The Uncomfortable Silence

The door opened and the noise and smell of the storm pushed into the office. The thunderous drone of rain pounding rooftops and windscreens and hitting puddles hard enough to make them pop and dance, and the wet earth smell of gutters overflowing with mud, leaves, tree branches and garbage bounded through The Page's open-plan office like the warm wet hairy breath of a big dog. Ping stepped in through the door and stamped her heavy boots. Mud and rainwater sprayed the carpet. She was short - not quite five foot - barrel-shaped and stiff. Phillipino black hair cut square across her forehead and her collar, shiny and flat as a piece of Lego. She smelled of rubber and wet wool. She shut the door and the storm suddenly settled, back in its kennel. From under her raincoat she drew out a battered satchel.

Ron Templeton, feature’s editor of The Page’s Weekend Magazine, watched from his desk at the far end of the office. He'd worked with Ping for six years out of her twenty-seven as a journalist. She was a teacher of English for fifteen or so years before that, he knew, so she had to be somewhere around sixty-five. He studied her. Her face had that, not lined, but hard, set look that some older Asian women get. She gave the impression that her life had been difficult, that she was tired and perhaps already beaten. It would be normal, at her age, he thought. No crime or sin or guilt attached to it. He looked for clues in her face, in her boots, in the way she walked, but he knew almost nothing about her except that the suggestion that she was beaten was an illusion, or not an illusion exactly, simply a misreading of what looking stiff and old and bone-tired might say about a person.

He reminded himself of what another editor had said once: "Old-age is a sucker-punch waiting to happen." In a funny way, she reminded him of Ali on the ropes, whispering into Frasier's ear. "Hit me again. Hit me again! Again! You tired yet? You tired yet?" But she moved like Ali at 80, slow and careful (although blessedly not shaking), not like Ali in his prime, when he could float like a butterfly.

Ron glanced at his own reflection in the rain-flooded window. He didn't quite recognise himself. Ever. He was always not quite the person he thought he was. He had to search for himself in amongst the people he could have or should have been. He was a workaholic. He had the coffee-cigarettes-and-insomnia look of someone who'd begun copy-editing obits and compiling crosswords at 16 and had steadily worked his way up the ladder from there, rung by rung. He had the compulsive’s eagerness to be oppressed, to hand over power and be simultaneously raised up and made the victim. He should have been a Born Again, but hadn't met the right saviour. He had met a saviour, just not the right one.

Using his elbows, he cleared a space on his desk. He leaned forward, ready to receive, like he was a catcher and old Ping was about to throw one down the barrel.

All these sports metaphors, he thought. Maybe should'a been a sports writer. But never boxed, never played baseball. Was once Whiteport Regional Scrabble Champion. Just once.

Get off that track, Ron.

Ping sure as hell does things the hard way, he thought. She has no faith in the internet. (Who does, really?) She doesn't trust The Page's secure communications server. (That would mean trusting The Page's tech-department, and who could, really? If any group of social misfits were open to being socially engineered out of a username or a password, they were.) Ping never emails. Still uses a landline, for crying out loud. Reads books. Does 99% of her research by talking to people. And won’t touch the cloud. One click and I could've already have already read it, probably even finished editing it, without all this mucking around in the rain. But that wasn’t her style.

He twirled his pen around his thumb then back again, flick, twirl, flick, twirl. Tick tick tick. Working with Ping was like going into an exam. She stomped her feet once more and starting walking across the office towards him.

Credit. She was old school.

Ron looked down and noticed that his hands were shaking. Shit.

It's hard to imagine forgetting that you're an addict, but it happens all the time. That's entirely the beauty of it: that when you have a hit you become you. The juice doesn't make you feel different; it makes you feel the same, the same as the way you imagine you should be, the way you want others to see you and to see yourself. Suddenly, the search for yourself is less hollow, less intense. It allows you to escape, to feel that you have managed to become the way you are deep down or when you're alone or in your dreams. It makes you forget. It makes you dance, as they say, as if no one is watching. Remembering you're an addict is like trying to forget that you are you. But then your hands start shaking and suddenly you are reminded: you are an addict and you live according to addict’s rules, on an addict’s clock. When was your last cap? How many more caps do you have? When do you need to get more? How easily can you score? Where is your dealer? Is he available now? Will he be available when you need him? What if he isn't? What's your plan then? The questions make your head ache and your heart thump.

Faerie Potion is poison. Ron thinks this every time. It's poisoning him, poisoning Whiteport, and hurting just about every person, culture, economy and community on the planet. But another hit would be nice. That's the kicker, the knife. He could just sneak off into the second cubicle in the gents and take a smack, or maybe even just pour it into his coffee in the staff room. Why not? People would notice the ammonia smell but hell maybe he could explain that. But maybe not. And what's your plan then, eh? Shit.

"Heavy rain," she said, putting the manuscript on his desk. "You know when it's supposed to stop?" She pulled a chair over and sat down.

You never lose that Phillipino accent, he thought. He didn't know about the rain, maybe tomorrow, maybe the day after. It was heavy, but it's not as bad now as it was then. Would it rain on the commemoration? No idea. Probably.

It was almost the tenth anniversary of the weather event that totally changed Whiteport, that tore it apart and put it back together differently. You know how when a doll has her arms ripped out, how after that there's always that weird gap along the join at her armpit? It doesn't matter how careful you are, there’s always that gap to remind you of what happened. Whiteport after The Event was like that. So whenever people talked about the weather, especially rain, there was a set of questions that hovered in the background: Is this as bad as then? Is this it - is this the beginning of "the next one"? And then of course there were other questions that came like a tidal surge after a storm. Are you ready? Am I ready? Everyone has a plan - but does anyone really have a plan? (And by anyone I mean the government, the police, the army, the emergency services workers, the aid workers, the hospitals, the goddamned kindergartens and primary schools, the PE teachers, scout leaders and part-time restaurant managers; I mean all the damn people who are going to be asked to help and protect us.) And the lists: of what to grab, of who to be near, of what - and who -  they might lose this time.

