Forty signs of rain - Kim Stanley Robinson [133]
“Well I’ll be damned.”
He sat back, thinking it over. Taolini had liked Pierzinski’s proposal; she had rated it “Very Good,” and argued in favor of funding it, persuasively enough that at the time it had given him a little scare. She had seen its potential….
Then Kenzo called up, raving about the storm and the flood, and Frank joined everyone else in the building in watching the TV news and the NOAA website, trying to get a sense of how serious things were. It became clear that things were serious indeed when one channel showed Rock Creek overflowing its banks and running deep down the streets toward Foggy Bottom; then the screen shifted the image to Foggy Bottom, waist-deep everywhere, and then came images from the inundated-to-the-rooftops Southwest district, including the classically pillared War College Building at the confluence of the Potomac and the Anacostia, sticking out of the water like a temple of Atlantis.
The Jefferson Memorial was much the same. Rain-lashed rooftop cameras all over the city transmitted more images of the flood, and Frank stared, fascinated; the city was a lake.
The climate guys on the ninth floor were already posting topographical map projections with the flood peaking at various heights. If the surge got to twenty feet above sea level at the confluence of the Potomac and the Anacostia, which Kenzo thought was a reasonable projection given the tidal bore and all, the new shore along this contour line would run roughly from the Capitol up Pennsylvania Avenue to where it crossed Rock Creek. That meant the Capitol on its hill, and the White House on its lower rise, would probably both be spared; but everything to the south and west of them was underwater already, as the videos confirmed.
Upstream monitoring stations showed that the peak of the flood had not yet arrived.
“Everything has combined!” Kenzo exclaimed over the phone. “It’s all coming together!” His usual curatorial tone had shifted to that of an impresario—the Master of Disaster—or even to an almost parental pride. He was as excited as Frank had ever heard him.
“Could this be from the Atlantic stall?” Frank asked.
“Oh no, very doubtful. This is separate I think, a collisionary storm. Although the stall might bring more storms like this. Windier and colder. This is what that will be like!”
“Jesus…Can you tell me what’s going on on the Virginia side?” There would be no way to cross the Potomac until the storm was over. “Are people working anywhere around here?”
“They’re sandbagging down at Arlington Cemetery,” Kenzo said. “There’s video on channel 44. It’s got a call out for volunteers.”
“Really!”
Frank was off. He took the stairs to the basement, to be sure he didn’t get caught in an elevator, and drove his car up onto the street. It was awash in places, but only to a depth of a few inches. Possibly this would soon get worse; runoff wouldn’t work when the river was flowing back up the drainpipes. But for now he was okay to get to the river.
As he turned right and stopped for the light, he saw the Starbucks people out on the sidewalk, passing out bags of food and cups of coffee to the cars in front of him. Frank opened his window as one of them approached, and the employee passed in a bag of pastries, then handed him a paper cup of coffee.
“Thanks!” Frank shouted. “You guys should take over emergency services!”
“We already did. You go and get yourself out of here.” She waved him on.
Frank drove east toward the river, laughing as he downed the pastry. Like everyone else still on the road, he plowed through the water at about five miles an hour. Fire trucks passed through at a faster clip, leaving big wakes.
As he crossed one intersection Frank spotted a trio of men ducking behind a building, carrying something. Could there be looters? Would anyone really do it? How sad to think that there were people so stuck in always defect mode that they couldn’t get out of it, even when a chance came for everything to change. What a waste of an opportunity!