Deluge (The Best Thrillers Book 2) by James Best (top romance novels txt) 📗

his actions in relationship to his responsibilities. He had to think more broadly. What else should he be doing to fulfill his obligations to the county? Through his series of phone calls, he had tried to alleviate problems dealing with law enforcement, housing, food, water, and medical attention. What had he forgotten? The thought of medical services reminded him of another threat—disease. Could continual wetness bring strange new diseases to the county? He had no idea. He called the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to learn that his biggest concern should be pestilence thriving in pools of stagnant water. The CDC suggested that he allocate street cleaners, excavators, bulldozers, backhoes, and other equipment to improve drainage of water. He called Deputy Chief Chuck Damon and told him to instruct officers to report standing water to the city’s Public Works Department. Then he called the city manager and alerted him to the CDC guidance and the possibility of incoming police calls about stagnant water. His third action was to issue a county-wide email alert recommending similar action.

Then he came up dry. He got up and left his office to get a cup of coffee from a break room. He sipped coffee while looking out the window at the rain. Damon came in, poured his coffee, and stood beside him.

“Damn shame,” he said.

“Evarts looked over at him. “What? The rain?”

“You haven’t been watching the news?”

“No, I’ve been on the phone.”

“The Mulholland Dam ruptured, and over two billion gallons of water spilled out of the Hollywood Reservoir. Evidently, the Hollywood Bowl and Walk of Fame are under water. Even Hollywood High School is flooded. Mud slides are playing havoc all over Southern California. Rich people’s homes are slip-sliding into their neighbors’ yards.”

“People?” Evarts asked.

Damon’s expression conveyed embarrassment. “Yeah, dozens dead … that’s an early estimate.”

“Damn, will this ever end?” Evarts said.

“The Mulholland Dam was a twin to the Saint Francis Dam. That one failed in 1928.”

“Every dam is filled to the brim,” Evarts said. “Seven have failed … so far. I don’t think we can blame an engineer who died nearly one hundred years ago. After fifty months of drought, the state didn’t work on a single reservoir, even though many projects had been designed and planned.”

“Who can we blame?”

“Politicians,” Evarts said automatically. “They always harp about infrastructure, but they really mean new toys, rather than keeping old stuff working properly.”

He was annoyed with himself, because he usually tried to avoid political remarks at work. He didn’t want subordinates echoing his opinions back to him because they thought that was what he wanted to hear. Without saying anything further, he returned to his office and flipped on his office television. Evarts seldom received his news from television. He preferred headline news services, so he could web-research stories he wanted to know more about. He found network and cable newscasts so obsessed with being first that they repeated the opening narrative until they moved on to a different story, and seldom came back to the original story after the facts surrounding an event became known. In normal circumstances, he didn’t care that he might be caught unawares about breaking issues, but he needed to remain current about this crisis, so he intended to keep the TV on mute. If he occasionally read the chyron, he wouldn’t be blindsided by yet another catastrophe.

Before he could hit mute, he heard something that froze him as he pointed the remote at the set. A furious Hollywood studio head ranted about the Mulholland Dam failure.

“This is a clear dereliction of duty. You wait, those nitwits in Sacramento will call this an act of God or claim they had never been alerted to the fact that Mulholland posed risks to the people beneath it. I’m calling BS. I chair the Save My Town Association, and we’ve lobbied for years to fortify that dam. Nobody up there listened. It wasn’t that they weren’t told, they didn’t listen. Now look what we got. Some of the greatest icons of our industry destroyed. I’m angry … and so are my friends. Our homes are sliding down hills in Beverly Glen. In Malibu, they’re falling right into the ocean. All this rain makes the brush grow; when it dries into fuel, wildfires will devour anything left standing. The state’s response is ludicrous. Our entertainment community supports our politicians, but they ignore us when we need their help. They take us for granted. They shouldn’t. Listen, this industry can pack up and move … we very well may. Hell, the biggest portion of our nonstudio filming is already done out of state. We can move, I’ll tell ya, we can move.”

When the newscast returned to talking heads, Evarts pushed the mute button.

So, the movie business might move. Did he care? He wasn’t sure. He knew Hollywood had been moving out of the state for decades. Heavy manufacturing had done the same. How important was it nowadays? Television, commercials, and movies added tens of billions to the state economy, but he seemed to remember reading that it now ranked behind technology, agriculture, tourism, research, and even, by some measures, aerospace. Just as these thoughts went through his head, he spotted a chyron reporting that the entertainment industry represented sixty billion in a two-and-a-half-trillion-dollar economy. Evarts did the math: between two and three percent of the state economy. The next chyron said that tourism ranked far above entertainment, but Evarts wondered how much of that tourism could be attributed to the glamour of Hollywood. With agriculture under water, losing the entertainment industry would throw kerosene on the fire. Another thought struck him. This storm, or series of storms, would hit tourism hard. Who wanted to visit a soggy paradise? He had no expertise in economics, so he pushed that line of thought from his head. He needed to focus on his own responsibilities.

Despite severe flood damage in the county, his city had so far weathered the storms without serious injury, and city services remained intact.