THE FIRST STRONG TREMOR HAD JOLTED GOVERNOR Tad Parker and his wife out of their bed in the third-floor bedroom of the governor’s mansion. A heavy mahogany bookcase crashed to the floor, narrowly missing Parker’s head. He was vaguely aware of his wife’s screams.
Parker tried to stand, but the shaking sent him sprawling. He tried again and was upended so violently it knocked the wind out of him.
Frankfort, the capital of Kentucky, was about 230 miles northeast of Memphis and roughly midway between Louisville and Lexington. All three cities had felt the earthquake that had struck Memphis three days earlier. There had been a lot of property damage, mainly cracked foundations and fallen chimneys, but no one had been killed.
But Parker knew this one was deadly.
He crawled to the door, got to his knees, and tried the light switch. The electricity was out.
Parker cursed himself for drinking too much wine at dinner. He’d met with his campaign advisers and had allowed himself to be overserved, something he rarely did. He usually stuck with one small glass of burgundy. This time he’d had four or five and had only recently gone to bed.
As the ground shook, glass shattered in the pair of French doors that opened onto the bedroom balcony.
The chandelier in the dining room jingled like a wind chime as it swung back and forth. Then it fell with a splintering crash of broken glass.
Large gilt-framed pictures were knocked from their mountings. A china cabinet pitched over, spilling nineteenth-century Wedgwood and French crystal onto the floor.
Crawling on all fours, Parker cut his hand on a fragment of glass.
“Tad, we’ve got to get out!” his wife screamed. She tried to hold on to the bed’s headboard, but the heaving ground action sent the massive four-poster sliding across the floor, knocking her legs out from under her.
Parker was as frightened as he’d ever been in his life.
When the earth finally stopped moving, he sat with his back against a wall, too stunned to get up. He stayed there with his wife next to him for five minutes before he finally managed to get dressed in the dark, slipping on a pair of trousers and a pullover.
He got a flashlight from the bathroom. The mansion was a shambles. Wide cracks had opened in the walls.
The ground started shaking again.
Parker realized those must be aftershocks. They had to get outside.
With his wife following in her bathrobe, a coat thrown over her shoulders, Parker hurried down the grand staircase to the first floor. He went out the front door just as a car from the Kentucky State Police pulled into the driveway.
A young officer got out. He delivered the terrible news with crisp professionalism.
“The dam at Kentucky Lake is gone, sir.”
Parker felt as if he’d been kicked in the teeth. He slumped against the open door.
That can’t be true.
As he tried to comprehend the immensity of what he’d just been told, Parker struggled to follow what the trooper was saying. He’d already moved on to another subject—the Department of Energy’s Gaseous Diffusion Plant at Paducah.
Parker knew it well. He’d lobbied hard to keep the plant in operation amid rumors that the DOE wanted to phase it out.
He squeezed his hands to his temples and tried to think clearly. It was so difficult, but he had to focus.
“The plant manager called, sir,” the trooper continued. “He wants Paducah evacuated.”
“What are you talking about?” Parker stammered.
“They have a leak of some kind. He said something about poison gas.”
Parker had just toured the uranium-enrichment plant with a delegation of Japanese visitors. He knew how they shot uranium in the form of uranium hexofluoride gas through a series of ceramic and steel separators, which filtered out impurities. The pipes ran for miles it seemed and were forty inches in diameter.
He remembered what one of the plant engineers had told him: The biggest danger was the accidental release of gas. When mixed with oxygen, it was lethal. The separators were sealed under pressure. If they ruptured, they’d go off like Roman candles, spewing clouds of poison gas.
“Will you authorize it?” the trooper asked.
Authorize what? Dammit, man. Just let me think, Parker thought.
The trooper was staring at him, waiting for an answer.
“The evacuation,” he said. “They want to do it right now.”
The ground shook, just enough to make Parker clutch the mansion’s porch railing. He sat down on the front steps. He was suddenly aware of how bright the stars were. The sky was filled with stars.
He’d never seen them so bright. Then he realized why: all the lights were out in Frankfort. The city was in total darkness.