No more empty spaces, p.16
No More Empty Spaces, page 16
TWENTY-FOUR
Will yawned and stretched. He reached to his right, forgetting that Paula wasn’t beside him. His second thought, since the first was out of the question, was of coffee. He folded back the flap of tan canvas, crawled out of his tent, and inhaled, still feeling newly appreciative of the freshness of the mountain air, even though they’d been out of the city for months. He craned his neck to take in the view. The rocky slopes to his right ascended to a jagged ridge. To their left, the topography eased, sloping down to the river. They were camped near a small tributary of the Firat, probably spring fed. If he followed the creek bed far enough upstream, he might find where it bubbled out of the ground. He breathed in again, slow and deep. He wasn’t sure he’d really looked around yesterday. He’d been in too much of a rush—to get packed up and out here, then to fish, and then to cook the fresh trout for dinner. He smiled at the irony of being in a rush to slow down.
There was no movement or sound from the other two tents—the one next to his, with Paula and Didi, or the one on the other side of camp, with the boys and Buddy. He’d let the crew sleep a while. They’d stayed up late last night telling ghost stories around the campfire. After dinner, Paula had surprised them with a bag of marshmallows and the first story. Either she possessed an active imagination, or the basement of her granny’s “damp, gray house” was a truly terrifying place. Either way, she won the scariest story prize.
Will crossed the clearing to the folding table that defined the camp’s kitchen. Two ammo boxes, tucked under the table, held the cookware and provisions. He opened the Coleman stove as quietly as he could and set the kettle to heat on a low flame. Then he made his way along the trail out of camp, toward the Firat. They hadn’t explored in this direction yesterday, and he hadn’t seen this particular reach of the river before. He knew this area would all be inundated when the dam was built. He felt a pang, even though it was his mission to make that inundation happen, and he believed in that mission.
When he could just see the deep green of the Firat, he stepped off the trail behind a boulder and contemplated the view of the river while relieving himself. Something upstream caught his eye. Was it a ruin? It looked like a wall, but that didn’t make sense down in the riverbed. Maybe a bridge abutment? There were remnants of ancient river crossings throughout the valley.
He couldn’t leave the kettle any longer, but now he had a plan for the morning. Exploring a ruin would be fun for everyone. Paula loved learning local history and used it in her teaching. Kevin had been working on a dig in the to-be reservoir for a couple of months and had learned a lot about the archaeology of the region. And even though Rob professed not to like history, he did like scrambling around on rocky ruins, even if he only let his excitement show when he didn’t think Will was watching. Little Didi loved adventures of any shape or size. So did Buddy.
He hurried back to camp. Making coffee, he was as noisy as he had been quiet before. He wanted the crew up and going now.
Buddy let out a boof at the lid clattering onto the big pot when Will got oatmeal cooking, finally raising some activity in the tents. As he poured himself a second cup of coffee, he poured a first one for Paula, then reached the cup inside the flap of the girls’ tent and held it steady until he heard a sleeping bag unzip, a rustle of fabric, and felt the cup’s weight lift from his hand.
“My hero,” Paula said.
“Me too,” said Didi.
“I have a surprise for you,” he said. “But you have to get up to get it.”
“Better than coffee in bed?” Paula asked.
“Yup,” he said, giving the tentpole a shake. “Come on.”
Will hustled the crew through breakfast and dishwashing. The morning sun was still at their backs when they turned west from camp onto the trail that paralleled the Firat. Will led, his strides fast and long. He heard the crunch of Paula’s boots and Didi’s quick footfalls behind him. Farther back, Kevin and Rob talked and laughed, probably pushing and shoving each other.
He passed the boulder where he’d spotted the cut stone blocks, eager to see the structure—or what was left of it. About twenty paces farther, he stopped short. What had looked like a wall was the crumbling end of a failed dam. The buckled edge of wall that had made no sense now had context. Beside it lay the rubble of what had been, indeed, a wall—a wall that had held the Firat back, smaller to be sure, but not entirely unlike the one they were building miles downstream at Kayakale.
