The winter freeze didn’t arrive by degrees. It struck the valley in a single night with the fury of an arctic hammer.
By the second watch after midnight, the heat had plunged to fifteen degrees below zero Fahrenheit. The puddles in the railway ditches froze to solid ice. The cold mountain wind screamed through the rock notch of Granite Gap, coating every cedar telegraph pole in a thick sheath of hoarfrost.
In the newly erected refugee dormitories along the southern avenue, the situation verged on a freezing disaster.
Cast-iron box stoves devoured firewood at an unsustainable rate of forty cords a day. But the corners of the timber rooms remained cold enough to freeze water in the washbasins.
Giles Croft stood in the underground brick vault beneath the town pumping station. He held a surface-contact heat gauge against the exhaust pipe of the twenty-horsepower stationary steam pump.
The pump ran day and night. It lifted three thousand gallons of river water per minute into the Citadel gravity reservoirs.
“The engine exhausts fifty pounds of low-pressure steam per minute into the air,” Giles observed to Master Borin Bronze-Lung. “Exhaust heat is two hundred and twenty degrees Fahrenheit.
At air pressure, that steam carries nine hundred and seventy British heat units of latent heat per pound of vapor. We’re venting forty-eight thousand BTU per minute into the open clouds while fifteen thousand people shiver in their beds.”