This list of costs and benefits, of what could be afforded this time, was the thing that separated the survivors from those who hadn't been touched and the kids who'd been born after, who had no idea.

Wind reminded survivors of daemons; hail of marauding hordes coming on horseback to smash windows and steal children. They were apocalyptic images, but it had felt like the end of the world. Only that was ten years ago, and they had all had to keep on living. Weird. Rain reminded people of death, of the soggy damp swollen smell of it floating out to sea and of bloated, fly-laden bodies - of cats and dogs and cows and pigs and sheep and birds, and even fish smashed, battered and drowned in the raging floodwaters, as well as people - friends and relatives - sinking slowly into the mud. Today's rain and the echo of that other rain drummed on the roof. It was heavy, like she'd said, meaning heavy in both senses. Ping was good like that, good at making words work overtime.

“This it?” he said, redundantly.

She just looked at the manuscript, then back at him.

Ping knew what poison addiction looked like. Of course she did. Ron ran his fingers through his hair to steady his hands, to hold onto his head and stop his brain from exploding. He looked at her title:

"The Uncomfortable Silence. 10 years on, echoes from The 2017 Disaster."

We'll just go with "10 Years of Echoes" he thought. Have to have "10 Years" in the headline. Be tighter, more economical. Put "the uncomfortable silence” somewhere in the first paragraph. Simple. Weird though: does silence echo? Is that awkward? What’s she getting at? Would a reader be intrigued or put off? Make a note. Think about it later. The word “Disaster” is tricky. “Tragedy” and “Disaster” kick blame to different parts of the field. Make a note; think about it.

Ping stood up. "I'll leave you to it. Call me."

She knows, he thought. She hadn't said anything directly, which meant she would work with him. But he felt judged. She would keep her distance. He exhaled, sad and grateful: prison but not execution. She opened the door and for a few moments the sound of the rain rumbled through the office again and wind snapped at the photocopy paper. She wrapped her coat a little tighter, braced herself, stepped out and shut the door.

Two hours back across town in the rain, he thought. Hard core.

He picked up his pen and began to read.

The Uncomfortable Silence.

10 years on, echoes from the 2017 disaster.

The call starts with a male voice. “Emergency Response. Can you tell me your location?”

The female voice belonged to Elena Ruales. Her voice sounds anxious and distracted: “Hello? Hello?”

Operator: “Yes. Hello. This is Emergency Response. Can you tell me your location?”

Elena: (To someone else) “Where are we?”

(A male voice, thought to be her husband, Ernest:) “Tell them we’re half-an-hour from the centre.”

Elena: “We’re half-an-hour from the Evacuation Centre at Heart Valley.”

Operator: “Were you at the centre?”

Elena: “Yes.”

Operator: “And you left? Why did you leave the centre?”

Elena: “We had to.”

Operator: “Why? You shouldn’t have left the centre.”

Elena: “We had to! We couldn’t find our daughter.”

(There is a small pause. In the background the male voice starts shouting “Shit!” over and over again.)

Operator: “Can you tell me your exact location?”

(Elena speaks to the male, who keeps shouting, “It’s coming. Fuck. It’s coming over the bonnet. We have to move.” A child can be heard crying.)

Elena: “Can you hurry? We need assistance!”

Operator: “Tell me where you are. I can’t help you if I don’t know your location!”

Elena: “Wilson. That’s the library. Oh my god, the library’s gone. Wilson and Peel. Yes. Peel. Peel!”

Operator: “What’s your situation?”

Elena: “What?”

Operator: “What’s your situation?”

(Pause, the sound of the wind, of rushing water and the child crying are all very loud.)

Elena: “We’re in trouble.”

Operator: “Are you in a vehicle? Are you in a house? What’s your situation?”

(Male voice:) “Tell them we’re on the roof of the butcher’s.”

Elena: “We’re on a roof.”

(Male voice:) “We’ll climb up. They’ll see us.”

Operator: “Are you on the roof now?”

Elena: “No. We’re on the roof of a car. A truck. But we’ll climb onto the roof.”

(In the background, the male is yelling: "Fuck. Hurry! Fuck. Elena, we've got to move! Come on!")

Operator: “We’ll send the next available crew to come and get you.”

Elena: “Hurry. It’s coming fast. Really fast.”

Then there is a click, and then there is silence.

When James Delaney filed a complaint against the Whiteport Police for lying to him about his wife’s last words, few people followed the case. His wife’s last words were on the phone to an officer at the Emergency Response Centre. At the time, she was trapped on top of a garage which was being swept out from underneath her by floodwaters. A policeman, in an effort to make him feel better, told him that his wife had sounded calm. This lie was also intended to stop Mr Delaney from accessing the conversation and hearing that the tone of the operator had been unsupportive and patronising, and not only was Jane Delaney far from calm in the minutes before her death, she was terrified and angry and felt agonizingly alone. Someone once wrote that all we want as we are dying is someone to hold our hand, and at times this is an ERC Operator’s responsibility: to reach down the phone line and hold the hand of someone in a life-threatening situation. In this case, it was easy to infer that the operator’s comments failed dismally to meet this obligation.

In handing down her ruling in that case, Judge Judy Wainright made an order which had wider implications. She ruled that that the ERC did not own the contents of the emergency phone calls it responded to. She further ruled that they were, therefore, obliged to provide unfiltered access to the contents of those phone calls to anyone who felt the need to listen to them. In complying with this ruling, the ERC at Whiteport made every emergency call it has fielded since 2004 available to the public via its website.

It is a gruelling process, but psychologist Paul Roman agrees that people grieving need to hear the truth of it in order to face and perhaps begin to move beyond the loss they have suffered. According to Paul: “If the truth is available first hand, then there is a natural and healthy compulsion to hear it or see it or to go to the spot and touch what’s left.” Everyone who lost someone on that day needs to hear how it was for them, how they sounded when they were calling for help for the last time.

Of the 19,805 calls received by the ERC on February 14, 2017, 13.1% resulted in referrals to the Coroner. All 2594 of these calls are all available through the ERC website. 97.5% have been accessed, some many times, in the ongoing process of reliving and letting go. But that leaves 2.5%, or 65 calls, that have never been listened to, people for whom no one has grieved, whose voices no one has needed to listen to one more time.

