CHAPTER 43
Dave looked at the clock. It was almost 2 a.m. He needed to get down to the condenser and open the hatch on the ridiculously slim chance that these guys Prichard told him about were able to make it through. But what about his wife? Whoever had been sending him instructions hadn’t contacted him again, and he hadn’t heard anything from Prichard saying his wife and kids were okay. He was starting to believe it didn’t matter. His cards had been dealt, and the only thing to do now was to play them out. He had to trust that Prichard, and whoever was working with him, would be able to help his family. All Dave could do was to help the men trying to get into his power plant.
The unit supervisor stuck his head in Dave’s office. “The 1–1 circ water pump is shut down, we opened the vacuum breaker and drained the tunnel, the screens are shut down — as ordered,” Bob said. “The power control guys are not happy campers about this.”
“Thanks, Bob. I’m going to take a tour. You’re in charge,” Dave said, moving to the door and ignoring the crack about power control. Without waiting for a reply, Dave hurried out of the control room and onto the turbine deck. The condenser water box was down on the 85-foot level. He’d normally ride the elevator down, but this time he walked quickly across the turbine building and literally ran down three flights of stairs. He figured it would be quicker that way and he didn’t want to spend any of what he assumed was little time left, waiting for an elevator. Time was a precious commodity now.
It was quiet at that time of night, meaning there were no employees other than his operators and an occasional security officer roaming the plant. That was good, because Dave wasn’t sure how he would explain what the hell he was doing trying to get into the water box.
It was 0200 straight up. On his way down, he realized that he’d need a tool to get the hatch open. So instead of going straight to the hatch, he hurried into an electrical switchgear room, whose door was at the bottom of the stairs he had just come down. Inside, there were rows of huge mechanical circuit breakers, each one four feet wide by ten feet high. The breakers provided power to the various huge motors inside the plant. Off to one side of this room was an equipment shop.
Dave ran over to this shop and flung open the door. Come-alongs and various tools were meticulously hung on the walls. His eyes quickly scan the room, looking for a wrench or other tool he could use as leverage to open the hatch. He couldn’t locate any tools that might have helped him, but he did find a length of pipe about eighteen inches long and two inches in diameter. It would have to do. He was out of time. He ran out of the switchgear room with the pipe in hand, and over to the condenser water box.
The entire water box was painted green on the outside, meaning it was a system that had seawater in it. Pipes painted blue had pure water in them, yellow had hydrogen gas, red had firewater, and so on. This helped operators and maintenance workers more easily identify the various lines that ran throughout the power plant. However, Dave knew the plant well and didn’t need the color-coding to help him find things. Certainly not the main condenser, which was bigger than his house. The condenser reached from the bottom of the turbines on the 140-foot elevation all the way down here to the 85-foot elevation and stretched from one end of the turbine building to the other. It was a huge structure, as were most things in this power plant.
It took Dave no more than ten seconds to get to the north half of the condenser, which was the one that the 1–1 circulating water pump fed, and located the water box hatches. Each hatch had ‘dogs’ on it, which resembled huge wing nuts that clamped the hatch in place. He was almost frantic now, either from the fear of being discovered by the security staff or his own operators, or from concern for the guys who were supposed to be on the other side of this hatch.
He slipped the open end of the pipe over one of the dogs and tried to turn it counterclockwise. It didn’t budge. He knew they were put on tightly so the hatches wouldn’t leak, but he had to get it open. He tried it again, and put his back into it this time. It started to move! He stopped to collect his breath, and then attacked it again. This time it moved more. He felt immediate relief. Once started, he was able to loosen it all the way. He then did this for the other three bolts dogging the hatch in place.
Normally, this wouldn’t be done without a work order and a tag, ensuring the pump was off and everything was ready for the water box to be opened. And there’d be a chemistry technician waiting to take a sample of the air inside, to make sure it was breathable. That was ‘normal’. This wasn’t. He was past the notion of doing this by the book.
The last fastener un-dogged, he opened the hatch and shined a light inside. To his astonishment, two men were standing at the bottom of the ladder in wet suits, breathing through regulators, and carrying a bag of equipment. One man looked weak and wobbly. The other man seemed to be helping him up the ladder. He couldn’t believe it. Just thirty minutes earlier, this water box had been full of water with a circulator running. It wasn’t possible for two guys to be standing where they were!
As the guys got close to the top of the ladder, Dave reached in as far as he could to help them, careful not to stick his head inside the water box, knowing that it was probably an oxygen-deficient atmosphere. He’d heard of men who had quickly succumbed to it and fallen in and died. He grabbed hold of the first man and with considerable effort, pulled him up and out of the water box. The man was clearly weak. Dave struggled to get him onto the grating near the hatch and laid him down. He pulled the man’s facemask off and the regulator out of his mouth. By the looks of it, he was an older man, ashen-faced. The man immediately started to gasp for air, which turned into violent, racking coughs. But he was breathing, which was a good thing, and the color slowly returned to his face. That was something, anyway.
Dave turned and looked back at the hatch as the other man climbed out and onto the grating. He, too, removed his mask and regulator and started to gulp in clean air. Dave recognized him as Nick, the man he’d met in Prichard’s office after the drill the other day. Dave looked at him in wonder; unable to conceal his unbridled respect for these two guys who somehow did what was supposedly impossible.
CHAPTER 44
I was still breathing hard and thankful to be out of that water box. I held out my hand to Dave, who took it tentatively and shook it.
“Good to see you again, Dave. Thanks for getting us out of there!” I said.
“How in sweet Jesus did you do that? That just isn’t possible!”
“I guess it is, because we’re here,” I said as I collected our gear and closed the hatch again. “There’s no time for explanations. We need to get out of sight before Security finds us.”
I reached down, grabbed the Old Man under his arms, and helped him to his feet.
“Hey, you okay, Old Man?” I asked with a smile on my face.
Breathing better now, the Old Man stabilized himself on his feet. “I don’t ever want to do that again!” he said. “I need to catch my breath, and I have a helluva headache, but I’m okay.”
I looked around at the massive components on this floor of the power plant while the Old Man rested for a moment. Despite still being a bit wobbly, he appeared to be okay and started looking around to get his bearings. He spotted the switchgear room, not knowing that’s where Dave had gotten his tool, pointed to it, and says, “Lets go in there and get out of sight.”
I was impressed with the Old Man’s stamina, as well as his ability to make decisions under the current conditions. We were two minutes away from being dead just moments ago. Now he was leading us to a safe haven that he’d picked out.