This
selection from my letter archives is presented to explain the remark in
“Sealand
(part 3)” about the Silk City bus not having exploded on me yet.
December
3rd, 1997
…So I’m on the bus, just like a thousand other days when I’m on the
bus,
pouring over GURPS statistics, when this big ugly wench stomps forward
from
the back of the bus and complains to the driver that she smells smoke. The
driver
does what every good State Transit driver does: he feigns ignorance and
ignores
her. She goes back to her seat. I’m like, “Ah... the complainer.” There’s
one
on every third bus. The heat’s too
high, the heat’s too low. You know.
Pretty soon, another guy in the back complains. “Hey, there’s smoke
back
here.” Whether he’s complaining that
he can smell smoke, or that he can
see
smoke, I can’t tell. But he makes a
noise, and now a number of people are sort
of
looking back there and trying to figure out just what these people are on
about.
Various
sorts start sniffing the air. I take a
whiff, and yes, I can definitely get the
vibe
on smoke. But it isn’t overwhelming, or
even really obtrusive, and it is, after
all,
a highway. We pass factories and traffic
and all sorts of things that produce
foul
smelling pollution every day. I go back
to what I was doing.
A few minutes after that, it becomes obvious that more people than not
are
convinced they can smell something, because individuals in the front and
the
back get up and pop the rooftop emergency exits. This is a relatively common
procedure
executed by passengers on older buses.
It has the effect of ventilating
the
entire length of the bus, making it much like the world’s largest convertible.
It’s
usually done when it’s 112 in the shade and the air conditioning is broken.
That
eliminates the smoke smell, at least where I’m sitting, and settles everyone
down.
We know now that somewhere during this time period, the bus driver
got
a generator red-light on his console, and called it in to Central Terminal
as
per regulations.
Whether because of the red
light, or because the passengers feel
sufficiently
strong enough about the smell to pop the exits, the bus driver then
pulls
the bus over to the side of the highway.
He gets out of the bus, and
disappears
around the back, presumably to check the engine. Since I am sitting
on
the left side of the bus, and near the front, I can’t see what he’s doing. He’s
gone
for the space of maybe five minutes. At
the end of that time, he gets back
on
the bus and pulls back out onto the highway, only this time he’s driving
slower:
no
more than 30 miles an hour. We have no
idea what he’s trying to accomplish—
whether
he’s moving the bus to a safer location, trying to make it into Central
Terminal,
or what.
Five minutes after that, I am looking through Magic when there is a
sudden
lurch, and the bus immediately loses velocity.
Simultaneously, everyone
in
the back five rows leaps up and presses forward screaming, “FIRE!”
The driver immediately steers the bus over to the side of the highway,
opens
the doors, and with no fanfare, bails.
The situation for the rest of us
teeters
back and forth for a few tense seconds, as the people from the back five
rows
prepare to trample the people in the front fifteen, who have not yet realized
what
is going on, and are moving less than quickly.
No one thinks to use the
window
emergency exits. Somehow reason
prevails. Everyone files off in an
orderly
fashion. I am one of the last ten
people off the bus, preferring to let the
more
obviously panicked riders go first. I
am given the opening to get out by a
man
who sees the color draining out of my face as I watch clouds of smoke roll
forward
from the back of the bus inside the cabin. I am starting to cough by the
time
I hit the open air. I disembark inches
from a puddle of motor fluids that is
running
away to the right. I go to the left.
Most of us get a good fifty feet or so away before we turn around to
look; a smaller number keep going until they run
out of median. The back of the
bus
is engulfed in flames 10 to 12 feet high.
It has come to rest on the thin island
between
the express and local lanes of the highway; an accompanying thirty foot
cloud of smoke is drifting across the opposite
lane of traffic, obscuring vision there.
Police
materialize from somewhere, near instantaneously. They drop cones and
start
channeling all the traffic out of the express lane and into the local. The flames
burn
forward, cooking off the tires and the flammable fluids as they get to them.
