No more empty spaces, p.25
No More Empty Spaces, page 25
Will could draw some parallels to a pumped storage project he had worked on a few years back, but there, leakage from the reservoir had increased gradually. Over a period of years, not hours, as had just occurred at Kayakale. The differences in the structures were more notable than their similarities—at the pumped storage facility, the reservoir was completely clay-lined, and as the finer-grained clays had flushed out of the liner into the coarser-grained sediments the liner had been constructed upon, the liner had cracked. No definitive answer came to mind for Kayakale, but contemplating all the possible failure mechanisms bore consideration.
The reservoir reaching a record-high elevation almost certainly factored in, as it was one of the few changed conditions. Had the fluctuations in pool level—first the rapid drawdown, then the even more rapid increase—resulted in a pulsing or pumping action that had loosened the sediment plug Will was picturing?
The “drain” that the “stopper” had been extracted from was presumably indicated by where the vortices were located. Nearly a thousand feet upstream, it was not undermining the dam itself, suggesting that the structure was not in jeopardy, at least for now. Will fervently hoped that was the case.
Curtailing the leakage that had spiked so precipitously could be difficult, but that was, essentially, an efficiency matter. Important, but not perilous. The crux of the problem was this: the leakage was moving through an undefined pathway, or pathways, in the subsurface. You can’t control something you haven’t defined. And control had to be regained. Along those lines, Will wondered how the emergency drawdown was going. Lowering the reservoir was imperative, for safety first, but also to provide access to the areas they needed to investigate.
Deep in those thoughts, Will was surprised by the thud of the landing, the skidding of rubber on the runway.
“Turkey,” he said to himself. “Made it.”
FORTY
“What’s that?” Will said, more a voiced thought than a real inquiry, as there was little doubt the small building just inside the entry gate to Kayakale Dam was a mosque. It was plain to see in the clear moonlit night.
“A mosque,” Refik said.
The tenor of his brief response sounded flat to Will, but it had been a long day and concerns about the work ahead weighed on them. It was possible he was reading something into Refik’s tone that wasn’t there.
“Well, yes,” Will said. “Since when are there mosques on government sites?”
“For a few years now. Things are shifting. Didn’t you see how many more women wore hijab when we were in the airport?”
“I didn’t, no. But I don’t tend to notice what people wear.”
“Seems as much political as spiritual to me,” Refik said.
“Maybe we’ll talk about those shifts sometime. Things are shifting in the US too.”
“I read an article in the New York Times that said some states are trying to put ‘creation science’ into their school curricula,” Refik said. “Is that one of those things?”
“You get the New York Times?” Will asked.
“It’s been online for two years. I subscribed right away.”
“That’s practical. Paula and I get the Times too, but still in paper. And yes, that would be. Looks to me more like controlling people than uplifting them—their clothes, their bodies. . . .” Will paused. “And their minds.”
“It’s human nature to control things. Engineers are all about control,” Refik said. “Maybe our judgments about it just depend on what it’s applied to.”
“Maybe so. But in the States, there’s that small matter of the separation of church and state, which is supposed to be one of our central tenets.” But Will realized he was too tired to engage in an intellectual exploration of the issue, or anything else, after so many hours of travel.
Refik pulled up and parked in front of the house the Rosses had lived in. The headlights glinted off the front windows.
“They got the old place ready for you,” he said.
Will stared through the windshield. Lots of good times there, and one horrible, if hazy, scene crossed his mind. He shook his head to dispel the image.
Instead, he reflected on his introduction to Refik. “I just said I don’t notice clothes, but remember our first day working together?”
“Botları! Botları! You sure were wound up about hiking boots.” Refik laughed.
“I was. You’d have slid right off the trail in those shiny shoes of yours.” He thought back and chuckled. “But you ended up with good solid field sense, and we ended up a darn good team. And did I ever thank you for teaching me most of the Turkish I know?”
“Must be why your grammar’s so shaky. You did the same for me with English. And connections for grad school. And I still think of how you look at things when I’m approaching a problem, and try to teach that to our young engineers.”
“You know, Refik, I think that’s the best compliment I’ve ever been given. Teşekkür ederim.” Thank you.
“Birşey değil.” You’re welcome.
They sat in silence a few more moments, perhaps with their respective recollections, or simply too weary to talk.
“Remember dragging in from night shifts?” Will asked.
“I do much better sleeping at night and working by day. But I am looking forward to working with you again, even if we end up doing marathon days. We’ve got to get this figured out.”
“Yes,” Will said, nodding. “Yes, we do.”
“Erdem’s office. Oh seven hundred. The coffee will be ready.”
“Good.” Will clapped Refik on the shoulder and climbed out. “See you at seven sharp.”
* * *
Will sent for a geophysicist and a karst hydrogeologist to join the project team. They, along with those assembled by DSI, were able to puzzle out the subsurface conditions that had caused Kayakale Reservoir to start emptying like a bathtub whose plug had been pulled as the spring of 1998 blazed into a hot, dry summer—fine weather for all the work in the field.
