by Wayne23 » Sun Nov 28, 2021 12:49 pm
1/27: I woke up to alarms clanging in the middle of the night. We gathered up the baby and listened:
"If you are in a safe area remain where you are. If you were sleeping, dress and prepare to move to safety. People on decks 14-20 please put on underwater gear and use the stairways to go up to decks 1-7. People on decks 8-13 be prepared to move to the stairways quickly."
Lacy, June, and I live on deck 8. I made sure Lacy and June were safe, and were ready to travel, then I quickly went to the bridge. As a member of the Council I need to know what's going on and need to help to coordinate whatever needs to be done.
I'll tell it as I remember it from here on:
There was an explosion in the biggest water storage compartment on the ship. The explosion blew out a wall that connected to a walkway and water came cascading out.
Thousands of gallons flooded the bottom decks of the ship. Doorways are close to water tight but not completely so. The lives of everyone living and working on decks 14-20 were in jeopardy, as was all equipment down there.
Fortunately, only a limited number of people live on the lower decks, none of them children, and every living and working area has underwater gear in case of emergency.
People who live and work down there are trained in how to get into the gear quickly and how to swim to a safe area once they are wearing the gear.
Still, 7 people lost their lives. It's hard to say why- panic, equipment failure, difficulty in navigating their way to "higher ground..."
Initial investigation, and there were crews in scuba gear down to the explosion site within minutes, indicates a human cause.
Once all survivors were safe and all doorways were sealed off the Captain and the Council held a brief emergency meeting. Here's what the Captain said:
"It is clear we have a maniac or a conspiracy on our hands. We will need to, well first we'll need to get rid of all the damned water, then we'll need to fix the hole, then we'll need to check for damage in every compartment on decks 12-20- the water doesn't seem like it will get higher than deck 12. But before any of that I am ordering 12 hour shifts for all security personnel, and I'm calling up all reserve security personnel and putting them on twelve hour shifts; that probably means 12 hour shifts for all personnel to pick up the slack from the reserves being called up. The very survival of the ship and all hands is at stake here. We're going to have conversations with everyone from the Captain on down, including all members of the security force. All security personnel are trained in interrogation techniques-"
"Captain, surely you're not-"
"Jeff, let me finish. This isn't going to be an inquisition. We're not going to use torture, intimidation, threats, coercion, or anything like that. We ARE going to thoroughly and extensively and repeatedly question every single person over the age of 7 on this ship. Somebody knows something. Somebody has seen, maybe heard something. It may not have registered at the time, but our interrogations will bring it back to memory. We need leads. Jed Clark found discrepancies in some statistics, and that led to us finding destructive programs hidden deeply in lots of computer programs and files. Somebody, singular or plural, is up to something that endangers us, endangers our very lives, as well as the ship itself. We intend to deal with this and to solve it."
There were a few protests, on human rights grounds, but there were only two dissenting votes when it came time to decide.