Catagory 5

CATEGORY 5





“Hey Pete, check out the sky”, yelled Mike over the background of generators and cranes, hammers and saws.

“What?”

Mike pointed up grinning, “Ghost Busters”.

Pete straightened to his full six-feet and stretched his back.

The work was going well. Six more weeks of work would top out the parking garage. A lay-off would come before the end of September. Right now fifty-two people were working on the project.

He looked up at a darkening sky. The clouds were huge and ugly and moving fast. It did look like the storm scene in that Ghost Busters movie. Two towering cloud formations hurtled together. At their convergence the sky roiled and bucked. The storm line, already close, moved in their direction.

“I don’t like the look of that”, said Pete. “Where’s Bob?”

“Right here”, answered the foreman. “We’re going to get wet, so what: wetter still with you standing around. Let’s get this crap done so we can get under cover when it hits. Mike, gather up the tools we’re not using and get ‘em in the gang box. Come on Pete, we gotta get this …”

A bass drum roll of thunder vibrated the plywood deck where they stood cutting off Bob’s orders. Sheet lightening close enough to stand their hair on end lit the sky.

As the two fronts clashed together they began to revolve. A half mile away an immense gray column vaulted from the cloud mass. The column began to turn. A pillar of wind dropped from the churning sky with a roar. It did not waver; it did not taper to form a funnel; the sides hung vertical and were made of two hundred mile per hour wind. The deadliest tornado to ever hit the State dropped to the ground a half-mile away and started moving on a direct path to the job site.

Another construction site, this one new and still at ground level was across the street from the parking garage; it was hit first. Pete saw the chain-link fence surrounding the job devoured by the tornado. Long lengths of it corkscrewed up with fence posts and concrete feet still attached.

Every one was running and so did Pete. Straight down the ramp to the level below. At the bottom the mob turned to head back under the formwork above as they always did in a rainstorm, but this was toward the tornado and Pete wanted concrete over his head not wood. They would never make it down another level before the damn thing hit. He went straight. One level down, outside the low wall was the top of the staired scaffold erected for worker access. He had been working here for most of a year and knew exactly where it was. If the jump broke his leg it was all over. But if he didn’t make cover it was all over anyway.

He hit the top of the barrier wall with both hands and vaulted over, the scaffold directly below him. Landing with one foot on the upper portion of a split platform and the other two feet lower, his forward momentum threw him into the guardrail. The whoosh of air forced from his lungs drowned out the crack of his ribs.

The tornado hit the opposite corner of the building like a bomb blast. The wind swept up four-by-four inch support posts like a great paw raking in food.

Pete dove headfirst, arms extended, over the half wall and back into the garage. The drop from the platform was only five feet this time but he landed on this hands and shoulder. He rolled as he hit but his chin came down hard on the floor. His teeth cracked together and his eyes swam with bright exploding lights. No time. Get up.

He crawled, stumbled, and rolled the thirty feet to an interior barrier wall. It was only three and a half feet tall but it was eight inches thick concrete and it ended at a two feet square concrete column forming a small corner facing directly away from the coming storm. He braced his back into the corner with his legs bent and pushing in front of him. He pulled his head down between his knees and protected it with both arms.

Debris blasted the other side of the wall and shot above him. The air was thick with chunks of wood and rock and splinters and dust. He held on to his position and unknowingly, he held his breath until he passed out.

The tornado sheared the formwork and wooden decking off the top of the structure and hurled it in every direction at over two hundred miles per hour. The materials; lumber, aluminum channels, sheets of plywood and steel I-beams made projectiles varying in type from shrapnel to heavy artillery. The result was a war zone of annihilation and dissolution.

As the eye of the storm passed over the building the updraft exerted a huge upward pressure on the top concrete deck. The floor was designed to withstand a heavy downward load. It was still braced because the concrete had not reached full strength. The support beams, poured with the deck, heaved upward. Steel cables had been placed in these and five thousand pounds of pressure placed on each one, tensioning the beams to support the weight of the cars to be parked there. The upward thrust on the deck and the beams sheared the end of these cables, releasing the tension and weakening the beams. Stress fractures formed tattered spider webs on every support beam on level four. Fissures opened in the deck, some wide enough for a man to fall through. For now a twisted net of steel rods held the pieces together.

When Pete came to he was soaked. Water was beating on his hip and thigh. He rolled away from it. Electrifying pain cascaded from his shoulder down his side and burned in a fist-sized sun below his rib cage. His consciousness wavered in the heat of the pain like a desert mirage. He turned to ease his side and a torrent of water shoved his head down to the floor banging his shoulder again. He inhaled water, spluttered, choked, and managed to roll away again. Flying debris had broken a drainpipe seven or eight feet above him, and the resulting waterfall was forming a pond where he lay. He rolled again, this time to his right side and keeping his left arm pressed to his side, rose slowly to his knees. He caught his breath, head dangling, and with a hard push was on his feet. He turned and started climbing to Level 5 where he had last seen his crew.

Half way up the ramp the air began to taste coppery. He paused, starring at his feet. Rainwater was running in rivulets, shallow and wide and rusty. He could not think where so much rust could have come from. He climbed until he saw the first body.

It is hard to recognize a face contorted by terror and covered in blood from the eyes and nose and mouth, adding depth to the already stained water running around and under it, and he had no desire to acknowledge whom it had been. The head and one arm were visible. The rest lay under a couple of tons of wood and steel. Turning away, he staggered back and fourth looking for a way through a dense jumble of twisted and broken building material. Steel beams hung from the floor above him like shattered tree limbs. Some had plywood dangling from their sides, while others had acted as a back-stop for tons of wood supports and building materials forced into a jumble of dikes and dams. There were gaps in the carnage but each time he started through a body or a face or part blocked his way.

Pete found his way to the southern corner of the structure. Here the level above was completed and the shoring had been removed. His way was clear to the buildings edge. He leaned on the waist high barrier wall and rested, his head hanging, his chin on his chest. He felt the sun on his scalp and looked up. The rain had stopped, the storm had moved past and the sun was shining.

He heard a moan, long and low and miserable. Where from? There. The elevator shaft. He hurried toward it. Another moan. There’s the shaft. He leaned over the edge and peered down. The sun lit the shaft to the bottom. The sheen of water glared, and in the water a hardhat lay upside-down. It had protected its contents and there they were, the top half of the head it had ridden complete with grayish brains and a graying ponytail.

He dropped to his knees and puked down the shaft, clinching his eyes shut. He did not want to see any more. Another groan, loudest yet, brought his eyes open. It wasn’t somebody; it was the building. He was looking up at the concrete floor above when it collapsed.

He cartwheeled down the elevator shaft. On the second or third turn he noticed he had left all of him below the ribcage back on the fourth floor. On the next turn, he looked up at the slab of concrete lying where he had been. He guessed the rest of him was jelly. It hadn’t hurt, still didn’t. On the next turn he looked down. He hoped the impact wouldn’t hurt either. Even more he hoped he wouldn’t land in his own vomit. It didn’t. He did.