Elena Ruales was born in a small town just outside of Whiteport on October 26th, 1990. When she died, she was just 26. She had two children. Deena was five and Jonah had just turned three. She and Ernest had married five years before. He was a successful software technician at HinCo. Elena, too, had worked at HinCo, but left just before Deena was born. One can imagine that she was a vibrant young mother and that financially things were going well, so the future for her and her young family would have looked bright. That day in 2017 was Valentine’s Day, but with the rain in the week leading up to it they, like most people, were probably planning something quiet. Or perhaps, being busy parents, they hadn’t planned anything beyond the usual nightly challenges of getting kids fed, bathed, in to bed and to sleep.

Elena, Ernest and Jonah were seen at the Heart Valley Evacuation Centre sometime during the afternoon. Amid the confusion of more than 4,000 people, each facing life-changing dramas of their own, all jammed into a tin-roofed, two-court basketball stadium, with people and bedding and food and emergency crews with their vehicles and equipment all streaming in and out, no one can remember whether they saw a small blonde five-year-old named Deena or not. But quite a fw people remember when Elena and Ernest noticed that Deena had disappeared. They shouted for her. They enlisted others to help call out for her, telling people that she was wearing a pink jacket with white ears on the hood and a rabbit print on the front, red pants and pink rubber boots. Ernest, in particular, was wildly distraught. He appeared so angry that it left him almost disoriented. Elena was the one who seemed to hold the team together. She was the calm one who kept making decisions and looking for ways to make it turn out all right. They must have decided that they wouldn’t separate, that they would stay together as a family, come what may, and that they would go and try to find Deena. According to the coroner’s report, no one saw them leave the centre, but people had noticed that they were gone “sometime close to or just after sunset.” The sun set that day at 7:23pm.

Elena called Emergency Services at 10:08pm. We can only speculate as to exactly what they went through in those three hours, but we know that winds were gusting up to 190km/hr, that by 8.15pm it was almost completely dark and that, except for one brief miraculous pause just before 8pm, the rain fell constantly in thick blinding sheets. By that stage the floodwaters were full of debris. The muck-filled torrents which raced down both the Heart and the Butler Valleys were still growing in violence. The water knocked more and more garbage into their deadly trail until they were more like runaway trains laden with battering rams than the gentle rocky creeks we see if we visit them most days of the year. People were being guided by torches, by the sound of water gushing over and around and through obstacles, by buildings falling and metal crunching against metal, and by the thin threads of other people shouting. We know that Elena, Ernest and Jonah spent three hours searching for their daughter in these conditions before they made the phone call. We don’t know whether or not they found her, whether they had been forced to give up or had just become lost and trapped by the surging water. We only know that they didn’t make it back and crews were unable to reach the area they said they were calling from until late the next day. When emergency crews did eventually get there, there was no sign of them or the truck they said they were standing on at the time of the call.

The calls on the ERC website are just a list of letters and numbers - log details. At the end of phone call ECL-ERCWP-22:08-14/02/2017-013171, all we are left with is this uncomfortable silence. I feel the urge to comfort someone, but I cannot, because there is no one to comfort, no surviving relative, not one person before me who cared enough to need to listen to Elena’s last words even once. And I cannot draw comfort from the silence (as I could if I knew it meant the tragedy was over) because, even ten years later, I’m sure that the worst suffering came after that final click. For all of us, all we are left with is an absence, a loss, and a deeper realisation of just how much that event on Feb 14th 2017 took away.

I shuffle around my computer, scuffing the carpet with my old shoes. How do we as a nation explain this? There were hundreds of bodies never recovered from “The Wreck” (as the site of “unrecoverable damage” has become known) but few of those bodies disappeared as completely as the bodies of Elena Ruales, her husband and their children. They are ghosts: the invisible, the unmarked, and unmourned. How do we incorporate these uncomfortable silences - these forgotten stories and stories of our own forgetting - into our stories of recovery, of moving on, as we prepare to “celebrate” the tenth anniversary of the 2017 disaster?

Geoff Merkl looks dapper sitting in a tailored dark-blue suit. He has silver hair, calmly combed into place over a healthy tanned face. His eyes are piercingly sharp. He seems to never lose focus on whoever is talking to him and can remember almost word for word conversations he had yesterday as well as those he had ten years ago. But he speaks almost not at all and when he does it seems to emerge with soul-searching reluctance. Geoff prefers to work in his chambers rather than in the formal setting of the courtroom, although what he is doing has the same legal force as an order dispensed by the court. Being in chambers makes it easier, he says, for the victims to talk to him and then listen to and accept his ruling.

Geoff is the Administrator of the Special Fund for Victims of the 2017 Weather Event. “It’s a simple principle of adversarial law that when someone wins, they don’t usually care why they won, but when someone loses, they generally need to hear why they lost. They need someone to give them a good reason and to explain the process to them. They might not like that they lost, but if they can understand the reasoning, at least that makes it easier to accept the court’s decision.”

Geoff has become the government’s chief explainer. In a situation where everyone who comes before him has lost something, and where regardless of how much money he gives them few will ever be able to replace what they lost, his job is to make a decision and get them to accept the decision as quickly and painlessly as possible. “The first wave of claims were actually easier,” he tells me. “The formula was simpler.”

Geoff is all about the formula. He refuses point blank to engage in questions like “How could this have happened?” or to try to apportion blame. When, at one point, an irate claimant starts weeping and demands to know why HinCo aren’t paying, stating angrily that “they did it”, Geoff keeps moving calmly forward as if they’re okay and they know he can’t give them an answer, but he can give them money and he can explain why it’s x-amount and not y. He understands people’s need to seek answers to those questions, but says it’s totally outside his remit. “It’s probably impossible to say exactly who is responsible and to what degree,” he suggests. “And anyway, it wouldn’t move things forward. We’d get bogged down in it every day, with every claimant, forever.” Instead, he focuses on what was lost and the dollar value that could be used by the victim to alleviate that loss. Of course, doing so leads to some tricky questions of value. Is a child worth more or less than a partner? Is a twin brother worth more than a normal sibling? If compensation includes pain and suffering, then how much is losing a best friend worth? Is a partner you had fifty years of life together to look forward to worth more or less than the partner you had already spent fifty years with? To put it more generally: is what was lost measured according to how much value it had accrued or how much potential value you missed out on?

