GWOT Bleach Blanket Bingo
Nov. 27th, 2018 01:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
drewkittyGWOT Bleach Blanket Bingo
We were starting to run out of potential convoy destinations for foodstuffs. That was a Very Bad Thing.
We had almost thirty percent of the perimeter - all the north and a chunk of the south on either side of that gate - wired in, with the rest at least marked with tape or a cleared patch of ground. But holding the line wouldn't do any good if all the people inside it starved.
Nor did our latest acquisition help much. At the last staff meeting, I had demanded that along with the new corporate militia, that we organize a first aid organization and a fire service. The guard force's modest training in both roles was being overwhelmed by pressing needs, let alone the ever present potential for disaster.
Our first fire vehicle had been a Diesel powered 4 wheel drive pickup truck with extended bed. Married to a poly water tank and a skid mounted trash pump, with a rack for tools and hose, we had christened it what it was - a brush truck. Further modifications would have to wait.
Now I looked at an honest to goodness fire engine, escorted in by today's convoy.
"I found it at the side of the road, can I keep it?" asked Janine, who really should have known better.
The front doors read "Uvas Volunteers" - a small struggling volunteer department nestled in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Obviously they would have no use for it. The front fender had what looked like fresh damage.
I decided to solve three birds with one stone. Since the Data Center raid, Janine had attached herself to the Security Department in ways that I considered unhealthy and a poor example. Irrepressible, unwilling to wear a uniform, always carrying a fire axe ...
"Yes, Fire Captain," I replied. "The traditional punishment for bringing a puppy home is having to feed and water it, and clean up after it. This is all your puppy now. Find or make a uniform suitable to a Fire Captain of an actual department. If I recall correctly, that's some color of blue - NOT black. That is your new assignment. Take command of the site's Fire Brigade. I will square it with the SLE."
"But ... I'm not an Employee!"
"Even better. You can be spared to full time fire service duties. Congratulations on your new department. Department head."
Janine was just starting to grasp what a ferocious punishment I had found to inflict on her.
"I suggest you start working on your staffing plan right now. I will need the brush truck and two fire crew for tomorrow's convoy. Both will require full turn out gear, PPE, and Hazmat training at the Operations level, because I'm going to go clear a hazmat with them. Your newly acquired engine will need to be staffed for coverage while the brush truck is out on convoy. You have a lot of work to do. Go."
Her jaw dropped.
"Or you can go back to contract IT work. Your call, Captain."
She stormed off to Security Control. I chased her with an E-mail.
"Where do I park this?" Buddy asked from the driver's seat.
"Motor pool. How fucked up is it?"
"Lots!"
"Oh good," I murmured as it limped into the site, transmission slipping. But hey, it was a piece of apparatus, right?
I went back to the South Gate construction trailer we used as a gatehouse - soon to be a bunker - to my day's task of shuffling badge and access control logs for the semi-sacred Count, the twice a day precision list of who was on site and why. We had to have 100% accountability for persons on site.
Miss just one saboteur, and all of this is for nothing.
###
We were starting motor pool assembly of the convoy an hour early. This briefing would suck more than usual.
"Attention to orders!" Brooke called.
Everyone perforce listened up.
"The objective is the Dollar Barn on Leigh. As we all know, during attempted looting someone ran a truck into the front security gate while it was down, causing a collapse of the cleaning products section and a major hazardous materials spill, mostly of bleach but also of ammonia and other products. I have determined that it is within our capabilities to clear the hazmat spill and salvage undamaged goods.
"Recon has determined that the municipal water mains in this area are up. This is key to the plan.
"We will establish an outer perimeter per SOP during the operation. Laborers will wear full face respirators and Tyvek suits. The fire crew will charge two hose lines - one from the mains, one from the brush truck, lay out a decontamination area, and make initial entry. We will flood out the hazardous chemicals with massive quantities of water, preferably from the building's own sprinkler system but if necessary from hose lines. We will then load out the items ironically protected from looting by the hazmat spill with a special focus on the food and the health/beauty aisles.
"Overwatch will bring fire axes and pike poles as you will need to ventilate the roof and stand clear. We have three contingency scenarios. The first is if the decontamination effort is too big for us, I will call it, we will decontaminate ourselves and leave. The second is if we are met with force majeure, i.e. if our badge wearing friends show up and demand a share of our hard work. We will extract with whatever we have loaded, and leave them to it. The third is if we are interrupted by banditry. During our operation, we will defend the operations location with force and use deadly force only in direct point self defense - but be ready to break contact if we've bitten off more than we can chew."
