End of the World Times

FRESH KILLS, NY – My body is done with pumping the air supply for today. They have granted me a reprieve from my shifts, as it has helped them to dig their way closer to the trapped miners faster. There are some locals who are also coming in to help, but they are supporting topside, not in the mine itself.

The head of the follow the main tunnel faction is named Adam Powell. He opened up to me in a brief moment between shifts. I’ve had my eyes on him as a leader of the site, and I don’t think I’ve seen him down and not working for more than an hour at a time for anything including sleep. I don’t know how he’s coping with the stress, it can only be the task at hand that is keeping him straight.

he has assured me he believes the men trapped are alive, he says he has heard their voices coming along the ductwork, but adds they can’t make out what is being said due to the effect of the reverb coming up the ducts.

I found out a bit more about their operation. They all work on this as a communal effort. They sell or trade what they dig up for food and the usual life support needs with locals who are attempting to rebuild some of the technology that made late 20th century life so comfortable. There are a number of factories near here that are being retooled, and some big people are looking for raw materials, working microchips, anything they can get their hands on. They need copper and aluminum for wires. The copper is for local wiring and the aluminum gets used for high tensile lines.

High tensile! these guys aren’t messing around. They want to get the power plants running again. and supplying power to the area. They want to be back to the 20th century in the next year.

Copper can be found in near pure form in the ground, but this environment is very corrosive, and much of what they find has the usual green patina. Aluminum was convenient last century, but is not found in nature pure. Adam was a metallurgist and is one of the founders of this project, the one who realized that mining the trash would be easier than mining nature. I had no idea about some of this. The cap of the Washington Monument was the largest piece of pure aluminum in the world at the time. He has a mind on the future.

Problem is, you need electricity to refine aluminum, so if you want the pure stuff at this point, you need to find it where you can.

His idea of reaching the miners is to do extra reinforcement on the way in, pull them out and then take off the top from here on out. The landfill proved to be less stable than he’d thought it would be, and this experience is destroying him. He estimated the distance to the miners as about 500 ft down, maybe 1,000 linear feet. The problem is, shoring up the loose garbage is slow, and the materials to do it are scarce. Sometimes they pull something out of the tunnel, and it goes right back in to hold up the ceiling or the walls. They took me about twenty feet into the tunnel, but won’t let me go further in. it is a maze of irregular cross braces. I can’t imagine working further deep in. The air is toxic, the danger of tripping is high.

I’m going to find an opportunity with the leader of the drill straight down faction. It isn’t like they hold press conferences.

I finally got this damn thing working. My name is Lt. Commander AJ Green. We performed an emergency landing in the Dominican Republic twelve weeks ago in response to a distress call that sounded like a medical outbreak. I was very wrong.

We were flying in an HC-144A from Clearwater, FL to the old Coast Guard Station in Borinquen, Puerto Rico. This was during the brief period of time when the governments were still trying to gain control over the situation. Vaccines were being shipped to combat a virus that was mutating out of control, supplies were being shipped away like candy. We were to transport aid, vaccines, and supplies that were needed to continue the treatment of influenza victims in the Caribbean for the next month.

Lt. Jack Solomon and I were assigned two additional crewmen to manage the handling of  medical personnel and supplies.

Ensigns Amanda Briggs and Robert Calloway joined us in the cockpit after strapping in the fourteen relief personnel into the cargo hold with the hummer, the vaccines, all of the electrical equipment that needed replacing on base, and enough emergency rations for a small village to live happily for a few months.

About 30 minutes from our destination, we heard a very unique call for help. Someone on one of the islands we were passing had locked himself in the control room of a military outpost in Haiti. He was screaming (in broken English throughout broken static). The strangest thing I recall hearing was that his father was trying to kill him. Somewhere in there he mentioned his father’s funeral being several weeks ago.

We radioed back and decided that this could have been some new strain of disease in the outbreak that the doctors needed to attend to before it got out of control. We changed course and decided we were going to try to land at the old Cibao Airport in Santiago.

We landed at what was the start of the first of at least three hurricanes that plowed over the airbase. We taxied into the only roofed service hangar and did the only thing we could do in a hurricane. We waited.

A week went by of solid storms. We did our best to keep the hangar doors closed at all times, but mostly we stayed in the plane. The occasional bashing on the outside of the hangar was easier to ignore in the cockpit. The hangar had a bathroom, and the eighteen of us waited out the storms. Apparently the rest of the island wasn’t so lucky.

When we emerged from the hangar, piles of debris were everywhere. Over the course of the next two weeks, half of the island came down with some strange strain of the disease. One of the doctors on board tried to explain it to me, but all I got from the conversation was that it wasn’t swine flu, and it was blown here from another island thanks to the hurricane. Mosquitoes, maybe?

Five of our medical personnel died that week from it. Another eight (including Lt. Soloman and Ensign Calloway) were on death’s doorstep for about a week before a few of them died. Calloway, Jack, and another one of the doctors eventually pulled through, but the other five didn’t make it.  Ensign Briggs and I, with the help of Dr. Gerald Samuel (the only other person in good health), buried the dead outside the airport limits behind the hangar. We really wanted to get out of there, but Calloway and Jack weren’t exactly making a speedy recovery and the doctor didn’t want them to be moved at all. During his copious amounts of free time, Samuel was able to determine that all of the victims had mosquito bites. Very peculiar.

I took one of the luggage go-carts out of the hangar with Amanda, and we drove through the airport looking for a fuel pump or a tanker truck. I didn’t know where we were going next, but I sure as hell wanted a full tank of gas when we left.

That’s when I first saw them. Coming in from the other side of the airport, a small mob of about a dozen locals was shuffling their way towards us. Briggs wanted to speak with them, but I couldn’t help but feel like something was off about them. There was nothing wrong with how they looked, aside from being locals. It’s just that they didn’t move like they were supposed to. It seemed…inhuman…the way they swayed and staggered about while they approached us. It was almost as if they’d forgotten how to walk. I saw a tanker truck and decided we’d make for that instead. Briggs and I ditched the cart and hopped into the truck. There was some debris in the passenger seat (someone left their windows open), but we took off across the tarmac anyways.

We ran into another problem outside the hangar. Those doctors we buried the week before…they were limping around the corner to greet us. Covered in mud, staggering the same way our pursuers were giving chase they were all converging in on us at the hangar.

That was probably not the best time for Robert to come out to investigate the strange knocking noises he was hearing on the hangar walls.  They were on him and dragged him behind the hangar before we had a chance to do anything. I couldn’t see what they were doing to Robert, but no one came out from behind the hangar for quite some time. We capitalized on this window of opportunity to open up the hangar, get the tanker in, and lock it back up before any of them had a chance to come back.

We started fueling and were trying to figure out a destination to get the hell out of there. Briggs suggested Puerto Rico, our original destination. Samuel suggested warning Haiti that there was some sort of epidemic on the island and to close the border. I really should stop listening to doctors.

We managed to get out of there without a scratch.  Apparently they aren’t too bright….didn’t think to use the door in the back of the hangar…they just kept banging on the walls until they saw we were leaving.

As I was setting the plane up for departure, that’s when I saw the rest of them. A giant mob of hundreds…possibly even a thousand or more…feebly approaching from the terminal. The odd thing was, as we were leaving the ground, I swear I saw the shape of a man on top of the control tower, beckoning them in our general direction. I had absolutely no idea what was going on at the time.  Now I know I should have shot the bastard where he stood. Or at least knocked him off the tower.

Damn it…the clouds are rolling in, and I have to get this equipment under some cover before it gets rained on.  I’ll explain more when I can, but I don’t have an awful amount of free time while we’re dealing with these border attacks. There always seem to be more of them after a storm…

Semper Paratus.

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Fresh Kills, NY There is little to report. People weren’t talking to me much until I started to pitch in. Mostly I have worked on the breathing apparatus. These are fairly crude devices, like bellows that is about the size of a person. They have ten of these running normally for a crew, about one per person, and there were several mine entrances going at any time. With this situation, all mining operations have been suspended, and the apparatus has been transferred to this site. It was only yesterday that all of them became fully operational in the rescue.

There is an old landfill air system, part of the design, but it isn’t designed to support humans. The ducts are more designed to drive waste gases out. These gases are used as fuel on site as they can, but it isn’t useful as a primary energy source.

The camp is breaking into factions. Some say to clear starting from the mine entrance. Some think they should dig directly down, starting with a narrow air shaft they can lower food down, then widen it to aid in the rescue. The problem is, there is no modern equipment for pinpointing exactly where to dig. It could be a shot in the dark.

Another faction wants to clear the tunnel leading to the trapped miners, but the issue becomes the fear of another collapse.

They say they think they have heard voices coming back up the air tube, and so their hopes of rescuing their trapped brethren remain high despite the long odds of success.

