Last week just before 2:00 pm, I was working, scoring standardized tests, when I felt a jolt, followed a few seconds later by a second jolt. Earthquake?! While I was ready to dive under the table, my eyes darted around the room, but nobody else seemed to notice anything. I shrugged. I’ve always had a more sensitive sensory system than most people, always been a little more jumpy. If something scary happens in a movie, I usually jump about a half a second before anyone else. An electrician had been working in our area earlier. Maybe he was working on the wiring in the ceiling.
On my 2:00 break, I walked out to my car and called home. Cameras (and therefore cell phones) aren’t allowed on the floor at my job because of strict confidentiality, so I leave my phone in my car. The kids were packing to go back to college. I was calling to see if they needed to know where the extra boxes, tape, etc. were.
Johnny answered, and in an excited voice, asked me if I’d just heard two big explosions. I told him I’d felt two jolts. He said that he heard two huge explosions, big enough to set off house and car alarms in our Puyallup neighborhood. He’d run upstairs from the basement out onto the front porch expecting to see a truck crashed into our house.
He’d called John and Sarah who were in the waiting room at a chiropractor in Tacoma. They had been on westbound Highway 512, and John said he thought something went wrong with his car, maybe a blown tire? Everybody in the lobby listening in on this phone conversation asked, astounded, if the explosion had been felt 11 miles away in Puyallup. Everyone was abuzz.
This was definitely bigger than the guns that rumble regularly from Ft. Lewis maneuvers. There had been a huge natural gas explosion in Tacoma in October 2007 that John and I had felt at our house. Then there was the time they blew up some old dynamite that a construction crew found when they were building a Rite Aid a few miles from our house, over a decade ago. But, this time I’d felt a shock in Auburn, 12 miles north of Puyallup. Puyallup-Auburn-Tacoma: that’s a pretty big, 12-miles-on-each-side, equilateral triangle.
Johnny and I speculated that President Obama was in Seattle. Maybe it had something to do with him. Maybe something happened, and they had to get fighter jets up in the air from McChord Air Force Base and there was a sonic boom. Johnny said there wasn’t anything on T.V. I told him to go online to see what he could find. With that, my 15-minute break was up, and I headed back into the building.
I made what I hoped was a casual announcement to my group, and asked if they’d heard anything about an explosion or anything unusual while they were on break. Nobody had felt or heard anything. I started scoring and tried to concentrate.
What if Mt. Rainier had blown? Aren’t we in a valley? If a lahar of ice and mud was gushing down from Mt. Rainier, I tried to remember how deep it would be. Two stories? Three stories? Would the overpass over Highway 167 be high enough to be safe? They always said that it would be faster to go on foot than everybody getting in their cars and creating a traffic jam. (Maybe that was advice for tsunamis in Hawaii. Oh well!) I’d better try to run up the hill, to Highway 18. I was calculating in my head how long it would take me to run there. Ten minutes, fifteen? Puyallup had sirens to warn everybody. Did Auburn? How long would it take a lahar to reach Auburn?
Tom, who sits next to me, interrupted my mental evacuation planning. He suggested I ask the secretary to get online and see what she could find out. I hesitated. He assured me that if the Site Manager was there, she’d check it out. I agreed, and added that she’d make a big announcement about it. She was good at ferreting out information and making announcements. But I still hesitated. I didn’t want to be Chicken Little running around clucking about the sky falling, especially since nobody else had felt or heard anything. What if it wasn’t anything? Then I’d be flagged as a hysterical nutcase.
There are other businesses in the building. I was pretty sure that someone in one of those offices was online, and if anything big happened, they’d let us know. If worse came to worst, Johnny had the main number here and would call to sound the alarm, wouldn’t he? I spent the rest of the afternoon scoring papers, and in the back of my mind, wondering what had happened, feeling a little on edge.
At 4:30 I hurried out to my car, and called home. As I asked Johnny what had happened, my phone beeped that I had a text message simultaneously with Johnny asking why I hadn’t checked his text message. Here’s what it said:
Mom, KOMO 4 news reports that an unknown aircraft breached Presidential restricted airspace and that two F-15 fighter jets were scrambled from Portland, OR. Apparently they flew well above supersonic to Seattle, and created sonic booms that were heard throughout the region. No news yet on whether they shot down the other aircraft or what. –Johnny
Apparently while I was estimating how long it would take me to run up the hill to Hwy. 18 to avoid a volcanic mudflow, Johnny was calculating how long it would take a jet traveling at Mach 2.5 (about 1900 mph) to fly from Portland to Seattle (145 miles), an impressive 10 minutes, about the same time for me to get out of a lahar’s path.
The wayward float plane was flying from the east side of Washington. The pilot didn’t file a flight plan, and didn’t realize that Obama’s visit created a 10-mile, no-fly airspace. The jets intercepted him. The Secret Service questioned and released him.
The headine the next day in The News Tribune was “Boom. Boom. Rrrring. Scrambled fighter jets in turn scramble South Sound 911 network.” It reported that residents from Olympia to Federal Way (40 miles apart) streamed into the streets when the thunderous booms shook the region about 1:50 p.m., and so many people in Pierce County dialed 911 the switchboard couldn’t keep up.
And so the mystery was solved. It’s kind of interesting that it even was a mystery with an Air Force base and Boeing in the region, and a basketball team named the Seattle SuperSonics. But, it’s nice to know that people are paying attention, and it’s even more reassuring to know that our military is ever vigilant, and the best in the world. On Tuesday, August 18, 2010, throughout the Puget Sound, we all got to experience “the sound of freedom.”
Laura Keolanui Stark tries to live by the Girl Scout motto, “Be prepared.” She can be reached at stark.laura.k@gmail.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment