Blown for Good - Marc Morgan Headley [75]
The base got its electricity from Southern California Edison. When the temperatures got into the triple digits, it was guaranteed that the base would max out the feed coming in from Edison to the property and whenever that happened, the power would shut down completely.
There was some sort of safety mechanism installed that would blow the power out. It was like a giant circuit breaker for the entire property.
We had been told earlier in the day that on Sunday it was supposed to be over 110 degrees. The power was sure to go out.
Whenever the power went out, anybody who had anything to do with the power drill, would jump up from whatever they were doing, spread out all over the property and turn off everything in their assigned building. That way, when the power was ready to come back on, we would not have such a huge load on the overall base power feed and the people assigned to each building could turn some things back on in each place and keep the power lines from overloading. All in all, this involved about sixty people.
With a Scientology event coming up in a few weeks, there were several areas of the base that were going to be up all night. One of these was Special Effects. They did all of the special video effects for all event videos. Flying through space, fancy graphics, fire, smoke, flyovers, you name it, they did it. There were about five people in Special Effects that did the work of about twenty-five. When it got close to an event, these staff could be counted on to be in their offices all day and all night.
A kid by the name of Power Coleman was one of two people in Special Effects who could crank out shots. Power was a mix between a surfer dude and a computer geek. He was very talented and smart when it came to computers, but had the apparent intellect of a waterlogged tree branch and although he never did drugs, you could swear he was high on something. He had an awkward glee about him that made you like him, but not take him seriously.
Power was sitting at his computer when he got a call from his girlfriend, Elsa. Elsa wanted to “talk to him”, which most likely meant that she wanted to break up with him. If you are not married in the Sea Organization, you cannot have any sort of sexual relations with anyone, and if you do you will be assigned to the Rehabilitation Project Force when it is found out about. If Elsa broke up with Power, there was a good chance he would not be getting laid for years. Elsa and Power had loosely planned to get married in the next few months. So while Power was concerned about what the outcome of the meeting would be, if he wanted to salvage his relationship with her, it was a must. As he was going to be up all night, it would have to be in the morning when he went home to take a shower. Power lived at the Kirby Apartments in Hemet and Elsa lived about two miles away at the Vista apartments in San Jacinto. He decided he would walk over to Vista from Kirby in the morning after he got home. They would meet at Vista at 10:00 a.m.
Even though it was still very hot outside, the night went by quickly and Power managed to get on the 8:30 a.m. bus to the Kirby apartments where he lived. He hadn’t slept a wink all night and was really tired. He walked into his room where a few of his roommates were cleaning. It was Sunday morning, so most people were supposed to be cleaning from 8:30 a.m. to 11:45 a.m. even though most people slept in or did their laundry for the week. Power was going to take a shower and head over to meet Elsa. By the time he had taken a shower it was already 9:30 a.m. He had to hurry if he was going to make it to Vista by 10:00 a.m. It would take at least 30 minutes if he walked fast or even ran some of the way.
He made his way out of the Kirby apartments toward Menlo Street. He was starving. The last food he had was at midnight the night before. He stopped