stacks and big gas storage vessels, all embedded in a web of walkways and pipelines. One big line strode overhead across the brook itself.
Gary asked, “Where are we? What is that?”
“Canvey Island,” Thandie called.“And to the west of the creek, that’s Coryton. Petrochemical installations.”
The terminals were serviced from the river. One immense supertanker huddled against a jetty, with the compact shapes of tugs nearby. Brightly lit, a carpet of sodium light, this landscape looked as if it went on for kilometers, and Gary could see it had some protection from the water in the shape of a stout concrete sea wall that had to be meters high. But the land wasn’t entirely given over to industry. There were estates of houses down there, clusters of brick red like scrubby flowers huddling in the rain, some of them only a half-kilometer, less, from the industrial plant.
And there was clearly an evacuation underway. Gary saw cars streaming out of the housing estates, crowding the roads that fed into the big arterial routes to the north. It was so dark now, though it wasn’t yet four in the afternoon, that most of the cars had their lights on. The traffic, however, was all but motionless, and helicopters, bright yellow search-and-rescue machines, prowled along the riverbank. Gary saw all this in glimpses through sheeting rain, from a chopper that bucked and rolled in the wind. He heard Thandie talking to some kind of air traffic control.
And now there was a spark of lightning, a crackle of thunder.
“The storm front’s only a couple kilometers thataway,” Thandie called, pointing east. “Sanj, how’s the data? You got GPS?”
“I got that,” said Sanjay, staring at his screen. “Climate sensors nominal, though that wind gauge is going to rip clean off at this rate. And the pressure’s dropping. Nine seventy. Nine sixty-five… The radar’s working, the sonar not so well, you’d expect that. It would help if this tub wasn’t bucking like a fairground ride.”
“Doing what I can, brainbox.”
Gary had had no idea that all this industry was out here. “It’s like a city in itself. And kind of vulnerable, isn’t it?”
“When it comes to fuel London’s a big and thirsty monster, Gary. But they’re prepared for floods, they drill for them.” She snapped a switch, and the radio cut into a feed from a refinery crew going through shutdown procedures, working through checklists of pumps, furnaces, compressors, valves, catalytic crackers.
“Leaving it late,” Gary said.“The storm’s been tracked since Scotland.”
“A flood warning itself is an expensive event,” Thandie said. “With more than a million people living on the Thames flood plain, you don’t raise the alarm unless you have to. The river traffic is a problem too. The Barrier seems to be raised more often than it’s lowered nowadays. And shutting down those refineries is no joke, you don’t just throw a switch. It costs to abandon the processes they put their materials through. False alarms are unpopular. People are terrified of liability, legal claims.”
“And in this case,” Sanjay said, “the error bars around the storm’s probable track and effects were just too wide to be sure. I told you, our modeling is breaking down. What’s worse is that the interfaces between different models aren’t working so well either.. ”
Gary understood the principle. Mathematical models of the weather were generally based on dividing up land, air and sea into discrete elements and tracing the progress of variables like pressure, temperature and wind speed through from one element to the next. You might run a coarse model for the whole of the North Sea, and as a storm passed the Wash or the Thames estuary you would feed predicted conditions from the ocean model to finer-grained models to see what happened in there. But if all the models were suffering because of some underlying change in the physical condition in the planet’s weather systems, it would be at the edges and interfaces that errors would particularly multiply.
Sanjay said, “The last great London flood was back in 1953. That event led to the construction of the Barrier, eventually. Much of Canvey is below sea level; people died here. But that flood was a convergence of high tide with a big storm surge.”
The low-pressure air at the heart of a storm could lift the level of the sea below it, physically sucking it up into a hump that could be hundreds of kilometers across. And then the winds could drive the high water against the coast or into a river estuary. That was a storm surge.
“So is this a surge? Are we hitting a high tide?”
Sanjay said,“The storm is driving waves ahead of itself, but I wouldn’t call it a significant surge. And as for the tide, the predictions now are all over the place.”
Gary said, “So this event doesn’t have those key features that characterized the 1953 event. And yet we’re getting a flood even so.”
“Looks like it,” Sanjay said.“It’s not even a particularly severe storm.” He sounded unhappy, as if the real world were a bit of grit in the oyster-shell of his science.
And Thandie called, “Oh shit. Here it comes.” The chopper dipped and bucked as she hauled them back out over the river for a better view.
Gary, peering through a rain-streaked window, saw the wave coming, water raised and driven by the North Sea storm and bottled up in the narrowing, shallowing estuary. As it advanced it spilled almost casually over flood barriers and walls, and on either bank a dark stain spread over the roads and gardens and parks.
Thandie called back, “You getting this, Sanj?”
Sanjay was using a joystick to control the camera slung beneath the chopper’s body. “Pretty good,” he reported.
“We’re feeding the rolling news channels…”
The flood reached the petrochemical refineries and storage tanks. The water spread around the feet of the huge structures, looking as black and viscous as the oil that was processed there. Some lights failed, and a few abandoned cars were quickly submerged. The depth of the water must be increasing rapidly.
And now the flood started to spill over the housing estates. Thandie swooped lower so they could see. The rushing waters poured onto access roads still crowded with cars. Vehicles were overwhelmed, their lights flickering and dying. People scrambled out of their cars through windows and doors, and climbed onto the cars’ roofs, or tried to wade through the rising water. The current shoved the cars themselves, piling them into the fleeing people like logs.
All this Gary saw from above, from the warmth and comfort of his helicopter cabin. There was no human noise, no screams or cries; it was all drowned by the storm’s roar and the thrum of the chopper’s engine. Suddenly this was no longer just a stunt weather event, a puzzle for climate modelers. “Christ,” he said, “there’s a disaster going on down there.”
“The whole damn day is already a disaster,” Thandie said. “Let’s just do our job.”
The chopper roared up into the air and headed west. The flooded estate was reduced to an abstraction, a melange of water and land.
12
Pursuing the storm front up the river toward central London, the chopper flew over Tilbury, ten or twelve kilometers west of Canvey Island. There was a much more massive evacuation project going on from this heavily populated area, with traffic edging out of Tilbury to the north of the Thames and Gravesend to the south. Electricity substations were overwhelmed. The lighting in whole districts started to blank out. In the river itself a container ship had been caught, apparently as it tried to turn, and had pitched over, spilling containers into the water like matchsticks. That alone was a major rescue operation, Gary saw, with helicopters and what looked like lifeboats clustering around the stricken ship.
The chopper flew on.
“We need to understand this,” Thandie murmured. “Understand it, and do something about it.”
“Mean sea levels are up by a meter,” Gary said.
Thandie turned. “Who told you that?”
“It came from an eleven-year-old.”