“Wow,” Paula said.
“What’s that?” Kevin asked, but didn’t wait for the answer.
With Kevin in the lead, the kids and Buddy pushed around Will and Paula, clambering down the slope to the ruin. The sound of happy shouting filled the valley. Then a shrill whistle drowned out the shouts. Will turned to see Paula blowing through her right thumb and forefinger in another piercing blast.
The kids all turned, and Buddy too.
“Be careful,” Paula called. “Stay away from the water. And watch out for Buddy.”
“Another hidden talent,” Will said. “You almost broke my eardrums.”
“It comes in handy. Got their attention, didn’t I?”
“You sure did,” he said over his shoulder as he began to angle down the slope.
He could see the collapsed margin of the dam climbing in stairsteps of blocky risers up to what had been the left abutment. Where it was still complete, the full height of the structure looked to have been about twenty-five feet. It was topped with a wider, more finished layer of capstones, though some of them were missing. Despite the missing blocks, the juncture between the natural and man-made structures, where the dam met the bank, appeared to be intact.
Well ahead of them, the kids climbed up the dam, Buddy jumping and barking below.
“Whoa!” Paula yelled, and they all turned to look at her. “Go slow. And remember, three points of contact.”
A chorus of okays was her answer.
“Good job, Mama Bear.” Will smiled. “But let the cubs have some fun.”
“I hope you won’t be making another flight to Ankara anytime soon,” she said.
“They’re good,” he assured her.
Will walked the contour to the top of the dam, then scrambled over to the upstream side. Observing the portion of the dam that still stood, there were no obvious issues. His eyes panned down what remained of the failed dam. He could see water flowing over the rubble to the point it got too deep near the middle of the river, but there was none on the other side—no remnants of the structure on shore, no debris, nothing.
Then Will shifted his gaze up the opposite slope, and the answer to the dam’s failure fairly screamed at him. He’d broken his own rule by looking too close before looking at the big picture. And when he saw the big picture, it told the story loud and clear.
The slope comprising the right abutment had liquefied as a mudflow at some point in the past, surely causing the catastrophic failure of the dam. The landform looked like thick gravy congealed over lumpy mounds of mashed potatoes. The feeling of fluidity was unmistakable.
Pleased with himself for solving the mystery of the small dam’s destruction, Will’s mood shifted to dread within moments. The unstable slope would be submerged by Kayakale Dam’s reservoir. It was a massive slide complex, the hummocky topography so indicative of movement, and yet it had been missed. Probably not overlooked, but not even looked at.
Those sediments had liquefied, become oversaturated, and flowed downslope. Where the water had come from, Will could only guess—perhaps a series of downpours of cataclysmic proportions; perhaps a winter of heavy snowfall followed by a warm, wet spring; or perhaps all of the above, plus an earthquake on the East Anatolian Fault or one of its ancillary faults. The filling of the small reservoir behind this dam might have exacerbated the situation. And it would have been a mere puddle, compared to the reservoir that Kayakale Dam would impound.
Will stood across the Firat, studying the slope, with the possibilities playing out in his mind. Simply impounding the reservoir might be enough to cause another failure. That was the worst-case scenario. There were numerous others Will could envision, like climatic events or earthquakes. There was reservoir-induced seismicity to think about as well. Kayakale’s reservoir would be more than big enough to need to consider that. To Will, it seemed inevitable that at some point in the future that slope would again fail—perhaps catastrophically.
The words of the father of modern geology, James Hutton, echoed in Will’s head. His first geology professor required the class to memorize them. In 1788 Hutton wrote, in his volume Theory of the Earth, “from what has actually been, we have data for concluding with regard to that which is to happen thereafter.”
“That which is to happen thereafter,” Will said out loud, looking across the river at some of that data.
If Kayakale’s reservoir was filled to design capacity when the slope failed, the consequences could be disastrous—for Kayakale Dam and for the village downstream.