The answers, in order, are: less, no, less, depends on the financial implications of both the friendship and the suffering and, in general, potential value.

I tell him about Elena. He runs through some possibilities with me does her husband die? do one or both of her kids die? is she injured? - rolls around some figures in his head and then suggests she would get “something between five and eight million.” I can’t help but let out a low whistle. It seems a lot, but then, relative to the calamity, money itself seems paltry, however large the number. For a moment I imagine that Elena is alive, and that she is like a lottery winner who has yet to come forward to collect her prize. She’ll be so pleased when she hears, I think instinctively, stupidly, and then of course it hits me that Elena is dead. It comes via a silly logical back-door: if she were alive, I think, she would have come to collect her money, wouldn’t she? Therefore she must really be dead, buried in the mud as we thought all along.

Today, almost ten years after The Event, Geoff is still administering the fund and still hears victims’ claims every day. It is harder, he says, now that the claimants and the incidents are once or twice removed from those that clearly resulted from events that happened on the day. Fire-fighters who spent months recovering bodies and trying to make areas safe to re-enter, trudging more often than not through water contaminated with the pollutants which eventually had the area declared unrecoverable, were not innocent victims caught out by a once-in-a-millennium weather event. They were doing their jobs. Heroically, yes, but by choice and aware of most of the issues associated with that choice. But when the area was declared a wreck a huge number of them went home, suffered depression and then, much later, developed ocular and digestive-tract cancers at three or four times the rate of other males their age.

I sit in his chambers and watch Geoff work for an afternoon. He is compassionate and maintains that particular ability of his to be an intensely attentive listener, but he is also methodical and efficient. Some would see it as too business-like, as if getting the job done involves not being aware of the enormity of the victims’ suffering. In that context his dapper suit, his tan, his neat silver hair and his comfortable chair can all come to be seen as an insult to a process deeply and inextricably rooted in mud and rubble covered with oceans of tears and acres of grief.

I watch him talk to two fire-fighters who have cancer, to a grandmother whose two daughters were both injured in the floods and can now no longer look after her, to a builder who lost an arm trying to save his wife and now she wants a divorce. There is a nurse who can no longer deal with blood. Then there are more fire-fighters. He listens to them all. He listens to their wives. He listens to the stories of dark moods, of domestic violence in houses that were previously loving and safe places. He listens carefully as they talk about blooming alcoholism, declining income, and suicide. He listens, then he applies the formula. Knowing that they need it, he explains the formula as patiently as he can. But then there is a moment just before he asks the claimants (the victims) if they have any questions, where he does something subtle. He does it every time, as smoothly as if it were an innocent, unconscious act. He turns his wrist and glances at his watch. This little glance shifts the consciousness in the room. It reminds the victims that they are just one of many, and that they don’t have an exclusive claim on the Administrator’s office or its time. It says, louder than words, that we all have to have the wisdom to accept what we can’t change, and the good grace to know when to leave. But this move is not unconscious. It is practiced, in fact, and is the most gracious way Geoff knows how to keep things moving and save him, and therefore the government, a hell of a lot of time and money.

“The Special Fund is like a blank cheque given to you by your mother,” he explains. It is theoretically infinite, but must be used with rigorous fairness and common sense. He is formally accountable to the government and indirectly to all tax-payers. However, he sees his ultimate responsibility being to try to rebuild a healthy community. “It’s about costing out the healing process, and accepting that it’s better to pay for it now than pay for it later, when the cycles of trauma are more deeply entrenched and therefore much harder and more expensive to fix.”

I ask him about the situations where whole families have died and there are no “victims” left to make a claim. He explains that these are something of a strange anomaly. In terms of the fund - thinking purely economically - they are a bonus. Despite the fact that the fund is not a fixed-size cake, apparently it does still follow that when there is a loss but no one to claim it, there is somehow more pie to go around. At one point he shrugs and says, clearly aware of the irony: “Dead people don't need money. Only survivors need money. And not only that, there are more resources and opportunities which that money can be used to access.” He is aware that everything from counselling services to reconstruction materials and labour have been struggling to cope with the pressure. They too are flexible, but not infinite, cakes.

The other benefit for Geoff is that not only do dead people not need money, they don’t need explanations either. He looks at his watch. I see that he is a busy man who has been trying hard to do a very difficult job for a very long time. I notice for the first time that his eyes have tiny red veins creeping in from the side, and that beneath his tan his skin is cut with worry-lines. He has another case to hear, and then dinner with his ex-wife to get to. He says he’ll go to the official commemoration ceremony. He’s interested in, but hasn’t heard, how much they’re spending on it. He feels certain that it’s an important part of the healing process.

The comment of the fire-fighter - that question over why HinCo isn’t paying and his assertion that “they did it” - sits with me for a few days. That story, too, seems to have disappeared from public debate. Instead, we focus on the ideas of “community” and “healing”; we bow our heads, clasp our hands, and pray. In the ten years since the disaster, 55 new places of worship (including Churches, Mosques, Temples, Synagogues etc.) opened for business in the Whiteport region, and people gave $4 in donations to religious based support groups for ever dollar they gave to non-religious groups.

“God did this,” says a piece of graffiti on a wall near the Memorial Arch. It has the double-edged cut of a comment that may be taken to suggest that God brought down His wrath on Whiteport and unleashed The Event to punish us, or else it might mean that He was there when the first piece of reclaimed debris was put in a pile which grew into the Memorial Arch itself, and which has become a focal-point and a symbol of unity, strength, resilience and recovery.

