Ten minutes into the surge, the prepared turning basin was drinking eight thousand gallons of brown mountain floodwater a minute. But the floating wreckage of the upper forests was already threatening to choke the intake throat. A massive raft of dead hemlock branches, woven together by peat slurry and upland river moss, had slammed against the main trash-rack, bowing the two-inch iron bars inward like guitar strings under tension.
“Hold your positions on the overhead frame!” Tom Carver roared through his cupped hands, leaning over the timber safety rail. Two young draymen had already kicked off their boots, preparing to dive into the boiling brown whirlpool with hemp ropes between their teeth. “Step back from that ledge, you young fools! The first lad who touches that current gets sucked through the turbine grate before he can blink! We clear this trash from the dry platform, or we don’t clear it at all!”
Carver seized a sixteen-foot ash pike-pole fitted with a forged iron chisel hook. Standing on the solid oak decking of the overhead frame, five feet above the spray, he drove the steel tip deep into the root ball of the leading hemlock log. Beside him, Eren Tal threw an iron grappling hook over the trailing branches, snubbing the thick ship rope around a heavy cast-iron bollard. “Now, heave!” Carver barked. “Use the river’s own eddy to spin her! Don’t fight the current—let the back-eddy do the work!”