When
the first explosion goes off, we move back another 50 feet or so.
Most of the riders are picked up by a Green & Black line bus which
stops.
There’s
sort of a code among bus drivers with respect to that: by the time the buses
hit
the major highways, they’re all done with their routes and are just booking out
to
Central
Terminal. Usually assistance occurs
within the same bus company, but this
was
dramatic enough to warrant an exception, I suppose. The rest of the riders,
myself
included, are picked up by another State Transit bus, and shuttled off to our
destination. No one stops us, or records our names. No statements are taken.
Upon arriving at Central Terminal, I disembark, and proceed to the
Avenue
to
find an open liquor store. It is 9:30
AM. I have an entire day of
storyboarding
ahead
of me.
Actually I eschewed the liquor store, although I was really looking for
one,
and
I did have a beer with lunch. I did
call my mother-in-law, to have her call
Weaver,
to tell her not to worry in case someone at work had a Walkman and Radio
News
decided to lead off the lunch update with “State Transit Bus from Ivory Grove
explodes! Details after the commercial break.” Weaver, ever of the steady head,
called
my parents to tell *them*, too, so the next thing I knew my Mom was on the
phone. That was funny, and actually very
comforting. (“Hello.” “Hi, Mom.”
“How
are you?” “Um... I’m OK.”
“Yeah?” “Yeah.” “I hear you had a little
problem.” “Um, yeah.
My bus exploded.”) We made the
TV news that night, and
the
local paper the next morning (but not the City Journal. Damn!)
There wasn’t
much
left of the sucker; they just kept
everyone at a safe distance and let it burn.
Had there been more people on the bus than there were, someone would
probably
have gotten seriously hurt, and possibly killed. As it was, the head count
was
very light for a weekday morning. The
woman and the guy who initially
complained
both came forward voluntarily and blamed everything on the driver.
They
had good reason to be upset: it turned
out that when they jumped up and
yelled
“fire”, it wasn’t because they could see the flames licking past the windows.
It
was because knee high flames shot up out of the engine access panels beneath
their
feet (and beneath my feet as I write this)--
the same place the smoke had been
coming
from. I couldn’t see that from where I
was, up front. They spoke to both
the
cops and State Transit, who both in turn wondered how come it hadn’t occurred
to
anyone on the scene to get the names of all the people who were on the
bus. The
police
and fire teams determined that it was the faulty generator that the driver had
called
in that blew up. State Transit grilled
him at length. He was trying to
get the
bus
to Central Terminal it turns out, and he hadn’t told them (and presumably still
hasn’t)
the passengers were complaining of the smell of smoke. After they
finished
their review of what happened, they fired his ass….
[My friend] Darwin, in an additional irony, wound up taking a bus
accident
class with his rescue squad that was taught by the guys who investigated
the
explosion. They used the accident as
their lead-off example. Darwin piped
up,
“My
friend was on that bus,” and suddenly he was Dean Witter. (Turned out the
account
I gave him matched what the investigators knew pretty accurately.)
It was the subject of some humor and shock at Giant Media Conglomerate,
too,
as you might well imagine. I was pretty
much unflappable for the rest of the
day-- what else could have happened to me?-- and
we amended one of our favorite
sayings,
“I’m driving the bus,” to “I’m driving the bus-- and it’s on fire!” But
for
quite
some time after that, I found myself sitting as far forward as I could get.
Subsequent
to the events recounted above, the Bus Drivers’ Union immediately
petitioned
to have the driver reinstated, since he had followed procedure and could
not
be held responsible for the exploding generator. State Transit responded that
they
had not fired him for blowing up the bus, but for fleeing a potentially life-
threatening
situation without providing any aid or instruction to the passengers.
His
case was then turned over to a third-party government council for arbitration.
I
never heard what the result was. I was
told by another State Transit driver that
if
the union succeeded in getting him reinstated, he would be placed on a
different
route
as far away from Ivory Grove as possible, where he would not be recognized.