Washington, DC
August 20, 2017
What a perfect day for a ballgame! Past the halfway point in the season, the Washington Nationals were hosting the Milwaukee Brewers and hoping to improve their dismal forty-three wins and eighty losses record. Thousands of loyal fans would brave the stifling heat and drenching humidity to get to the Nationals Stadium for the last of the summer series. Washington would be starting up again after the long hot recess, and the pace would be unbearable by mid-September. People wearing ball caps with the stylish pretzel "W" and red baseball jerseys were swarming towards Southeast, Washington. The combat zone of the District of Columbia had been transformed in the late 1990s from a drug-infested slum to a vibrant neighborhood anchored by the stadium on one end and the re-furbished Navy Yard on the other. The Department of Transportation built an impressive headquarters building right on the water surrounded by loft apartments and several new hotels. Hundreds wedged into the Yellow Line train as it came up from the last underground stop at the Pentagon, banked to the left and emerged into the bright sunlight flooding the cars for the short trip over the Potomac. The rush to the Stadium started early.
The District Department of Transportation added two extra cars to the Yellow Line trains for game day to handle the large family crowds. None of these Yellow Line cars, including the extra ones, would make it to the next stop at L'Enfant Plaza. Just like one of those planned high-rise demolitions shown on TV, three of the Metro's heavy reinforced concrete bridge foundations were instantly pulverized in a perfectly timed series of massive underwater explosions designed to produce shear stresses which would destroy the thick bridge support structure, twist the tracks and tear them like a piece of tablet paper. The conductor had no time to react as the tracks suddenly veered to the right and downward like some amusement park ride.
His hands were still steady on the controls as he saw the muddy Potomac River rushing into view. Eight Yellow Line cars followed each other into the water. The sound of forty tons of steel and aluminum shearing and twisting drowned out the screams of the eager Nats fans, tourists, and weekend workers, as each car slammed into the car ahead, trying to find space for their seventy-five foot lengths in less than thirty feet of water. It was similar to the massive fog-induced collisions on highways in the West involving fifty automobiles or more, but turned on its head, vertically, with forty feet between the bridge and the water and another thirty feet to the bottom. Each of the eight cars carried well over one-hundred riders with several near their maximum capacity of one-hundred and seventy five. The last car landed on its back, speared in its mid-section by car number seven before breaking into two pieces which hesitated on the water's surface for several long seconds before sliding off on opposite sides and disappearing. There would be many no-shows in the Stadium today. Some died of blunt force trauma, others more slowly by drowning as their common metal caskets tumbled to the bottom and filled with muddy water. Many tried to escape by breaking the fixed windows on the way to the bottom. The large fixed picture windows separated the living from the dead by a thin piece of tempered glass about a quarter inch thick. The bodies thrown around inside the trains added to the panicked stampede of fear and caused scores of people to drown just beneath the surface. Ironically, the Nats won anyway.