On Saturday, the official Anniversary Mass will be held at Memorial Arch and will be led by Father Terry O’Brien. Terry was a not-wholly-convinced Jesuit brother doing working in the Whiteport soup-kitchens in 2017. He laughs loudly and has the charm and warmth and forearm strength of a solid Irishman. “For me it was the woman thing!” he laughs. “I used to think, ‘What am I doing, committing myself to a life of beer but no women?!’” His laugh rolls over me and he pats me gently but warmly on the shoulder. His love for people is palpable, and according to him is a direct expression of his faith.

When he became involved in the recovery process after 2017, he had such a profound experience of God’s presence among the survivors that he fast-tracked his ordination and began saying mass at the makeshift church he built out of piles of rocks and bits of twisted metal on Grange Hill.

Sitting half-way between The Wreck and the centre of Whiteport, Fire-fighters, Emergency Service workers, and skilled volunteers came past Grange Hill on their way home each day from working on what at that point was thought of as the recovery process. Their feet, their souls and their hearts were heavy and the tiredness seemed to have penetrated their bones so deeply most feared it would never lift. They needed support and energy. According to Terry, they needed faith. “It’s only faith in God that can fill a hole like that.” Slowly, the recovery workers began finding time to stop off and they began a tradition of depositing something they had found - a part of a doll’s house, a child’s toy, a braided dog-leash, a broken picture frame, a bit of metal that had been twisted into the shape of a cross. Then they would sit for a minute or two. Sometimes and hour or two would disappear. Father Terry started spending time there, comforting them and day-by-day rebuilding their faith so they could continue doing the soul-shattering work they were doing.

I ask Terry about the graffiti. He can see that it can be taken both ways, he says. “But anger has to have a place inside God’s love, too,” he explains. “People need to be able to be angry at God and know that He won’t turn away from them.”

On Saturday, Father Terry will begin his day as usual in one of the Soup Kitchens. “The need for them is now bigger than ever. The social and economic challenges facing Whiteport are much bigger now than they were 10 years ago.” After that he will come to Grange Hill to lead the official Anniversary Mass. There has been talk already about why the official mass is Christian and not Jewish or Muslim, or why they couldn’t have found a way to accommodate a wider variety of faiths. Some people have questioned whether or not religion should have been allowed to shape the proceedings at all, arguing that they are being made to feel that their emotions are not valid because they can’t be shoe-horned into being about their relationship with God.

“It is a tough situation,” Terry admits. “It’s impossible for a committed Jesuit Priest no to come off as being evangelical about the power of faith and the importance of one’s relationship to God. But I respect other faith-traditions and I don’t see faith in God as a way of white-washing discussion about the causes and effects of 2017.” But if God did it, then there isn’t much need for further investigation, is there? And certainly the Christian God - Terry’s God - has a rap-sheet which makes it seem kind of likely. He has one prior conviction for flooding which only Noah, with some nifty boat-building and a good species-management program, managed to squeak civilisation through. So, as they say in the cop-shows, it looks like He’s good for it. Case closed.

Father Terry doesn’t feel like a political pawn. He is a man of faith doing God’s work in a profoundly compassionate way, but he concedes that politicians, big businesses and even the cartels love to use God to close out discussion. Ironically, it’s probably different religious groups who’ve used God as a blanket more than anyone else. From jihading terrorists to right wing Christian fundamentalists, God gets used to solve some sticky arguments in politically motivated ways. “Using God for political reasons usually ends up creating situations which lead to ignorance, lack of compassion, and violence, I know.” He pauses and it seems that he takes a moment to say a prayer. This outcome is so at odds with everything Father Terry is working towards that when he looks at me again, his shoulders are slumped and his eyes seem weary. This seems to be the pattern when I meet good people working to get beyond 2017: they are tired, but they’re giving everything they have to make a better future for Whiteport. “For me faith is everything.”

I tell him about Elena Ruales and the 65 other calls to the ERC that no one has ever listened to. He promises to include them in the prayers at the mass. I feel, unexpectedly, incredibly grateful. It seems easy for him. This gift of love adds to him somehow and as he makes the promise he seems stronger, more resolute, but also happier in himself. We shake hands and I leave, feeling renewed optimism about the ways I can make sense of those three spray-painted words: “God did this.”

Mary Lynch is teaching a class full of eager six-year-olds in one of Whiteport’s toughest suburbs: Eastbrook. She is a compact young woman with three years teaching experience.

“Eastbrook is where a large portion of the Emergency Accommodation was first built,” she tells me. “So a huge proportion of the kids here have been affected by The Event, but very few of them have any idea what it was like. They have to deal with the issues of members of their family having injuries or post-traumatic stress or whatever, but often their parents just won’t talk about it, so they don’t know.”

I watch students draw pictures with crayons of what they imagine happened 10 years ago. “Art therapy is a very effective way into a young child’s inner world. They find it almost incomprehensible to not draw what they’re thinking,” Mary tells me. There are pictures of boats and cars pressed together in a watery mess, but in some the water is bright blue, in others the sun is shining, in still others the people are all smiling. One is mostly black and there is a dog with blood coming out of its mouth. Another is empty; the child has no picture of what it was like. Mary says that’s okay, and encourages her to just draw a picture of what she thinks the sea looks like.

Google “The Event Whiteport” and you get about 35,000 videos to choose from, but these kids are too young to watch the YouTube clips of The Event or to listen to the coverage or the recorded phone calls which perhaps (only perhaps) begin to tell the truth of that day. And for the generation who weren’t there, I wonder, which stories are the ones they need to hear?

Annika, a cute six year-old with bouncy blonde curls, tells me she still has a mum and a dad and an older brother who all survived that day. When I ask her how things are at home she squirms and smiles. “Good” she says shyly. Jeff, a small whippet with big eyes, whispers almost to himself, “My mum is sad.” It’s impossible not to want to hold these kids and fill them with stories that everything will be okay and nothing bad will ever happen ever again. I want to use phrases like “Never ever ever” and finish stories with “and they all lived happily ever after.”

