"da Cruz, Daniel - Republic of Texas 02 - Texas on the Rocks" - читать интересную книгу автора (Da Cruz Daniel)
The collapse of City Tunnel No. 1 was no accident, the result of the explosion of a ten-kilo charge of TNT. The previously unknown Freedom for Puerto Rico Militant Action Group claimed responsibility. City engineers estimated that it would take at least ten days before the flow could be fully restored.
Mayor Nancy Meyer immediately convened an emergency meeting of the city council. She proposed, and it ratified, draconian measures to ensure that Manhattan and the Bronx would survive with minimum inconvenience. Car washes were shut down. Block watches were organized for early detection of fires, cutting down on the use of water by the fire companies. Manufacturers were ordered to recycle water when possible. In the Bronx and Manhattan water was rationed--what water was available trickled in from cross conduits linking City Tunnel No. 1 with City Tunnel No. 2, serving Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island. Homes and apartments were limited to thirty-minutes of water daily.
Rationing meant an end to steam heating. Tempera tures in apartments all over Manhattan and the Bronx fell below freezing, only a few degrees above the bitter cold outside. Water pipes froze and burst. Huddled beneath bedclothes to stave off the freezing cold, New Yorkers upon whom their fellow citizens were dependent for food, transportation, and other essential services called in sick. The streets were half empty, the roar of city traffic stilled, and an air of desperation settled over the city.
A brownout was decreed: Consolidated Edison's coalpowered electricity-generating facilities alone used up nine hundred gallons of water for every kilowatt hour of energy produced. This water could no longer be spared.
At night the city was dark, as if war had come. The use of cars was forbidden to all but physicians and emergency workers, and those of violators were confiscated. To conserve electricity, elevators were run for but five minutes every hour. Unused to such hardships, during the next five days an estimated 470,000 New Yorkers decided to take their Christmas vacations early. Since many were professionals and executives around whom much of New York's economic life revolved, business in Manhattan ground almost to a standstill.
On December 9, 2004, catastrophe became chaos: at 2 A.M., City Tunnel No. 2 was blown up.
The detonation slightly injured two New York national guardsmen of the four thousand called up by New York's governor to patrol the length of the pipeline, the shores of the larger reservoirs, the banks of the tributaries, pumping plants and water treatment facilities, and the electric generation grid supplying power to bring water into the city.
Water, which before December 2 had been so taken for granted that it wasn't even metered by the municipality--billing was on the basis of the street frontage a building occupied--suddenly became a valued commodity. During the first week, the price of water rose from twenty-five cents to a dollar a gallon. The watershed, so to speak, came after the second explosion, when quarts, not gallons, became the medium of exchange--and the price of a quart ranged from one to three dollars.
Providentially, snow blanketed the streets on December 11. In most places it didn't last long enough to turn to slush. The city dwellers scooped up the stuff by the shovelful, potful, even spoonful, and rushed indoors to melt it on kitchen stoves and before fireplaces.
All traffic into the city was halted except for vehicles carrying food, emergency supplies for hospitals, and water, brought in by tank truck from as far away as Wilmington, Delaware. Supplies were dispensed--at first free, then for one dollar a gallon, one gallon per customer--on a first-come, first-served basis. Tank trucks were stationed at principal intersections throughout the city. Pressed against the walls of buildings to shelter from the wind and snow, the queues were reminiscent of breadlines in Soviet Russia. Some entrepreneurs made queuing and water scalping a full-time occupation. The price per scalped gallon shot to a high of $23 around Wall Street, and those who managed to stand up to eighteen hours a day in line were making more money than stockbrokers.
Others drove to neighboring cities, brought back cases of Clorox, and went into the business of disinfecting water from the Hudson or East rivers and selling it by the jerry can.
As great as was the turmoil in the city, the country scarcely noticed it amid the convulsions that had seized Wall Street and America's other financial markets. The exodus from New York had included so many brokers, financiers, bankers, and computer operators that the financial center had virtually ceased to function. At the Chicago, San Francisco, and lesser exchanges, the disaster had been a signal to unload one's holdings at any price, for if Wall Street went down in flames, the heat would consume all other American financial institutions along with it. The panic quickly spread to foreign markets. There American shares tumbled, the dollar fell to its lowest value in thirty-seven years, and the price of gold went over the moon.
Americans who first dismissed New York's plight as a local affair, and in fact welcomed the misfortune that had brought the proud city to its knees, rejoiced but briefly. They found that their checks were no longer honored; checks had to be cleared through the banking system's clearinghouse in New York City. Credit cards likewise became worthless, and when cash ran out, citizens across the land were reduced to barter. Economic life became a shambles, and in its train came the usual consequences: a breakdown in public order, a precipitate rise in robbery, theft, random brutality, rape, and looting.
Meanwhile, in the city itself, the incidence of communicable disease soared, and diarrhea became endemic. Hepatitis and cholera were also reported with increasing frequency, and dehydration became the most common cause of death among infants and the aged.
The epidemic scare caused a new stampede. Terminals were jammed with the panic-driven. Limited to one suitcase per person, passengers abandoned other belongings, created fast-rising mountains of luggage beside which foresaken children whimpered for parents who in the confusion sometimes lost them forever.
Soon the streets were crammed with cars crawling bumper to bumper as their owners joined the hegira to any city or village with a water supply of its own. Bridges, tunnels, sidewalks, and footpaths were clogged with fleeing New Yorkers.
New York's fast-dwindling population was learning the meaning of anarchy. Police and firemen had joined in the general flight, leaving lawlessness in their wake. The mobs that attacked and ransacked warehouses where Clorox was thought to be stored were only the harbinger of widespread looting and violence.
Fires raged unchecked. Whole city blocks were consumed as the few remaining firemen, unable to reach fires through stalled traffic, watched helplessly from afar.
It was the New York National Guard that, descending upon the city in tanks and armored personnel carriers, began the immense task of bringing order to the city, fighting fires, shooting looters, and providing emergency services to the old, the afflicted, and the solitary.
The men in uniform blasted whole city blocks into rubble as firebreaks. Gas lines that had fueled the conflagration were shut down. By and by, the menace of fires burning out of control diminished, and the clouds of greasy black smoke that covered the city like an imam's robe began to dissipate.
By Christmas Day 2004, the City of New York was a city of devastation. Whole sections had been destroyed by fire. Streets were littered with burned-out cars and sidewalks with shattered furniture, television sets and children's toys, garbage, and waste paper. And here and there a huddled lifeless body testified to the ferocity of what had become a savage civil war.
6. HEARINGS
4 JANUARY 2005
| © 2025 Библиотека RealLib.org (support [a t] reallib.org) |