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Fresh Kills, NY – The men continue to pump air into the chamber. There have been several strategies employed in the rescue, but each has met with unforeseen issues. They tried to clear waste from the top, but the time this would consume is too great to hope for any of the men trapped to survive. They have also tried clearing the shaft leading in, but cave-ins continue to happen. After the garbage hit the landfill, the plastic bags tended to rupture, making the piles essentially fluid. It’s like quicksand, the more you move out, the more falls in. Tunneling underneath the surface leads to collapses, and so they are going to try to drill a shaft down. The machinery they have might have been capable of this were a mine, but its weight makes it unsteady on the landfill base. They also have limited diesel fuel to run it. I was thinking about calling Blankenship Towers for a donation, but I guess that bridge is burned. Can anybody supply a recipe for biodiesel? It would seem like we’d have enough raw materials to cook some up. I’d do anything to help if it could get me away from the smell.

There doesn’t seem to be any one person in charge, but several leaders are emerging from the men here. The situation looks more and more dire, but the men and their families refuse to give up hope.

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I’m nearing Fresh Kills, NY, and I can smell it. The pollution and run-off from the rivers in the area make the sea a septic mess. Add to that the garbage mine’s stench and I may never smell again. Soren, I’ll get you back for this assignment if I have to build a boat to get across the ocean to do it.

The strange thing about an event like this is I can just walk up to it. There’s no media circus, no press area like there would have been ten years ago. I just walked into camp and started talking. Thing is, I can only talk to the people who are on break. It took me four hours to find somebody in charge who would take a moment to speak with me. Facts are these: there’s nine men trapped. They suspect that the collapse is down the tunnel from where they were, so they suspect there is enough air to last for a while down there. The toxicity of the environment however means they have to act fast, or the air they have will be unbreathable.

They spent nearly a day discussing strategies, about 36 hours ago. It needs to be said, I guess that there aren’t any professional miners in the area, and the material is not like mining into bedrock. They were making up safety guidelines as they went. The garbage is certainly not stable, and collapses are not uncommon here. The difference this time is that the collapse is deeper. This particular tunnel was a new experiment to go under the newer trash to get at material that is older, pre-recycling, richer in the materials they wanted.

I should give you a little lay of the land. Any tunnel must be constantly pumped. They have made air canals leading from the entrances of the shafts using pipes and metal of whatever they came up with from the landfill. These pumps were manned by hand to create a constant flow of waste gas out and air in. This is something of the trapped men’s saving grace. They are well reinforced, and the air is being constantly cycled, even more aggressively than when in normal operating mode.

The safety regs they had were never written down, but were an ad hoc combination of experience and guesswork. As they dug tunnels, they would reinforce as best they could. This is what led to this situation. They severely underestimated the weight of the trash above the tunnel. I have yet to get names, other than nicknames, but I will continue reporting from here as I collect the pieces of the puzzle.

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I met a man named Nex Anhelo today.  His name means “death breather,” but the way he carries himself suggests to me that he is not the man his name implies.  It seems that here, in the swamplands of Fleshtown, a name makes the man; who you are perceived to be centers on your name.  Ithius, apparently, is a strong name here, but Nex tells me it will only get me so far.  I’ll have to earn passage into the inner portions of the city, to the banished spaces, and even to the darker portions of the Santa Cruz Mountains.  I’m still learning what that will take.

I’m not alone here, thankfully.  It would be suicide to be here alone.  I’ve had to call up a few favors through my father’s old business.  You could say I have an entourage, but these people only have my safety in mind.  There are two:  Erin and Bruce.  The latter has been here before.  He told me the other day that he fled the area after the big quake in January, the one that split the mountains right through where Highway 17 wound its way from San Jose to Santa Cruz.  You’d have to see the split to believe it.  It cannot compete with the Grand Canyon, but it has a demonic look to it:  gnarled brambles, spiked rock, and ash run-offs from the fires.  Fires still rage out in the deep mountains–old brush and overdue forests torn down by the heat, poor weather, and lightning storms.  Those are parts of the mountains where most people never go; it’s too dangerous.  If Mother Nature doesn’t get you, the mountain folk will.  I’d rather Mother Nature took my life, if I were to die out here.

In any case, Nex tells me that there have been rumors of the mountain folk moving downhill into what is left of the city.  I haven’t seen them, but Nex knew they had been about when a few farmers stumbled into Mission Quarter yesterday in rough shape.  The farmers had been raided by an enormous party of cannibals–at least fifty men and women, but probably more.  What was once a farming community of a hundred people had been reduced to a dozen or so people.  The rest?  Nex didn’t ask.  But you can guess where most of them have ended up.

I’ll end this with a word of advice given to me by Nex’s son, Vita:  ”When the trees shift and you hear unfamiliar voices in the dark; run.  An unfamiliar voice is a demon in the night.”  Poetic, sure, but out here and in these times, it couldn’t be any more true.  Santa Cruz is no place to be when the sun sets.

