela said, grabbing his attention back to the moment. “She was with the mayor. He was in there too. I think they’re gone. It means you’re the acting city manager now.”
And in charge of all Emergency Operations for the city? Oh, shit. But he straightened his shoulders and nodded. “Okay, you have that window clear yet? Let’s get all of you out.” Before the first aftershock, he thought, but did not say.
The tan hose came slithering out. He stabilized its end as the office staff, one by one, climbed down it, or as with a couple, fell off it, luckily without serious injury. The city clerk, a very large woman in her 50’s named Kay, refused to even try. “I’m not the fat lady in the freakin’ circus!” she said. “I’ll wait until someone can get me a ladder. A big, sturdy ladder that I won’t break.”
“Can you check every office, then?” He called up to her. “Collect food, water, candles, battery operated radios, anything that will help us survive. Don’t be shy about going through drawers. See if anyone has one of the emergency radios in their office. And don’t hurt yourself trying, but then figure out if there is any way at all down to the EOC, okay?”
“I can do that,” she called, and disappeared from the window
A few of the workers were moving off toward the parking lot. “Hey!” he yelled at them. “Where are you going?”
“To check on my kids,” said one.
“Oh, right.” This was the problem with emergency staff. They were people, too, and they wanted to know, as he did, if their loved ones were okay. “Look, I know it’s hard, but the instant you know they’re okay, get back here. There’s work to do. If we’ve set up an EOC someplace else, I’ll leave a sign.”
He turned to the others. “Those of you without small children, I’m begging you, hang with me for now. We’ll take off in shifts, to go check our houses and husbands and pets. But we need to get to work now.”
“Doing what?” a male maintenance worker asked, looking around at the destruction all around them. “Sweet Jesus, is there anything to be done?”
“We’re the government. No one is going to come rescue us for days, more than likely. St. Louis and Memphis, maybe Paducah, they’ll get attention first. We’re on our own, and we have to be the ones to make sure services are provided, that food and water are distributed fairly, that medical care is available. We have to contact FEMA somehow. We have to prioritize, and take on big jobs, and get it done somehow, even what seems impossible. Everyone here will have to do important work, crucial work. Some of you will have to recruit and direct volunteers. We’ll all be working crazy long hours, and we’ll all be making tough decisions.” He looked around and held every set of eyes for a few seconds. “I know we can do this. Are you with me?”
Nods all around, a few “Yes, sir”s and Angela half-smiling at him. No one looked mutinous, at least not yet.
Now all he needed to do, to follow up his little motivational speech, was to figure out what the hell they were supposed to do first.
“Anybody have something to write with? I need to make a list, give assignments.”
“Smart phone,” said one woman, holding hers up, and a couple others nodded, pulling out phones and a tablet computer.
“Okay, good. But we’ll be out of power for these eventually,” he said. “And we’ll need to be making signs and duty rosters and so on, too. What we need is to pretend it’s 1960 or so. Markers, poster board, chalk maybe.”
An older woman from finance piped up, “I lived that time. I know what we need.”
“Great. Try and get Kay’s attention. Have her send down all the markers and big paper of any sort she can find for posters. Notebooks and pens and pencils. Strapping tape. Staple gun. He wiggled his fingers, asking for other suggestions.
“Push broom,” said the maintenance guy. “Wrench.”
Oh shit, thought Gale. “Wrenches, first. We need to get natural gas off, everywhere we go.”
The older woman, Jeannine, Gale thought her name was, went over to the building to try and get Kay’s attention.
“Oh god, gas. My house,” said one woman, sounding on the verge of panic.
“I know,” said Gale. “Just stick with us a bit longer. Either someone there will turn it off, or a neighbor will do it for all the others on the block, or the utilities guys will be out turning it off street by street.”
She looked mutinous for a second, about ready to turn and run away, but then her shoulders sagged. “My husband should get it.”
“Right. Try sending texts to home, all of you. Tell them you’re okay and to turn off the water main, the gas, preserve the water in the hot water tank by shutting its feed off — that may be all you have to drink for a while. If the texts don’t go through, turn the phone off and try again in an hour. Conserve your phone batteries.” His own house would have to burn or stand, whatever fate decided, though he felt a twinge at the thought of losing so many beloved things, photos and keepsakes, antiques, clothes. He hoped at least the garage had made it and that the trash can full of survival gear wasn’t crushed. Two people could live for ten days off that, with another week using what he had just bought.
He glanced around at footwear. Two-thirds of the women had running shoes on or sensible flat shoes. The other third were in heels. “You need better shoes,” he said, stabbing his fingers at the impractical ones. He made a mental note to make a rule to ban high heels henceforth at any workplace as part of the emergency operations plan. Screw fashion.
