>>> [BBS THREAD: What's Up With The River] [THREAD STARTED BY: /Lower_Lower] 2075-04-26

/Lower_Lower

Twenty-two years hauling freight on the lower levels, and I have never driven a truck into a lake before. Saturday, 0430, water to the axle at the Michigan ramp and chest-high at the bottom of the bend. I turned around. Half my regular stops were on the wrong side of it.

The pumps lost power early Saturday. The backup was, and I'm quoting a city guy, "in the queue." What the water took away, it also gave back. Every lower-level drain in the Loop spat up sixty years of stuff. Hundreds of the old blue bike-share bikes, still locked to each other. A vending machine, upright, undamaged, still stocked. One tuba...

Also the people who live down there. Thirty-odd. Let's not pretend they don't.

/Ledger

Corrections. Rain began Thursday the 18th. The pump house lost power at 0210 on Saturday the 20th. The lowest level peaked at roughly two meters around 0930 Sunday and was fully drained Wednesday the 24th.

Precedent: the 1992 freight tunnel breach filled a good part of the Loop from underneath. Basements were pumped for weeks. The city called it an unforeseeable event. It was foreseeable, and it was the piling. I mention this so no one says "unprecedented" in a comment.

/RubyRose

I WENT IN WITH WADERS AND A GRUDGE. rode a bike out of there. it had a basket. i named it Gerald

/Ledger

You stole a municipal asset.

/RubyRose

IT WAS IN A RIVER

/Abuela_Diesel

Now the part nobody wants to hear. Those thirty-odd people have a name for themselves, the Lower Lower Tenants' Association, and a woman called Odalys who runs it. They have a mailbox, a duty rota, and a rule about no open flames. Saturday morning they moved everything to the middle level in wheelbarrows. Sunday the city sent a notice offering "temporary relocation" to a shelter with a ninety-day cap and a waitlist.

Also, and I say this as a woman who rents out drones, I sent two down Monday to look over the flooded stretch. Both lost signal in the same forty meters, on the same heading. I've lost drones to water, to gulls, and once to a boy with a slingshot. Never two in the same place on the same afternoon.

/Cubicle_9

Just asking questions. My building's records annex is two levels down and takes in water from the same drain. Facilities has sent a memo about "moisture-affected documents." Apparently every quarterly report from 2071 on is now a brick. They say the contents are "recoverable in principle."

/Ledger

Nothing is recoverable in principle. It is either recoverable, or it is not recoverable.

/Small_Talk

The city has been dumping things down there for a century. The river returned them unopened.

/Ghost_Lake

Two questions, both about the pumps.

One: who decides which stretch gets pumped first? It's a list somebody wrote, and every list is a map of who matters. @Lower_Lower, when the water went down, which bottom-level blocks were dry before the alcoves were?

Two: Odalys's people saw something before the water dropped. I'm not going to say what, because it isn't mine to say. But I'd ask why the first crew on scene wasn't the city's.

/Lower_Lower

The blocks with garage entrances for the office towers were dry Sunday night. The alcoves were last, and the water there was the dirtiest.

/Ledger

That fits the standard triage logic. It's also insulting.

/Abuela_Diesel

Odalys told me herself, so you can quit poking at Lower_Lower. A door on the bottom level, an old fire door stamped ELECTRICAL, popped open Saturday when the water pressed on it. Behind it is a room no map shows. In the room there's a rack of gear on a raised platform, and the platform stayed dry. The lights were on. Green, steady, the kind of steady you only get from something with a battery and a reason. It was humming when the water was up to the door.

Nobody touched it, because nobody in that building is stupid. Odalys posted a watch on the door. Then Tuesday at three in the morning, a tanker convoy arrived with no markings and a crew wearing hard hats without logos.

/Lower_Lower

I was there for the last of it. Three trucks, one pump line, no city inspector. They put a tarp up in front of the door before they even started. A woman in a very clean parka signed something on a tablet.

Whoever they were, they moved the rack Wednesday and left the door.

Thursday morning, Odalys's mailbox had an envelope in it. It's an invoice for the pumping, addressed to "Occupant."

/Ledger

That's a legal notice, technically. Someone is asserting an obligation.

/RubyRose

WE ARE BEING BILLED FOR THEIR RIVER??

/Ledger

For your section of it, yes.