DURING THE FIRST HOURS OF THE CRISIS, Governor Tad Parker had been strangely paralyzed, unable to decide what to do. That wasn’t like him. He prided himself on his ability to make quick decisions. It didn’t seem possible that only a day earlier, a lifetime ago, he’d been confidently trying to raise money to run for president.
Parker was overwhelmed. His only decisive act was to order a National Guard helicopter to take Paul Weston and other staff members of the Seismic Safety Commission down to Memphis. He’d never liked Weston and remembered his calm assurances about Kentucky Dam when those cracks appeared in the walls after the first earthquake. He planned to revisit that subject with him later, but right now Weston was the most knowledgeable man in the state about earthquakes. More than anything, Parker needed information about what was happening in the ground. He hoped to hear from Weston soon.
There’d been so many disasters—all of them piling up at once, each requiring immediate attention: the clouds of lethal gas that had killed a couple hundred people near the uranium enrichment plant at Paducah before the gas dissipated; the dam break; the continuous reports of casualties from every large city in the state.
In those early hours Parker had fired his chief of disaster operations, a political hack who’d gotten the high-paying job solely because of his connections. Parker had gone to the disaster operations office in the state capitol building and found the man seated at his desk, drinking straight from a bottle of scotch. Parker’s bodyguard had to pull him off the man.
They didn’t have enough shortwave radios and portable satellite dishes. And no one had thought what they would do if almost every large hospital in the state had to shut down because it was either destroyed or badly damaged.
They couldn’t even get a reliable casualty count. Parker knew instinctively that the numbers were going to be horrendous. On the short drive from the governor’s mansion to the capitol, he’d counted eleven bodies himself. Lying on the side of the road and covered with blankets, they’d been removed from damaged buildings and homes.
He ordered his driver to stop. An elderly man sat on the porch of his collapsed brick home, holding the body of his dead wife. Despite the cold, he wore a thin bathrobe. His face was bloody. Weeping softly, he clutched her to his chest as he rocked back and forth.
“What am I going to do?” he sobbed, recognizing the governor, who sat down next to him and offered his condolences.
It galvanized Parker, who’d been in mild shock ever since the quake. He stayed with the man for a couple of minutes, trying to comfort him. When the next crisis came, and it came soon, he was able to make decisions.
A shortwave transmission came in from the director of the state prison at Eddyville, 180 miles south of Lexington. The quake had knocked down one of the dormitories, which dated to the turn of the century. Some of the crenellated walls had collapsed. Another prisoners’ building was badly damaged.
“We’ve got a dangerous situation here, governor,” the warden said excitedly. “Most of the guard towers are down. We’ve got prisoners getting away. Half my people are dead or injured.”
The man started to ramble.
Parker shut him up.
“I want you to do just what I tell you,” he said. “You march twenty men with shotguns into that mob and shoot over their heads. If that doesn’t work, open up again, and this time tell your people to shoot to kill. That ought to quiet them down until I can get some National Guard troops over there to help out. You got that, warden?”
“Governor, I can’t do—”
Shouting into the radio, Parker said, “I’m not going to lose control of that prison. I don’t care how many people you’ve got to shoot. You just carry out those orders. If you don’t, I’ll get somebody else up there who will.”