At six-forty-five on the morning of the twenty-seventh day, the freeboard on the western levee of the Ferry Turning Basin had dwindled to exactly four inches.
The water in the basin was no longer a calm holding pool. It was a churning, brown-yellow cooking pot of liquid mud, crushed birch bark, and pale stone foam that rose in violent, surging swells with every pulse of the river outside. Each surge pushed the water up the red clay stone retaining wall until the dirty yellow froth sloshed over the top sandbags, spilling in muddy rivulets down the outer slope into the drainage ditch where twenty wagon drivers stood knee-deep in water, wildly shoveling gravel onto the weeping toe.
Pella Rook knelt at the crest of the levee, her canvas tool apron soaked through, her hands clamped around a wooden measuring rod she had driven into the clay. Beside her, Hal Rook’s brass measuring tongs lay in their open leather holster, their polished brass surfaces beaded with freezing rain.
Pella drove her steel measuring rule into the crest sandbag, her thumb marking the wet line where the brown foam was sloshing over the burlap. “The crest is convex, Eren! Look at the crown of the water! The river is rising faster than the drainage water chute can swallow it! The high-pressure head is packing against the intake screens!”