Mary tells me that she feels uncomfortable with trying to pass on this particular piece of history. She hasn’t found a right way to do it, and perhaps there isn’t one, but she questions her responsibility in trying to create happy and sane children who will grow up to be good citizens. She looks back and feels as if she is a part of a history of teachers trying to teach primary school in the years after Hiroshima, or Chernobyl. Putting it in that context, she says, makes her feel grateful, but she still has to come to terms with her place in process. “Ii can’t remember the line,” she says, waving away her fringe and suggesting with an encouraging smile that it’s okay for one of her students to get a reader down from one of the low bookshelves, “but it’s that one that says that people who don’t learn history are more likely to repeat it.”

Mary is the guardian of both a set of information and a group of bright, excitable children, so teaching the history of The Event is a delicate balancing act. At some point, they will have to hear the stories of the mistakes we made, the decisions that were made that shouldn’t have been. They will have to hear more than just “God did this.” But Mary and hundreds of teachers like her face the difficult questions of when and how.

As adults, we find it hard to face the truth of what led to The Event. The intervening ten years have made that abundantly clear. Investigations have been shelved and the focus has always swung towards “recovery” and “healing.” This would be fine if it wasn’t for the fact that it leaves us without a real history to pass on, and may perhaps by its silence leave those in the future vulnerable to repeating the mistakes of the past.

John Jefferies is a widely read and exuberantly bright man for someone who spends most of his time looking at dials and readouts in the bowels of our two largest dams: the Butler and Blue Water. It was he who pointed out to me the contrast between our approach to The Event and our approach, say, to most violent crime. “In cases involving violent crime, the crime is usually brought on as a result of a whole host of issues, decisions, failed relationships between the accused and the support structures that are meant to be in place to help them. But when a violent crime is committed the basic aim of the criminal justice system is to punish the offender. And the public, to a large degree through a tacit silence, support that. A huge effort goes into prosecuting the offender. We investigate, interview, and do everything we can to build a case against the accused in order to punish him or her appropriately, and this transforms that history of our failure to support this person into evidence against him. The rationale for this is that punishment and fear of punishment stops people from offending, and that focusing on rehabilitation and change or early intervention is a waste of time. In the case of The Event, we as a community have focused almost entirely on rehabilitation. We have looked only at the needs of the survivors and of how to ‘get back on track’ (which you’ll remember was the Dickson government’s slogan when she ran for re-election in 2021). There has been almost no real investigation into the true causes of the breaches at Blue Water and Butler Dams or any real effort to prosecute those at fault. It’s like watching someone murder 8287 people in one day, and then simply asking what we can do to help. One really has to wonder, especially since it’s so out of character, why this has been the case.”

Jefferies is the head of the not-often-mentioned Water Securities Board. Early in his career, he managed a number of regional dams and since 2019 has been responsible for overseeing the safety and security of the majority of the state’s domestic and commercial water-supply. The Water Securities Board is an independent body established by the government, but the Minister for Water has no statutory requirement to listen to anything the Board says, nor is he required to even consult with it. In other words, the Board can be used as a place to store knowledge but not have to listen to it. In his role, Jefferies has had to review the entire history of every dam in the region and specifically the history of the Butler and Blue Water Dams, yet he has never been required to give evidence or testify in front of an inquiry or a court in relation to The Event. In fact, he’s never been asked for his opinion by anyone. Anyone. And he cannot find a publisher interested in hearing what he knows about the lead up to and aftermath of our nation’s worst “natural” disaster.

We meet in a McDonald’s. He jokes with me that while the meat may be synthetic, at least the chemicals in it are real. He’s wearing a white shirt suit pants and steel-capped dress-shoes. At first he is thoughtful, and it’s obvious he has spent a lot of nights adding up all the different scraps of evidence he has collected and comparing them with the narrative he proceeds to tell me. But he is convinced that what he knows is important, and once he gets going he starts gesturing with his hands and slapping the table for emphasis.

It was in the late nineties that people began really campaigning for governments to accept the reality of climate change and respond appropriately. We all know that for lots of reasons most governments were sort of tied to the oil-economy, so they had to dilly-dather around making fundamental changes. But drought and water pressure was something they felt a lot of pressure to act on and felt that it was an area they could act on. By 2005, Whiteport was a city of 15 million people. According to forecasts at that time, by 2050 it would have 20-25 million people and access to roughly half as much potable fresh water.

The Blue Water and Butler Dams were commissioned and pushed through on the back of an election-winning pair of promises: fresh water and fresh jobs. In this atmosphere, some of the time and space needed to think critically about the risks involved in the project is lost. Mistake number one.

After the election, a local company, HinCo, takes a hugely profitable risk and creates a set of subsidiaries. Under the name Blue Futures it wins the contract. Mistake number two: a massive government initiative is immediately privatised and given to a company with no track record in dam construction. This means that not only is the second, and last, chance to rethink the dam projects as a whole is lost, but critical areas of oversight are also given away and Blue Futures is largely left to self-regulate.

I have to stop him and ask if he thinks the dams shouldn’t have been built at all. The Butler and Blue Water provide household water to almost a third of Whiteport residents. John tells me that the science is not conclusive, but suggests strongly that the shift in pressure brought about by melting sea ice has changed the pressures on tectonic plates globally. Scientists are having to rewrite what they thought about just how likely earthquakes are in certain “marginal” sites around the world, sites that happen to include Whiteport. “and for very obvious reasons it’s simply not a good idea to build large dams above populated areas in an earthquake zone.” This science was fully known or understood at the time, but John’s point is that the time and opportunity to sort it out was given away by pushing through and then privatising the construction of two dams in valleys above Whiteport’s northern and western suburbs.

The second step towards 2017 involves men looking at dials and setting the flows in and out of Butler and Blue Water. There has been a lot of debate back and forth over whether or not letting more water out of the dams earlier would have mitigated the disaster, but Jefferies suggests that the dam managers made the right decisions in the day or two before Feb 14, but the problem was that they had too much water to start with.

“People often think that a dam that’s 100% full is actually 100% full,” he explains. In practice, all dams have a “flood mitigation level” and the Water Securities Board’s standard protocol for dam management stated that the concept of "full" was actually at 50% of maximum capacity, leaving 50% for flood mitigation.

