The subway to the sea.
It was a splendid idea, an idea whose time had finally come. After almost three wasted decades, Brad Somerset was once again digging under Wilshire Boulevard.
Of course, Brad was a much younger man when he first worked for the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority on construction of the Purple Line subway in the 1980’s. Then, he was twenty-two years old, vigorous and muscled, and the heavy manual labor of construction work merely gave him a big appetite. As he watched the men and even (gasp!) a woman laboring under his supervision, he knew such physical efforts today would give him a hernia. Fortunately a college degree and long experience in underground construction had freed him from the grunt work. He was a project manager now, more likely to push papers than a shovel.
Brad wasn’t just an office man, though. He still spent a fair amount of time at the construction site, especially on days like today when the newly-excavated tunnel was being equipped with sophisticated wireless surveying instruments. These precision tools included seismographs, tiltmeters and inclinometers designed to detect the smallest changes in walls or ceilings in the tunnel and in the buildings or street above. The system was an important safety feature that they didn’t have years ago. It could alert them to any destabilizing movements caused by minor earthquake activity or by the construction itself.
“I’m not getting a reading from that deformation monitor,” Brad said, pointing. “Check the orientation of the prism; maybe the laser isn’t hitting it right.”
Working on the Westside subway extension was far more pleasant than work in a coal mine—something else Brad had done in his career—and for that he was grateful. The shallow tunnel was well-lit, and once the virgin section was properly equipped with a high-volume ventilation system, the air would be pretty fresh.
“Better,” he said. “Calibrate it with the next one over.”
The original Purple Line ran under Wilshire from downtown L.A. west to Western Avenue. That left the subway still thirteen or so miles inland, amputated from its manifest destiny of extending all the way to the Pacific Ocean. But unlike most unfinished transit projects, this one hadn’t simply run out of money. Extension of the subway line further west was controversial, and the controversy reached all the way to Washington, D.C. Years ago, Brad was stunned when L.A. Congressman Henry Waxman pushed through a ban on funding new tunnels under a four hundred-block area of Wilshire between La Brea and Western Avenues, an area the feds designated a “gas risk zone.”
A load of crap that was, he thought. Sure, this part of town had problems with natural underground gas, but he believed the ban was NIMBY politics played by rich folk who didn’t want a subway line connecting their exclusive Westside neighborhoods with downtown. When a local Ross Dress for Less store blew up in a methane explosion in 1985, it provided the perfect political cover for the limousine liberals: stop the subway for safety’s sake.
Well, another twenty-five years of growing congestion on L.A.’s roads had forced many people to rethink their position. Plus, the Public Works Department had successfully managed construction of sewer tunnels through an area heavily pocketed with methane gas. Experts now testified that it was possible to safely build and run a subway under the entire length of Wilshire Boulevard. With Waxman’s support (damn, how long had that guy been ‘serving’ in D.C.?), the ban was repealed, initiating a series of events that ultimately led to Brad standing here today.
As he made programming adjustments to a small electrical unit on the tunnel wall, he noticed one of the workers stop in mid-stride and sit down on the floor.
“You okay?” Brad asked, walking over and putting a hand on the man’s shoulder.
“I don’t know,” the worker said. “I feel kind of light-headed.”
Then a second worker—the woman—also plopped to the ground. All of a sudden Brad noticed the air felt stuffy and close.
Abruptly lower air quality in a tunnel. Dizzy workers.
You didn’t need thirty years of underground construction experience to know they had a problem.
He shouted to the foreman. “We’ve got a gas leak. Everybody out—now!”
Men abandoned what they were doing and scattered like rats for the nearest exit to the surface.
“Be careful of sparks! Don’t turn anything on!” he shouted, terrified of igniting an explosion.
“What the fuck happened to the methane detectors?” the foreman yelled.
“I don’t know. They should’ve sounded long before it got this bad.”
A traffic jam ensued on the ladders. Shit, we haven’t got much time. Brad screamed at the men to hurry—as if they needed encouragement. Rather than just standing at the end of the line waiting for his turn, he surveyed the area for stragglers.
The woman was now lying prone and unmoving where she fell.
Knowing he couldn’t carry her unconscious body up a ladder alone, he grabbed the foreman’s arm and the two of them raced to her side. They struggled, wasting seconds as they tried to find the best way to pick her up and share the load. For a moment Brad remembered when his kids were little, how much heavier they were asleep than awake. He helped raise the woman high enough to sling her torso over the foreman’s shoulder.
They were halfway back to the ladder when the foreman collapsed. Conflicting impulses toward self-preservation and altruism made Brad pause. The opportunity for decision passed when he too was overcome by the foul air.
As he slipped into unconsciousness, he made a strange olfactory observation.
Not rotten eggs... sauerkraut?