The case of Vajont Dam immediately came to Will’s mind. In 1963, Vajont Dam, an 860-foot-high concrete arch dam in the Italian Alps, was overtopped by an 820-foot wall of water when the side of a mountain failed as a block slide into the reservoir. A third of the volume of the lake poured over the dam and crashed down the valley. Two thousand people perished, and numerous villages and towns were destroyed. Vajont Dam still stood today—a testament to the dam’s engineering, the structure itself hadn’t sustained much damage. But the reservoir was never refilled. The dam remained, a monument to the failure of scientists and engineers to heed Earth’s warnings.
“What’re you looking at?”
Will jumped at the sound of Kevin’s voice. So intent on his observations and the thoughts they had provoked, he hadn’t heard his son approaching.
“Sorry, Dad. What’s up there?”
“Nothing good.”
“I thought maybe you saw more ruins.”
“No, but see that slope . . . the landform tells me it was a mudflow or a large, wet, complex landslide. That’s what made this dam fail.”
“It told you?”
“Come on, Kev, you know what I mean. No, it didn’t literally tell me. But you know when the light’s good for shooting. Right? You just know.”
Kevin nodded.
“It’s like that for me with the landscape.”
They were quiet, standing together for a long moment. Then Will pointed across the river. “That could be really bad for Kayakale.”
“But how?” Kevin asked. “It’s so far away.”
“If the whole slope failed and slid into Kayakale Reservoir when it’s full, think about how much water would be displaced.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Imagine dropping a really big bucket of mud and dirt and rocks into a full bathtub. What would happen?”
“The bathtub would overflow,” Kevin said.
“Right. And that might damage the dam, which could cause the whole reservoir to be released downstream.”
“That would be a huge flood, wouldn’t it?” Kevin’s brow furrowed.
“Yes, huge, for sure. And even if the dam held, but it was overtopped, it would flood Kayakale. Maybe villages farther downstream, too, depending on how big the wave was.”
Kevin whistled under his breath.
“That’s what I was looking at,” Will said. “There are ways to handle it, just like we’re fixing the foundation. Finding out about it now means we can solve the problem before it’s a problem. But it’s no small thing.” He swept his arm in a wide arc for emphasis.
“You’re going to tell them?”
“As soon as we get back.”
* * *
Kevin, Rob, and Didi built the campfire that evening. Dad and Paula were doing the dinner dishes, and talking. But Kevin couldn’t hear what they were saying. He wondered if his father was telling her about that slope. He’d asked Kevin not to say anything, that he didn’t want Rob talking about it with Timur before he could speak with Timur’s father. Dad said he needed to think about how he’d explain the problem when they got back.
Kevin bent low to the ground and blew gently on the flames that were just licking at the twigs Didi had collected and proudly presented to them. Rob followed suit, except for the gentle part, and nearly blew the fire out.
“Easy,” Kevin said.
“Shut up,” Rob said. “I know how to light a fire.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah.” Rob glared at him through the smoke.
“Don’t fight,” Didi said. She sat cross-legged on the ground with Buddy’s head in her lap. “Buddy doesn’t like it.”
“How do you know?” Rob asked. “He can’t talk.”
“He does so, just in different ways than us,” she said.
“That’s stupid,” Rob said.
“Maybe not. I think Buddy talks too, like she said, just in a different way.” At the sound of Kevin’s voice, Buddy thumped his tail.
“See?” Kevin said, reaching over to pat his dog’s rump. “Good boy, Buddy.”
“Have any of you gotten your weekly letter to your mom written yet?” Paula asked, crossing the clearing.
They all shook their heads.
“I didn’t think so. Lucky for you, I brought paper and pencils and books to lean on, so you can do it right here.”
“I don’t have anything to tell her,” Rob said.
“Sure you do. Tell her about camping and fishing and playing on the ruin today.” She continued with a bribe: “We’ll roast marshmallows after you get your letters done.”
