Page 8 of South of Nowhere (Colter Shaw #5)

8.

Dorion and the six employees of Shaw Incident Services, LLC, regularly engaged in studying natural disasters to better understand the behavior of fire, oil, wind, rain, snow, metal fatigue, electricity, toxic waste and myriad other substances and devices—all of which posed an infinite and, sometimes, insidiously clever threat to human beings.

She felt that they were like the criminal perps her brother sometimes pursued: individuals with motivations that some might see as evil but was hardly that at all (murderers, after all, are the heroes of their own stories).

Water was one of these creatures too.

As she looked over the fragile town of Hinowah, California, she was thinking of the Boxing Day 2004 earthquake and tsunami, whose epicenter was in Indonesia, and the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Those terrible disasters left huge death tolls: nearly 250K dead in the first, and 20K in the second, with the vast majority dead from the water, not the collapsing buildings from the earthquakes.

Floods are particularly tricky. While the water set in motion by an earthquake can travel at five hundred miles per hour under the surface in a deep ocean, it is barely noticeable on top; those on ships sense only a slight swell. When it reaches shore in shallow water, the speed slows to twenty to thirty miles an hour, still far faster than a person can run, and like a car in low gear, the force behind it has the power to destroy buildings meant to withstand hurricanes.

In Hinowah, the wall of water would not reach the hundred-and-twenty-five-foot waves in Tohoku, but it would have a similar speed and the same force.

You could not ride out a flood of this sort. Escape was the only sure method to save lives.

Dorion recalled the story of ten-year-old Tilly Smith, visiting Thailand with her parents from the UK in 2004. The girl noticed the sudden recession of the resort beach water, and she announced to her parents that a tsunami was coming. She had learned in school how the phenomenon often sucks water from a beach before the deadly waves slam into the land. Tilly simply would not be ignored and talked her parents into warning the resort. They closed the beach and got everyone off—minutes before a tsunami did indeed hit. It was one of the few beaches in Thailand where no deaths occurred during that storm. She was credited for saving more than a hundred lives.

Dorion was amused to think that here, today, she herself would have to be as persistent as a ten-year-old girl.

She, Tolifson and Debi Starr stood at the command post, looking down at the evacuation effort.

The mayor sighed. “The minute the storm hit, I heard the Never Summer was rising. I should’ve closed the damn highway.”

“Don’t beat yourself up,” she said, her tone soft. “The volume of the snowpack melt surprised everybody. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence. I know this part of the country. And you’ve never had to deal with anything like this. You just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, Mayor.” She smiled.

His face flushed, and she guessed he was regretting his first impression of her.

Which was not unwarranted. She could be a real bitch when it came to saving lives.

Just then two black SUVs with U.S. government plates appeared on the south side of the levee. They pulled onto the shoulder. Two men in olive-drab military uniforms got out, each a driver of his respective vehicle. They walked to the end of the asphalt and surveyed the scene. Pointing, conversing, nodding.

Dorion’s phone hummed. A number she didn’t recognize.

“Hello?”

“Dorion Shaw?”

“Yes. Who’s this?”

“Sergeant Tamara Olsen, Army Corps of Engineers. I got this number from Police Chief Tolifson.”

“I’m looking at you now. From the hillside across the valley.”

A pause. “The tents. Got it.”

She saw a trim woman also in an OD uniform climb out of the passenger seat of the first SUV and walk around to the front of the vehicle and gaze at the levee. She said a few words to the two men, then returned to the call. “My corporals say the integrity of the levee’s good for now. I’ll drive over.”

Olsen returned to her vehicle and the Ford Expedition drove down the south hillside, crossed the bridge over the spillway and made its way through town. Then it wound up the switchback road to the city park that was the command post.

She climbed out. The woman with standout red hair had intense, focused green eyes and a firm handshake as she greeted Dorion first, then Tolifson. A brief nod at Debi Starr.

In a firm, low voice, she said, “I’m not promising anything, but we’ve got a battle plan. And I think we’re going to save your town.”