They were the last to head away from facility. As soon as McGarvey came around the corner, Gail didn’t need to be warned, she knew what had happened. She got on the radio and began notifying Haggerty, who was on site, along with all the other emergency responders what was about to happen, and to get away — and far away — as quickly as possible.
She, Townsend, Strasser, Bennet, and a number of other station personnel were already climbing aboard the Air National Guard chopper when McGarvey reached them.
“Both reactors?” Gail asked.
“Just number two,” McGarvey said, not too gently hustling her aboard.
Gruen and Vigliaturo came across the parking lot in a dead run, and Gail exchanged a glance with McGarvey.
“No one else?”
“That’s it.”
“You say they were unsuccessful to stop the explosions on one?” Strasser shouted over the roar of the chopper’s engines and the heavy thump of its main rotor.
“That’s right, but I think only one of the panels was destroyed,” McGarvey told him, and Townsend looked mad enough to kill someone.
Police and fire units started to pull away from the station, some heading south, but most heading north on A1A by the time Gruen and his team member reached the chopper and climbed aboard. They’d left their antinuclear device equipment behind.
A St. Lucie County EMS tech was in the back of the chopper with Bennet, cradling the electrician’s head, and he looked up. “I’ve called an ophthalmic specialist at Miami General. He’s standing by. We need to get this man down there as soon as possible.”
McGarvey waited a full minute to make sure that no one else was coming, and he turned to the pilot and pumped his fist, and motioned out to sea. The helicopter lifted off, made a sharp dipping turn to the left, and headed directly east away from the power plant.
“Have a Dade County medevac chopper head north up the coast. When we can set down we’ll radio our position,” McGarvey shouted.
Gruen started to object but McGarvey just glared at him, and he sat back. He was still deeply shaken by the death of one of his team members, which was obvious from his expression, and yet it was equally obvious that he was working out a way in which he could somehow either blame the situation on someone — almost certainly McGarvey — and/or turn it to his advantage.
“We need to go now—” the medic insisted, but Strasser overrode him.
“It’s starting,” he said. He was looking out the window on the opposite side from the still open hatch.
Townsend was crouched next to him. “Mother of God,” he said. But the angle was wrong. The helicopter had already crossed A1A and was out over the water, the facility almost directly behind them.
McGarvey had to shout twice to get the pilot’s attention and he motioned for him to turn the helicopter broadside to the coast, while still heading away. The helicopter banked a little to port, then slewed left, almost skidding, the coast sliding into view from the open hatch and then the facility dominated by the twin containment domes.
Gail was right there with McGarvey at the hatch, and Townsend, Strasser, and the others crowded around, looking over his shoulder. At first nothing seemed out of the ordinary, except for the traffic. The facility was deserted, and from their altitude of about five hundred feet they could see a long way up and down the coast and across the Intracoastal Waterway on the west side of the island to the mainland and down toward the town of Stuart, civilian cars and a lot of police and emergency responder vehicles streaming away.
Massive traffic jams blocked the bridges off the island, one to the north and two to the south, and it would be hours before they were cleared. Farther inland the turnpike and I-95, which ran parallel within sight of each other, were packed with wall-to-wall traffic both ways. The warning had gone out on radio and television and the public’s remembrance of 9/11 spiked and with it the mindless, absolute terror of nuclear power and they were running. Three Mile Island and Chernobyl — Hiroshima and Nagasaki in some people’s minds — conjured up visions of mushroom clouds hanging over Hutchinson Island.
Then McGarvey and the others saw what Strasser had already seen; a slight shimmer was causing the air over the containment dome for reactor one to waver and rise like summer heat from a black-topped road in the distance; like a halo of death hanging over the domed cap, it came to McGarvey. The bodies of Wager and Marsha and Alan were down there, and it was possible that the South Service Building would become their mausoleum for a very long time.
“There!” Strasser shouted over the noise, and the chopper slowed and stopped, hovering where it was a mile or so offshore.
A dark line seemed to crawl from about halfway up the side of the dome, widening as it accelerated, and steam, white by contrast, began to leak from the crack, a little at first but then more of it, rising up into the cloudless blue Florida sky.
“Is it radioactive?” McGarvey asked, without looking over his shoulder, his eyes glued to the dome, and the plume rising above it.
“Probably not,” Strasser said. “It’s coming from the steam generator, or the loop. As long as the reactor core container doesn’t breach, we’ll be okay.”
“What are the chances of that not happening?”
“Depends on which panel they saved.”
A geyser of water shot from near the bottom of the crack, slamming into the South Service Building like a stream from a fire hose.
“The primary coolant loop just opened,” Strasser said.
“Goddamnit, Chris, what about the emergency diesel?” Townsend demanded. “It should have been pumping water into the core by now.”
“I don’t know,” Strasser admitted. “More sabotage?” The remorse was thick in his voice. It
Gruen pushed forward so he was right on McGarvey’s shoulder. “Christ,” he muttered, but everyone heard him.
A second crack, this one wider and moving faster, branched off from the first, and headed at a wide angle from the top third of the dome, like a broad slice of pie, and the concrete began to take on a rosy glow, hard to see in the bright daylight, but growing.
“The core is overheating now,” Gruen said in awe.
“He’s right,” Strasser said.
“Any possibility of an explosion?” McGarvey asked. “Even remotely?”
“No—” Gruen said, but Strasser cut him off.
“Not a nuclear explosion.”
The massive piece of concrete pie began to glow brighter now, moving up the scale from a rose to a deep red and it began to slump toward the right, in slow motion, opening a big hole in the side of the dome. Suddenly another geyser of water and steam burst straight out of the breach, heaving pieces of concrete and other debris out into the open air, the heavier materials raining out as far as the shore and the lighter stuff roiling upwards.
“We’d better back off,” Gail said.
No one could take their eyes off the terrible sight, and McGarvey remembered the pictures of Chernobyl right after it happened in 1986, but something else began to dawn on him as he watched the steam plume rise over the dome — the wind had shifted from the west. The radioactive release was heading out to sea. They had caught a break.
“It’s coming this way,” Gruen said.
And Townsend and the others saw what was happening. “Thank God,” the plant manager said.
“Don’t you think we should get the hell out of here?” Gruen asked.
The side of the containment dome slumped even farther, but the damage seemed to be slowing down.
“The reactor is finally scramming,” Strasser said. “Your people saved that panel. Thank God.”