But the Butler and Blue Water dams were built in an environment heated by years of drought induced by (or at least exaggerated by) Climate Change. They felt and responded to the pressure to “safeguard our water future”.

But the pressure on Blue Futures - or directly on the people who controlled the knobs and dials at Butler and Blue Water - was to provide cool drinks, warm baths and green gardens to the people in the city, as well as cheap water to irrigators in the fruit bowl so that apples and oranges didn’t end up costing more than customers could afford, and finally to the rows and rows of processing plants, reactors and refineries in the south-west who need water to cool the machinery that does everything from build our cars to producing our electricity. In short, they needed a lot of water.

As a result, the Butler and Blue Water dams ran with a protocol that insisted that water levels could be maintained at 73% full from 2013 onwards. And they could do this without interference from government because the government had, in-effect, sold the right to regulate.

“This wasn’t just cowboys-management,” insists John. “They did have some science supporting them.” The 73% figure was based on the relative size of the dams to their catchments. They were putting bigger walls on smaller catchments, so the storage capacity was greater relative to rainfall than older dams, which theoretically changed the margin. Blue Futures argued (mostly with themselves, so it wasn’t a particularly hard sell) that it would take longer to fill and that they’d therefore have more time to empty it if they needed to. “But while the maths was solid,” insists Jefferies, “the basic premise was fundamentally flawed.”

What Blue Futures did not take into account were the reasons the dams were built in the first place. Climate Change created a weather regime during which far more intense rain falls in fewer, bigger rainfall events. It is actually wetter in most of the world's subtropical and temperate areas. (Not all, apparently, because local weather is a fickle thing). To an average Whiteporter it seems drier because there are far more sunny days, those days are much hotter, and as a result the dirt around our feet spends more time being dusty and cracked than it did 20 or 30 years ago. But when it rains, it pours. These storm deluges are regular enough for everyone to have become somewhat adjusted to them, but it is precisely this regularity of intense and extremely localised storm activity that mean that dams cannot be safely run at more than "full", regardless of their catchment size.

Mistake number three was simply that Blue Futures (HinCo) staff ran their dams too full. They did this in order to keep their customers happy, but not necessarily to keep them safe.

“On Feb 14th you get a situations where all these mistakes meet. You have dams which are already overfull and have no margin for error, and then suddenly you get this huge storm event which pushes them to their absolute limits. At this point - about midday on the 14th - both dams already had water flowing over the tops of their walls. And then you get an earthquake, which you knew was coming at some point. The pressures on these two dams was intense, and even a minor tremor can put a big crack in a dam under pressure. The Feb 14th quake was 6.8 on the Righter scale but only about 27kms off the coast of Whiteport, or 52kms from the dam wall at Blue Water, and 32kms from Butler. Overfull dams cracking above them, and a tidal wave coming at them from below, the people who were caught in the middle didn’t have much chance of a good outcome.”

“It’s coming fast. Really fast.”

Elena Ruales last words.

There are some silences that are hard to come to terms with. It’s hard to speak about Elena Ruales because there isn’t a happy ending and it’s hard, apart from the valuing of simply honouring her memory, to know what good comes out of thinking about her. It’s much easier to think about the people who found love, or faith, or redemption, or at least some piece of comfort and hope, in the mud and debris left behind by the 2017 Disaster. But there are stories still being written which require talking about, and kids who are growing up in a world which is post-2017, but not very different from it, for whom we need to provide more than just fairy-tales and You-Tube clips.

On Saturday, at the Official Memorial Service, we will tell and retell our stories. Through that process we will inevitable rewrite some, recast others, and create a new layer in the history of 2017. But as I sit with the silence at the end of Elena Ruales last phone call, I wonder what she would have done differently had I been able to tell her the things that John Jefferies told me about the Blue Water and Butler dams, about Climate Change and the probability of storm events and earthquakes. Would she have bought the flat with her husband and children in the middle of the Heart Valley? Would she have left earlier that day? And finally: would she be alive today?

Without discussion, without honesty, people have no choice. Silence took away Elena Ruales’ choices, which led to her death, which in its turn has left us with another silence. I think the best way to honour her absence is by telling the truth. This is the only way the children in Mary Lynch’s class at Eastbrook Primary will grow up to be able to make choices not just about how they live, but about whether or not they or their friends and relatives experience another 2017.

No one went back and listened to Elena Ruales call because there was nobody around who missed her. Whether we know it or not, we are all missing the true story about Blue Futures and the factors which made the 2017 disaster so much more deadly and destructive than necessary. Why? Because it’s far easier to focus on healing, to say it’s “probably impossible to apportion blame” or to say “God did it”. And not only is it easier; it’s also better for the economy. At least it is for now. Jefferies calls it “criminal neglect of our own future.”

According to Jefferies, the single biggest reason for our ongoing silence is that HinCo, who owns Blue Futures, is just “too big to fail.”

“Too big to fail” was the explanation famously used in 2011 to not act more vigorously to regulate and prosecute the banks in America who were handing out and passing on dangerously risky home loans and creating a situation of massive and unsupportable debt. In that case it led to the Global Financial Crisis which crippled America and Europe and led to a massive power shift in the global economy. The idea of “too big to fail” is a dead duck now, an emblem suggesting all the dangers of misguided and muddled thinking.

But when a company is so tied into every level of a community’s operation, how can it be allowed to fail? And certainly, how could one decide in good conscience to prosecute it to the point that it might be weakened, let alone fail, given that even shaking the tree could have devastating impacts on local health and prosperity? It would be like going into a one factory town - a little country town like Spitsburgh, where the only industries are tuna farming and tuna fishing and a “swim with the tuna” tourist resort - and bringing a case that charged that all tuna should be allowed to enjoy their lives without any interference from human activity. It might be a good, ethically sound, environmentally just case, but what happens to Spitsburgh? It dies. The outflow from that decision is poverty, isolation, depression, domestic violence, child abuse and so on. What at first seemed a moral triumph quickly becomes a moral disaster. It is obvious that unless you have a solid back-up plan, the tuna industry in Spitsburgh is too big, too important, too well-connected, to fail.