The three weeks Will had packed for turned into three months. One week in, it was clear Will would miss the Pacific Northwest vacation he and Paula had planned. Paula would go without him, and she sent her sailing résumé to the charter company, so she could take over as the captain. She invited her best friend to be first mate on the adventure. Will felt a twinge of envy at that, but he was immersed in his work, and when the time came, he barely noticed the date when Paula and Judi cast off from Anacortes.
Two weeks into the project, also after talking it over with Paula, Will pulled a metaphorical plug of his own, giving notice at the university. He would get his last grad student through the program, but passed along a number of names to the department chair as possible replacements, both consultants looking to leave corporate life as Will had and postdocs who had planned for careers in academia. Will hoped they would fill his position with another engineering geologist, even if they went with a temporary appointment. That was how Will had found his way onto NAU’s faculty. If you were good, and lucky, it could turn into a full-time gig.
Will loved the phrase “you can’t stop the wind, but you can adjust your sails,” and that was how he viewed career decisions. The wind had shifted, and he’d left corporate consulting behind when DECCO was auctioned off in pieces to the highest bidders. There were two reasons the course change to the halls of academia had seemed right. First, he loved his profession and wanted to foster its next generation through teaching. Second, he thought he’d be able to pursue the science that sparked his particular interest, rather than the research clients needed done. But he’d found the continual scrambling for funding took more time than the research itself. Not to mention, he’d thought he would like the slower pace afforded by academic life, the time to delve into a subject, but the truth was he missed the sense of urgency provided by tackling problems that had to be solved.
If the causes of the vortices in the reservoir were not discovered, the dam could fail. If the seismic history of a site was not understood, a much-needed power plant would not receive its permits. If the tectonic framework and site-specific geology of a proposed particle physics research facility were not fully characterized, the structure would not be sited, much less built. And those were just three examples from Will’s career in consulting.
Thinking harder and faster was motivating. And faster mattered these days; at sixty-three, Will no longer had all the time in the world. He got clear about what he really wanted to do professionally with the time he did have, starting with solving the problems now facing Kayakale Dam.
What the team found was a wide and deep honeycomb of karst features in the subsurface below the reservoir. It was similar to those that had plagued the foundation work during construction but not directly connected to them. If there’d been a connection, they’d have found this network back in the seventies. Still, Will questioned himself about whether they should have, but he recalled how hard they’d pushed to get the time and money to do the work they had done where the potential hazards were unmistakable. There was no way a detailed study of the wider reservoir area, especially one as extensive as Kayakale Dam’s, would have been authorized if an imminent risk was not evident.
And that risk had been blanketed by sediments. Young in geologic age but old enough to obscure any surface expression, they covered the entrance to what turned out to be a cave larger than the Moby and Babe cavities in the foundation area combined. Under those surface deposits, clay had sealed the cave’s entrance—until the reservoir level exceeded its elevation, a first since impoundment, and eroded that seal away, resulting in the larger, more turbulent vortex. Fractures, also with infilled sediments, intersected the roof of the cave, and the smaller vortices occurred through those joints when the clay had been flushed out.
With the sediment plugs in place and the lake level below the potential conduits, the massive void remained hydrologically isolated from the reservoir, but when those two conditions changed, the connection was made and the lake began to “drain” through it—that bathtub metaphor again.
The new springs in Kayakale Creek were part of the karst network that had not been discovered before. But in addition to water flooding through the newly defined features, more water was also streaming through the previously studied system, causing the increased volume and turbidity of the flow into the fish hatchery.
It took extensive geophysical surveying, mapping, and dye tracing to disentangle the many threads of the complex structure of the subsurface—following each strand until its origin was located, and quantifying how much of the substantial leakage was coming from which part of the geological framework of the site.
Erdem dubbed the huge void the Sorun cavity. Sorun meant “problem” or “issue” in Turkish. The next step was designing a solution for the aptly named Sorun cavity.
The team had a concept before they dispersed to their homes across Turkey and around the globe. Not only had the dimensions of the cave been defined, but the condition of the rock, specifically in the roof, had been as well. It was highly fractured and, therefore, subject to collapse given the size of the void it spanned—talk about potential for the metaphorical bathtub to empty.
Going forward, the reservoir level would be held below the elevation of the cave entrance, but that could only be guaranteed under ordinary operating conditions, and they all knew contingencies had to be in place for extraordinary situations, as had occurred that spring. With all those considerations in mind, the plan took shape.
First, the weak rock above and around the cave would be grouted. Then a shaft and a series of large-diameter boreholes would be driven into the cave. Through them, Sorun would be filled successively with hundreds of thousands of cubic meters of rock, gravel, sand, and, finally, clay slurry. The lake bed in that area would be cleaned of loose sediments, its irregularities smoothed with cement, then covered with concrete slabs. After the void was filled, the boreholes and shaft would be plugged with cement, as the cave’s natural entrance had been.
Concurrent with the Sorun mitigation, additional grouting would be undertaken in the zones of the Moby and Babe cavities in an effort to scale back leakage to the stable volumes they’d seen in previous years, and particularly to stop the loss of fine sediments from the subsurface. That operation would be conducted from a barge, since both Moby and Babe were much closer to the dam, in an area where the reservoir could not practically be lowered. This would all be done to prevent water from flowing into and through the caves to the springs downstream—in effect, plugging up the drain whose stopper had been pulled. Only later, as they monitored discharges over months and years, would they know if they had ultimately succeeded.