“Dear Mommy,” Didi said out loud, drawing the words out for as long as it took her to print the salutation in big block letters.
“Shut up, squirt,” Kevin and Rob said in unison.
TWENTY-FIVE
Will knocked on Borkan’s office door. He didn’t wait for a response before stepping into the room.
Borkan looked up from a pile of papers. “What are you doing here?” he asked. “Shouldn’t you be sleeping? You start night shift tonight.”
“I know, but I needed to talk with you,” Will said. “We went camping this weekend, in the mountains just downstream of Kemaliye, but still in the reservoir area. I saw something that could be a real problem when the reservoir’s impounded.”
“What could be such a problem so far from the dam?”
“There’s a large landslide complex, actually a mudflow, on a slope that’ll be inundated. It caused the failure of what looked to be a small Ottoman-age dam. Maybe saturation of the slope from that reservoir caused it, or possibly rising hydrostatic pressures. Any number of other things could’ve caused the failure of that slope and the dam, like an earthquake on one of the nearby faults, or a big one on the East Anatolian Fault, or a wetter-than-normal rainy season, or a big snowpack followed by a warm, wet spring. But the point is that Kayakale’s reservoir is going to submerge much more of that slope, more saturation, higher hydrostatic pressures, and the possibility of reservoir-induced seismicity too.”
Will paused to catch his breath. He took the two steps up to Borkan’s desk, placed both his hands down on it, and leaned toward his colleague. It was imperative that Borkan understand the gravity of this situation.
“You know about Vajont?” Will asked, leaning farther forward. “We could be looking at another Vajont here.”
“Of course I know of Vajont,” Borkan said. “The dam here is nothing like it.”
“It doesn’t have to be the same type of dam or the same geology to have similar implications. The issue is that a huge amount of material could slide into the reservoir. Whether it’s a block failure like Vajont, or a debris flow or mudflow like what would probably happen on the slope I saw yesterday, doesn’t matter. We’ve got to look at it.”
“Further site investigation is needed, as you like to say.”
“Yes, for sure. Was the reservoir area mapped?”
“I believe so, but that would have been before I came to work here.”
“Can I see the maps? And the report that went with them?” Will said. “I’ve been so focused on the foundation, I never asked before.”
“We’ll have to go into the archives to find them.”
“Erdem, the slope I found might not be the only one that has the potential to be a problem. We have to find out. You and I both know that the site investigation for this dam wasn’t what it should’ve been.”
“True,” Borkan agreed.
“Lives are at stake.”
“My family’s lives. My village. Yes, I want to see this slope.”
“I can fly us out there. It’s good to see these features from the air. That’s how I found the Kris Fault on the right abutment, remember? We can go one day this week. We’ll watch the weather for a good window. I’m on night shift, so I won’t have to miss a shift to do it.”
“Sleep?” Borkan asked.
“I’ll be losing sleep over this anyway. Might as well do something about it.”
“If this is a problem, am I correct that it will not be a problem until the valley is inundated?”
“Yes,” Will said.
“Then we have time.”
“Yes.”
“Good. We will have to think of the best way to get time allocated and funds authorized to investigate. If it is needed. My assistant will begin to search the archives immediately. I will make myself available to fly any time you say.” Then he deadpanned, “At least it is not a flight to hospital.”
Will answered with a wry smile of his own. “Different kind of emergency.”
* * *
Up in Blue, Will and Borkan surveyed not only the unstable slope Will already knew about, but the entire reservoir perimeter, taking three flights in all. After the first, Borkan agreed that they needed to see the entire zone. They found two other areas that presented concerns, though not as dire as the first, at least as far as they could tell from the flyovers.
No report, reconnaissance level or otherwise, on the proposed reservoir could be located. As they had before the presentation on the foundation, they spent hours in deep discussion. Will had never voiced his suspicions about the possibility of more than mere incompetence before, but he did now. It was hard to imagine someone intentionally sabotaging the dam’s construction, intentionally endangering the village of Kayakale. What would you get from doing that?
