Chapter

Protests continue now in every major city and most medium sized ones. There was no end to people available to protest as unemployment ran over 50% now. More people were unemployed than had jobs. Of course the dollar devaluation and the hyperinflation didn’t help anyone. Companies were laying off workers, not growing but retrenching, rerouting their expansions to full retreats, closing unproductive franchises and desperately trying to make a profit. Union shops were hit the worst.

Most companies with Union employees had strict rules about reductions in force; their only out was to close the entire plant to avoid huge negotiated payments to the workers. Unions kept their unrealistic demands for salaries, benefits, and especially their prized pensions. Their demands were indifferent to whether a company made a profit or not and consequently many companies simply closed their doors. The word profit had taken on a negative connotation with most workers, especially the unemployed. The workers held a viewpoint the company should be in business to make the employees’ lives better, not to make a profit.

Any profit should be spread amongst the workers as it was on the backs of the workers the company made any profits. This communistic train of thought was enforced by the Unions who advertised being advocates for the worker, but in reality they were simply trying to hold on to the power base they had created among the top elite Union Officials. Bribery, cronyism, and outright illegal behavior became a way of life for these elite. They sat on their demands while watching the baby get thrown out with the bath water. Unions started busing in laid off workers to the protests thinking if they stirred the turmoil and conflict the government would step in and make everyone’s dreams come true, after all, the people were entitled. What they didn’t realize or didn’t care about was the government was on the ropes; it was listening to the count at 9 and couldn’t regain its feet. They kept performing the same tried and true tricks that were guaranteed not to work. They raised taxes and boasted about the massive influx of revenue they’d raise. In reality, every time they raised taxes, revenue went down. Rich people deferred their money into tax free investments or hid it altogether. Many rich people lost the ‘rich’ designation like the song from Ten Years After “Tax the rich; feed the poor, till there are no rich no more.”

Every time revenue went down they’d print more money. Every time they’d print more money the cost of goods and services would go up. It was a vicious circle with no economic tricks left to escape it. Currently there was difficulty making the interest payment on the national debt much less try to pay it off. Public officials resigned in every level of government, seeing the writing on the wall and not wanting to take the blame for what was surely coming.

Many doomsayers and doom prognosticators held views the end was coming and very near. The reasons ran from the possible to the improbable, from nature’s vengeance in the form of hurricanes, earthquakes, solar flares, volcanic eruptions, pole shifts to brown dwarf stars colliding with the earth or moon or causing an ELE. Many saw the possible economic doom or the possibility of a war with one of the many countries holding worthless dollars as a reward for purchasing our debt. No one really thought the end would be brought about by tired, disgruntled workers with the help of an aging infrastructure.

Florida still reeled from Vicky’s knockout punch. The nation wobbled from the staggering still rising costs. Mother Nature wasn’t through though. As if to show who the boss was or demonstrate the adage “Man Plans, God Laughs”, a rare storm described by media anchors as “epic” occurred hitting Alaska hard. Flooding occurred along the state’s western coast followed by a high sea surge ten to twelve feet above normal. Strong winds ripped roofs from many buildings and reports trickled in about people missing after being swept into the Bering Sea during the storm. Damage from heavy storm surf and a lot of erosion was being reported.

National Weather Service Meteorologist Jeff Oscar reported this epic storm was the strongest in nearly 8 decades carrying heavy snow, rain and hurricane-force winds. Power was out in many communities sending some residents fleeing to higher ground. The storm continued unabated into Washington State and Idaho putting them into alert status as well. The record cold snap put record demands on the Nations Electrical Power Grid at a time when it could least afford it. The grid should have been upgraded or replaced decades ago. The government mantra had been to patch it and keep going since there were so many demands on the taxpayer funds, like all those entitlements. Florida aside from a few backup generators in some businesses had no power. The nuclear power plants were in danger of a different kind of disaster if the cooling rods weren’t kept cool. Texas was on a separate grid and better off than most other states but still in danger of not being able to supply enough power to meet demands. Many people unable to pay their mortgages also had their utilities shut off for the national deep freeze.

Transportation virtually stopped as did manufacturing. Coal, nuclear, natural gas, wind, solar, hydro-electric and all types of generated power plants started shutting down as parts would break and they could not obtain replacements. Nuclear plants started their shutdown protocols as they started losing their backup power plants making it illegal to operate in case of a disaster.

GOD wasn’t just mad at America though; every country in the world was undergoing some sort of hardship. Europe was also in a deep freeze. Asia was in the middle of massive flooding and civil unrest as the rest of the world quit buying their goods.

One would think that would be enough.

No!

Anyone thinking of the phrase “The Big One” usually associated that with California and the San Andreas Fault. The big one hit, only it was the New Madrid Fault line which was a prolific source of intra-plate earthquakes in the southern and Midwestern United states. The fault system covered 150 miles extending into five states. It stretched from Cairo, Illinois to New Madrid in Missouri, through Marked Tree in Arkansas. It also covered a part of West Tennessee. The zone had four of the largest North American earthquakes in recorded history with estimates of up to 8.0 all happening between December 1811 and February 1812.

FEMA issued a report a few years earlier that not too many people took seriously. The Federal Emergency Management Agency warned that a serious earthquake in the New Madrid Seismic zone could result in the highest economic losses due to a natural disaster in the United States causing widespread and catastrophic damage across Alabama, Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas and Tennessee. Water distribution, transportation and other infrastructure could be drastically impaired. The report went on to estimate 86,000 casualties 715,000 damaged buildings; and 7.2 million people displaced with 2 million of those seeing shelter, primarily due to the lack of utility services. Direct economic losses, according to the report, would be at least $800 billion.

The report findings were underestimated.

The Richter scale of earthquake magnitude is a measure of the energy released at the source of an earthquake deep within the earth. It is determined by measuring the amplitudes of ground motion on seismograms. Every two units represent 1,000 times more energy and every two-tenths of a unit represents double the energy.
Like the 1811-1812 earthquakes, the first one started in northeast Arkansas. The second occurred in Missouri both along the New Madrid Fault. The country uplifted and warped. Some areas dropped, other areas rose as much as 20 feet. Large waves were generated on the Mississippi River by the seismically-induced ground motion giving the illusion that the river was flowing upstream. Estimates put the Richter Scale at 8.7.

Electrical outages along the East Coast combined with electrical outages all along the Fault line. Redundancies failed. Safeguards failed. The grid has automatic routing and can switch outages to different grids. Those grids overloaded quickly. The safeguards in place to prevent overloading failed. Power plants were exploding across the nation. The lucky ones had already removed themselves from the grid for maintenance which added even more load to the few that were left. Layoffs found too many power plants and stations with an inadequate number of workers to handle this emergency volume.

Just before the earthquake, Unions representing many utilities across the country met and determined they were being overworked and underpaid. They’d started a slowdown or stayed home sick. Power was now out in the Eastern half of the United States and the storm pushing through from the North West took out the West coast and adjacent states. Pleas went out to Texas for help but Texas was running at maximum with the power plants that were already out of service for maintenance.