Of course, with HinCo and Whiteport, you have a city of 18 million people and the world’s fifth largest company. There is no back up plan big enough to cope with the failure of HinCo in Whiteport.

So on Saturday, as you tune in to listen to the President and the Mayor and Father Terry repeat stories you’ve heard before, and as we focus on rebuilding our community, try to listen for the ghosts and echoes that inhabit the silences. The seats that would have been filled, by people who would have been there had we been more open in the first place, are hard to see. The silences that they have left and that caused their absence are hard to hear. But we must try, because this is the way to honour those that went before, and who are coming after us. And the future is, as always, coming fast. Really fast.

Ron put down his pen, rubbed his eyes and swore softly.

“Shit.” He sorted the pages back into order. “Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit.” He wanted to punch her. Praise her for her reporting, then punch her again.

He called and arranged to meet.

At The Page they had a test. It was called The Running Man Test. It went like this: If you were sitting at a window and you saw a man run past, then two hours later you saw the same man run back again in the other direction, how long can you safely say that the man was running? The instinctive answer is that the man was out on a run that took at least two hours, that his run route went out and back and took him past your window once on each leg of his run. They called this the Inertia Assumption: the assumption that what you saw happening at one or two points continued to happen before or after you observed it. This is the assumption that says that people in general keep doing whatever it is they're doing. In some situations, this is obviously not the case: a mother who happens to be in the kitchen preparing dinner at some point during the day is highly unlikely to have spent the whole day in the kitchen. In other cases, this is trickier: it is harder to believe that a man who lies and steals and cheats on his wife spends much time not lying, stealing and cheating on his wife. As a journalist at The Page, they were trained to entertain the possibility that the man that runs past your window did so and then promptly sat down, then two hours later got up and ran back past your window; or that he ran past your window, had a heart attack, died, went to hospital, was revived, released, and then, overjoyed, ran back past your window two hours later; or that he ran past your window and through a doorway into another dimension where he slept soundly for a hundred years then returned just in time to avoid seeing his former self then ran back past your window on his way home; or that your window was in fact shut and that what you'd seen was the reflection of an ad being played on your television which happened to be broadcast two hours apart. No. You check that your window was open and then you report that you saw a runner run past your window in opposite directions two hours apart and that you are certain of just this much. All you know for a fact is that the man ran for a total of fifteen seconds - seven and a half in each direction. After that you can go and find the man and find other witnesses and reconstruct what else actually happened. Until you do that, you don't know how much longer than fifteen seconds he ran for, so you couldn't write it as fact and The Page couldn't publish it.

He knew it was all true, and then some.

They met at a little Chinese take-away. He sipped a lemonade while Ping had one of those Asian tea drinks with fluffy round balls floating in it. He hated the feel of those floating things. The texture of them in his mouth gave him the creeps.

“You’re going to kill it,” she said.

It was like being beaten to the punch in a confessional.

“They’ll kill you.”

That was the bottom line.

“No they won’t,” she said calmly.

“Really?” He was genuinely surprised. He hesitated, curious, but had to stay on course. Coming off the faerie-potion made it hard to track. Then again, being on the faerie-potion made it hard to track. He had to stay on course. “Even if we take his name off it, they’ll find Jefferies and use him as a warning. Shit, the way it is they’d probably do something at the school and then rape Father Terry just for helping you out.”

She frowned. He was going overboard, but he had a point. Maybe she’d gone too far.

“Maybe you know something that you think keeps you alive, or your just too old to care, but neither of us wants to be involved in having some innocent scientist get his tongue cut out and his body hung from an overpass.”

Three weeks before, a woman’s body had been mutilated and hung above the Western Expressway.

“She was a drug-mule turned informant.”

“You know the links. You almost went so far as to say it in the article: HinCo isn’t just too big, it’s also ‘too well connected’. It’s one thing to put a gun to your head; it’s another to actually pull the trigger.”

“You should know.”

She didn’t say it, but she’d finally said it: called him a junky. He wanted to argue that it was under control. He was a white-collar-user with a white-collar “dealer-friend” “friend-who-happens-to-deal”. He wanted to say that they would be friends even if he didn’t visit this friend strictly and only when he needed to buy a hit. His was the happy private side of poison addiction. He wasn’t breaking and entering or hanging out at toilets offering cheap blow-jobs. He wasn’t like that. He could argue that everything was okay, that no harm was done, that his was a victimless crime. He occasionally believed that he was on the distant edge of the chain of supply-and-demand, so he wasn’t really responsible for the actions of its corrupt twin brothers: violence-and-silence: the pillars of criminal free-trade. But those periods of relief were distant islands. He was part of it; she knew it, and fuck her made him face that he knew it, too. HinCo and the cartels were hand-in-pocket. They were light and dark, shadow and sunshine. They were coin. Two sided but with one head. And Ping wanted to chop it off at the neck.

“You owe me.” She would get this much out of the fact that Ron would kill the story, or gut it to the point it was unrecognisable. At least it was something. She went to stand up, but Ron had a stab of junky desperation. He felt it like a punch. He couldn't handle any more debts. He grabbed her wrist.

“You should thank me!" He wanted to hiss menacingly - he knew they were the words he would want used - but he couldn't muster it. He was pathetic. He could hear himself as a child whining about getting his toy back – the set of military figures his mother had thrown out when he was eight because they cluttered the house. "I don’t know what your death wish is, but if that had gone to some other editor - at some other paper - or even just into someone else’s email - with your name on it - you’d be dead by pension day.” And not just her. “You must have known that.”

He’d threatened her almost by accident. He could send it on. Not publish it, but leak it. Then it would really rain.

“HinCo doesn’t own everything.”

He just looked at her, at everything around them.

She sighed, taking it all in. It was everywhere, everything.

“You’re the editor.”

She lifted her arm free and walked out. He rubbed his temples, thinking that maybe it wasn’t his job to tell the truth; it was just to keep her and him and all of them at The Page alive long enough to - what? - hell, he didn't know - to see what else was going to happen. He sat staring at his half-finished lemonade and her cup of floating lychees.

He wished Elena and her family had lived. That would have made a story.

He shivered.