The maintenance guy pulled a multi-tool off his belt. “I can just yank them heels off, if you want.”
“These are Blahniks,” cried one woman, backing away from the maintenance guy.
“I have my sneakers up in my desk,” said another.
“Add it to Kay’s list of things to toss down,” he said, and that woman and another went over to speak to Jeanine as she paced the front of the building, still trying to catch Kay’s attention.
The maintenance man studied his multi-tool. “I’ll see if I can manage to get gas off here with this somehow.”
“Great, thanks. Someone, take some notes on your phones for now, please. I have to get this straight in my own mind. Priorities. Police, fire, ambulance, coordinate with them. Map of navigable roads, probably from fire department, updated with their survey. Tow truck to move abandoned cars. Water and food for us, here in the EOC. Location for EOC. Radios. Sanitation. Health care. Morgue.” He saw shocked face
s at that word, but he plowed on. “Generators. Camp stoves or someplace to boil water. Water purification tablets. Cots, sleeping bags for EOC. Big tents for temporary shelter for us.”
The woman with the pricey shoes said, “Thank you Jesus that it’s not cold.”
He nodded. “For October, we’re lucky. Anyone remember the forecast?”
Angela said, “Rain, I think, tomorrow night. And a cold front.”
Damn. He forced a smile. “At least it’s not January.”
“Or August,” said Angela.
The dead bodies, he thought, in a hot Mississippi Valley August — yes, that’d be bad. But he didn’t mention the thought. “Okay, I know you’re all anxious to check your houses, so what we need to do is get a list together and send half of you on a mission for supplies, and we’ll pick something to find near your house. But you need to swear to me to come back. No matter what.” He didn’t want to say it aloud — even if your whole family is dead. “You come back here. We need you.”
“We can’t stand in the middle of the road and direct operations,” said the shoe woman.
“No. But we need to stay outside. We can’t go inside any building. There will be aftershocks.”
“Aftershocks? Bad ones?”
He looked at a sea of worried faces. “Some could be as strong as the first one. There could be dozens of them, and a lot of buildings that didn’t come down the first time will come down the next time or the next.” He glanced at the building. “We have to get Kay out of there as soon as possible.”
“Let’s just go back in the park” said a woman. She pointed to the green space behind City Hall.
He’d have to get all these names straight eventually — he hadn’t needed to know everyone in City Hall until now. A few seconds alone with Angela, and he’d grill her on that. “Good. But we won’t be easily findable by the public, hidden back there.”
Angela said, “That might not be a bad thing.
Kay appeared a the front window and started tossing down trash bags. “Unbreakable stuff,” she called. She hauled the fire hose up. The older finance woman started shouting up their new list of items to her.
“Map!” he called over. “And I need letterhead and some official seal, a stamp or embosser or something that we can prove we are who we say we are.”
“To who?” asked the woman who had expressed her worry about the gas at her house.
“Shop owners, whoever. If you’re going to demand camp stoves or a generator or bottled water without cash money, you need some authority.”
She nodded, thinking it through. “Yeah, I guess credit cards aren’t going to work today.”
“We may need to — “ He hesitated, looking for a delicate way to put it, but realized being blunt would be better. “Not declare martial law, but be insistent. I mean, point out we need the goods and tell them to keep track and bill the city government later. And we need to get on it now, before dark.” After that, it’d be too late, he thought. What stores there were would be emptied out by tomorrow.
“It won’t be that bad,” protested the shoe woman.
“It might be very bad indeed. Is the bridge still up? Add it to the list, would you? Bridge, airport, rails, highway. Without any of those, nothing will get to us, no rescue, no supplies. The food and bottled water, juice, colas, what’s in town may have to last everyone in town for days.” He thought that body bags would be as important as food. Mass graves or mass funeral pyres would not be out of the question, but he wouldn’t bring that up yet. These people hadn’t yet seen the destruction across the city, the completeness of it, but they would soon enough. Some of the bodies to be disposed of would be people beloved by his EOC staff — Bash could even be among them. No, don’t think of that. Get the work done. Take each hour’s tasks as they came. Each moment’s tasks.
“Anything else on the list?” asked a woman with her smart phone in her palm.
“Sewage,” he said. “We’ll probably have to dig pit toilets before long, or recruit people to do that.”
“One pit won’t do it,” said Jeannine, back in the group now. “Not for forty thousand people.”
He wondered how many of the sandy bottoms had intact houses with septic fields. Subtract the dead, and he thought he still needed to think about sewage issues for as many as 20,000.