* * *
Will rinsed the clinging bits of shaving cream from his cheeks. He’d trimmed his beard the night before and this morning tidied up the edges with a shave. Grabbing his towel, he straightened up, dried his face, then combed his hair, still wet from the shower. He barely ran the comb through, and it fell along the line where he’d parted it for decades. In a flash of memory, he saw the younger man who used to stand before this same mirror: his hair and beard light brown, bleached lighter still during summers in the field. Now, it was more salt than pepper, his beard silvery white. Paula said he looked distinguished, running her fingers through his hair.
It would be delightful to see her, to feel her hands in his hair, in just a few days. This time away had brought home for him how much he still enjoyed her company, still loved the music of her laugh, still relaxed under her strong hands when she massaged his shoulders after a long day carrying a field pack, and still thrilled to her “rubbing his arm.”
What would’ve happened to that younger man without her? Paula had never given up on him, even in his darkest days. He traced the scar on his right cheek with his finger, thankful for the reminder, the warning, Kevin had left there for him.
Awakening early this last morning in Kayakale, he had sat on the stoop and watched the rising sun, just as he had his first morning here all those years ago. That morning he’d hoped to see fifteen-year-old Kevin loping toward him across the dry grass of the square. This morning, he looked forward to seeing forty-year-old Kevin tomorrow in New York.
FORTY-ONE
Kevin leaned across the car and hugged Andréa as close as he could over the gearshift. “I love you too,” he said.
She kissed him, then tilted her head back and smiled as she rubbed the smudge of lipstick off his cheek with her thumb.
“Keep me posted,” she said. “On everything.”
She didn’t really need to say it; she had to know he would.
“I will,” he promised anyway. After all those years, they were still best friends, ever since she’d broken up with him after they’d dated for two years at MICA, explaining to him that aside from their passion for art, what they had most in common was their taste in men. Andréa, in her indomitable way, had helped him not only see himself for who he was, but love himself for it. A simple thing, but not an easy one.
He unfolded himself from her roadster, grabbed his backpack from behind the seat, and waved as she drove off. He’d come from Ithaca on the early train so they could meet for lunch before he needed to get to JFK to meet his father. She would meet them that evening as well, at the Jazz Standard for dinner and the show. Kevin’s whole family adored Andréa, sometimes visiting just with her if they were passing through and Kevin couldn’t make it down.
Andréa was the only one, possibly the only thing at all, Kevin missed about life in the city. In much the same way as when he was taken to Kayakale as a teen, he had been surprised by how much better—healthier and happier, inside and out—he felt living closer to nature. He had not realized how much he’d missed it, having lived in the city for such a long stretch, until he had it back.
On the other hand, he’d been keenly aware of missing a dog, not having had one since Buddy. Kevin knew big old goofy Buddy could never be replaced, but still he had longed for the empty space in his heart to be filled, and Rosy had. A golden retriever named for the pinkish hue of her lush coat, she could’ve been bestowed with it for her disposition. Al had been converted, becoming a dog person, with the first clumsy swipe of her oversized paw at his unsuspecting hand. Rosy had added new dimensions of love and joy into their lives, and soon they would be stretching those dimensions even further.
Like Kevin had with Buddy, he and Rosy rambled together for miles—hiking in spring, summer, and fall, cross-country skiing in winter. He smiled thinking of how delighted she seemed when he could keep up with her, gliding downhill in the snow.
It would only be one night, and Kevin would enjoy Dad’s and Andréa’s company, the music, even the bustle of the city. Still, he knew his heart would sing when he stepped back inside the cottage door late the next day. For in that little stone house in the woods, with Al and Rosy, Kevin had found home. A place of everyday wonders—waking each morning beside the man he loved, his senses singing with the seasons while tramping the forest trails with Rosy (the tender green of spring shoots, the heavy wetness of warm summer mornings, the pointillism of the turning leaves, the low leaden skies of winter), the smell of roasting root vegetables with the tang of balsamic vinegar, the swing of his axe and trickle of sweat down his neck despite the cold as he split logs for the woodstove. It was a place where Kevin was becoming a man he was truly happy to be, not contingent on what magazine bought his photographs or which gallery hung his work, but how he felt inside.
The blaring horns of taxis jockeying from lane to lane brought Kevin back to the sidewalk where he stood. He checked his watch, then headed into the terminal, following the signs to International Arrivals. The board indicated that his father’s plane was on approach. Kevin took a deep breath and rubbed his clammy hands on his pants, glancing down to see if any sweat showed on the khaki. He shook his head, then shoved the hair out of his eyes where it had fallen. Would it ever be easier with his father? He’d turned forty a few months back, and it wasn’t yet, though not for lack of trying, each in their own way. Perhaps that was part of the problem; their ways were so different. But Al kept reminding Kevin of his good fortune at having a father to be a bit uneasy with; he wished his own father was alive to hear their happy news. They were adopting a baby!