Just got the call. On the move towards Staten Island. I’m to get there as soon as possible.

There’s been a major story reported to me. The garbage mine at Fresh Kills New York has had a collapse. A team of miners is trapped in the mine, and is presumed alive. As you all know, with the lack of fuel and resources to use traditional mining equipment, those looking to make new raw materials to rebuild critical infrastructure have turned to landfills. The waste that we created in the 20th century is is quickly becoming a precious resource due to its abundance, ease of collection and status as an already refined material. It is dangerous and toxic work, those that undertake it must work in conditions worse than miners from the gold rush era of 19th century North America.

Lori Kim will be heading there to cover rescue efforts. Let’s all pray for their souls.

Filed June 11th 2012

Graduation day. It isn’t what it used to be. Remember when you’d have a big thing in an auditorium that had no air conditioning? The bleachers would be pulled out and our parents would sit sweating in their finest clothes. Now we stand in a line and wait for a downloaded digital copy of the credentials, paper copies may be bought, but most of us can’t afford it. Not like I dreamed it would be. My parents aren’t alive anymore to see it. This is supposed to be one of those days, one of those all time most important days in your life, but for me, it’s a formality, a period at the end of the last sentence in a book, probably the most trivial event of my college experience.

Of course, the journalism degree course of study isn’t what it used to be either. Three years of survival training, and a little English. I can build a fire in a monsoon, find my way out of the deepest jungles or forests, survive a blizzard alone, and get out of a hard scuffle, but the actual journalism part of the degree was handled in a few classes in one term. I suppose I’ll get the rest of the education on the job. I’m one of the lucky ones. I have a job lined up. It isn’t a job like my parents had, I’m not paid, per se, I’m supported and backed by somebody I’ve never met, but who went to the Profs for a recommendation. I made sure he would pay for the paper diploma before I accepted.

After the ceremony, I went to get my things from my room. A pack had been left for me, as expected. I don’t know who dropped it off, the Resident Advisor, maybe? Inside was my communicator, basically a satellite phone with data capability, a computer in decent shape, some cash of several currencies (not as much as promised. Whoever delivered it had lined his pockets a bit) and some bargaining chips. I powered up the computer and communicator, just to see that they in fact were working, then put them back.

This and a couple other packs of my personal things were all I had as I went out in the world. I loaded them into the sidecar on my Puc and headed off. I’d like to say that I was chosen based on my winning personality or my grades, but no. Mostly it was the bike. Having transport in this job is important, and the rest of my class was setting out on foot.

Once out of the university’s grounds, I powered up the communicator again, and sent a message to retrieve my assignment. Boston. I could handle Boston, a few days of traveling, I hoped, but I had a stop to make that was only a little out of the way. I hoped the editor wouldn’t mind a little personal business. Is the GPS system still up? Does my communicator have a GPS?

I started out on 95. It’s decent still near the city, and you don’t have to worry about traffic, but once you get out of town you run into issues. You have to pick your way around potholes, then sections where the road is nearly gone. A lot of places, I only got 5 mph. When I left the highway, going got even harder.

When I made Lake Galliard, the moon was full and the sky clear, and I couldn’t have felt more miserable. The house was mostly packed up, and would stay that way as far as I could see. I didn’t want to stay there now. The memory of having a family was too close. I wanted to know the house was still standing, drop something off, and come back, I don’t know. Years from now. When it’s better.

When you grow up by the lake, Yale is a religion. My family wanted me to get into the school more than anyone ever, but we were nouveau riche. We didn’t fit in. We didn’t belong. My father designed computer chips, high end architecture stuff, made enough money to give to the school heavily. I had the grades, and I was accepted, but the early stages of the catastrophes were already underway. Both my parents died in my first year.

They were buried in a Catholic Cemetery about a mile from the house. I walked there by moonlight with my diploma, a tin, and a small folding shovel. I buried it with them. They wanted it more than me.

I couldn’t deal with sleeping in that house. It didn’t feel like mine. I made a bonfire in the backyard, and slept under the stars.

150 miles in an undisclosed direction from Blankenship’s patrols. Bastard won’t follow me here. Camping in the middle of what was probably a state park. Took a deer. field dressed it, and cooked a prime cut, hung some more out to smoke. We’ll see if it’s ready before I have to move out for the next assignment. Took the rest of the carcass a good distance from the site. Smell should attract away any bears that might be lurking in the area.

It was a bad turn to have my first assignment work out this way. Is journalistic integrity worth my life? Especially in this world?