A young woman said, “You know what we need? Something like block leaders. People who can, neighborhood by neighborhood, organize sanitation and child care and first aid. Someone should try and put that together. Use neighborhood watch leaders if they exist, if not go around and knock on doors and give people a list of things to do. Maybe there are ham radios or walkie-talkies to keep in contact with them.”
“Medications,” said the older woman. “My husband’s a diabetic. Insulin needs to be kept cool.”
Angela said, “And managed. If there’s any at the pharmacies, you can’t let a few people grab it all.”
“We need the police,” Gale said. “And I want to meet with the fire chief, too. Most of them seemed okay over at the station when I drove past. And everybody keep track of any ham radio people you run across.”
Kay appeared at the window. “Letterhead and an embosser from the clerk’s office,” she called, waving another plastic bag and dropping it out the window.
“We need some sort of uniform,” said the shoe woman. “I mean, matching jackets or something to identify us. It’ll automatically say we have authority, too, like the letter.”
“We need to get you all hardhats and work boots, hiking boots, something sturdy,” said Gale. “And that’s first thing, before you go walking through debris.”
The maintenance man came back. “Fire chief got the gas off for the whole block. He wants to meet with you.”
“Can you please run back and tell him ten minutes?”
Gale took the ten minutes to dash off two letters declaring the holder of the letter to be an official representative of the city government, with emergency powers. He tried to find wording that demanded cooperation of the reader in a way that would be least likely to incite refusal or resentment but that conveyed it had to be done. People were going to have to get used to, very quickly, a different world for a few weeks, to losing some freedom in order to keep the most people alive, to taking orders without having a long democratic discussion first. They’d be cooperative for a couple days, he had learned, in emergency management courses, and then they’d start to balk as stresses overwhelmed the urge to do communal good. He needed them to act like soldiers, but they’d act like frightened people.
“Reservists, National Guardsmen,” he said, as soon as the thought crossed his mind. “Add it to the list. If you know anyone who is one, have them report to the park, in uniform if they can get to theirs. We’ll need them, too.” He was sure they’d be called up officially, but until those orders got through to them, the city could put them to good use. He’d talk to the police and fire chiefs about splitting them up and assigning them out. He didn’t envy the police their jobs these next few weeks.
When he had two letters written, he handed one to Jeannine and one to Angela and asked them to make thirty copies each, signing his name. Then he asked for volunteers who did not have a family to check back home, and he got only two hands, a sturdy middle-aged woman who said she had cats she wanted to check on eventually but that could wait until last, and a girl barely out of her teens, who said her boyfriend was a truck driver and on the road out west. He set them to mapping where his staff lived and what sorts of stores were close by to them. He had someone else send Kay to toss out a phone book. He wanted to find a party supply place that might have big tents. Someone from Parks said there was at least one out at each of the two biggest parks, stored, for rentals. He had the rest of them except the two without families count off one-two, one-two, and said the twos would be going out first. When they got back, he’d let everyone else go home and check on things. Tomorrow, in shifts, he’d give them some time to clean up whatever messes th
ey had at home. He’d take a short shift at that himself, but he knew for the next twelve hours, he wouldn’t be leaving the city center.
Everybody had pads of paper by then, and pens, and they were taking notes on what supplies to find, addresses to stores to check, getting shoe sizes from the rest of the high-heeled women, and doing darned well, he thought, considering how worried they must all be about loved ones. “We’ll set up back there,” he said, pointing to the green space and picking out three people randomly. “You three get that started. The rest of us, do not put yourself at risk, but see if you can find any other survivors in City Hall. Walk around the edges and listen for voices. Look, listen, but no more than that. That building is a menace. And if you see something useful in the edges of the debris, pick it up” He wanted Evelyn to be found, and found alive, but he wasn’t counting on it. “Try to develop a list of who is missing in this building. Don’t forget to list the mayor. I’ll be back in fifteen or twenty minutes.”
He was ten yards down the street when he had another thought. “Power company,” he called. “Put that on the list, too.” He had to talk with someone there and see what was going with power, or what kind of emergency power they might be able to supply to part of the town, or at least to the EOC.
He was halfway to the firehouse when he had another thought — jails. First, who was in them, who would care for them, were they dangerous enough people to need to keep locked up? And second, as people started looting, which he imagined would be starting very soon and escalating as normally decent people got more desperate, enough cells to hold the looters. He honestly didn’t give a damn if that type got fed or not, but they’d have to see to it anyway.
There was so much to do. And ninety minutes of daylight left to get too much of it done. He turned back one last time, but they were out of hearing range now. “Flashlights,” he said to himself. “Everybody needs the biggest flashlight you can find, and plenty of batteries.”
