The leading crest of the surge entered the Turning Basin like an angry brown locomotive, throwing a crest of yellow froth twelve feet into the damp air as it slammed against the limestone cutwater. The sheer physical blast shook the heavy timber narrow high walkway where Pella Rook and Eren Tal stood. It sent a sharp shaking through the soles of their boots that rattled the brass measuring tongs in Pella’s tool pouch.
The river smelled overpoweringly of ancient silt stench, boiled river weeds. The skin-burning chemical bitterness of dissolved copper green rust bleeding from the upper cooling coils. Huge chunks of black river turf, uprooted willows, and shattered crate boards swirled wildly in the boiling vortex, colliding with the hemlock bending fenders with dull, sickening thumps.
Eren Tal leaned out over the iron railing. His eyes tracking the was dark water line against the gauge post. ‘Twenty-two thousand feet per second passing into the marsh water chute!’ he bellowed over the roar. ‘The reed sleeves are holding the invert! Jo’s flax seams aren’t leaking a drop!’
Down in the mud basin, the earthen retention dikes were performing exactly as Hal Rook had drawn them twenty years earlier. The scalding floodwater, diverted away from the deep city canal, was spreading wide across forty acres of shallow marshland, its destructive moving driving force dissolving as it fanned out over beds of river silt and dense reed banks.