I broke down the elements of the plan. It was simple but nasty.
We had too much experience with this. I didn't have my heart set on the store aisles. I had my heart set on the as yet unpacked cardboard boxes in the back room. Separated by at least one interior wall from the hazmat, they may well have fared better.
I motioned the fire crew and my handful of hazmat folks to the side.
"When you are working, I need you to inspect the bleach bottles carefully. I need _intact_ bleach containers only, placed in the salvage drums we are bringing. Just the bleach. Because reasons. Getting this much bleach is a major fork in this operation."
We rolled out. We rolled up. We charged hose lines. Covered by a fog nozzle, my breacher defeated the already broken back doors with a sledge. Then I put on my own respirator. I was already wearing the Tyvek suit, booties, ad nauseum ... with my duty belt over it and my radio double-bagged in plastic. I know you're not supposed to use duct tape for sealing gaps in protective gear, but it's what we had.
I made entry with my keys: a bolt cutter and a wrench. My eyes traced the ceiling and found the sprinkler system pipes. I followed these back to the riser. I cut the lock off the riser valve and made sure the system was charged. Then I stole a store stepladder and carefully climbed across the spilled chemicals and set it up to reach a sprinkler head.
Without a respirator, I'd be dead by now.
I wasn't about to set it off with a match. But I did tap it with a hammer until it started spraying water all over the place.
Two sprinkler heads later, I slunk outside for a heat exhaustion break. The spray of the fog nozzle washing me off felt good.
A large, unfriendly crowd had gathered along the sidewalks, watching us loot their neighborhood store.
Crap.
Sharon sidled over to me.
"Boss, I've got a bad feeling about this."
"Yeah."
If we packed and left, the crowd would hurt themselves on the hazmat. If we finished decon and started loading, the crowd would probably hurt themselves on us, which would not help our community relations worth a damn.
I went back in.
"Change of mission. No sorting, no bleach salvage. Load cardboard boxes out the back. Time now, haul ass. No decon, no time. All three truck beds, hazmat dirty. Only load two, third truck bed is only for personnel. Decon team, switch to flooding out the store immediately."
The team got really busy, really fast.
I took a roll of our precious HAZMAT tape and taped off the storeroom from the front of the store, using upside down shopping carts as if they were cones.
We didn't have gas sensors, not that you could tell them what to sense for in such a mucky situation. Imagine a spill under your kitchen sink times a thousand.
"Take five," I called on radio. This was not permission to take a break. This was a five minute warning that we were leaving in five minutes.
Guards eyeballed each other, the crowd, and their assigned vehicles. Mental rehearsal of what they would do when it was time to go.
We had the two pickup truck beds half loaded. The laborers would have to ride outside in the third truck, because we needed to keep some people 'dirty' to decontaminate and unload on campus. I went to each laborer personally and explained, nice and loud through my respirator, that this was their last box to load. Then I had the fire crew decontaminate me.
I held up a finger. Just one.
One minute.
"Team, ignore the distraction and begin tactical loading when you hear it."
The laborers went from their last box directly to the back of the third truck. I counted twice. A missed count was a dead laborer.
I took off my respirator and let it dangle by the straps. Then I picked up the bullhorn I keep in my truck for these kinds of situations.
"Everyone Out! The hazardous chemicals are on fire and they're going to explode! GO GO GO!" I shouted precisely.
The Hate Truck blipped its siren, then the brush truck took up the tune. Instead of fighting the nonexistent fire, the fire crew ran back dragging the hose behind them.
"GO GO GO!" I shouted again as I climbed into the passenger side of the truck.
And just like that, as if we had rehearsed it .... we had ... we were all up and moving, from stationary in control of a building and parking lot to full on run and gun in less than thirty seconds.
The crowd rushed forward, to see what they could steal. Hopefully they wouldn't manage to hurt too many people. We'd washed down the store interior as well as we could, at the price of not being able to salvage any of it ourselves.
But we wouldn't have to kill any of them to break contact, which was my biggest nightmare.
Even in Apocalypse there's things you'd really rather not do.
We were starting to run out of potential convoy destinations for foodstuffs. That was a Very Bad Thing.
We had almost thirty percent of the perimeter - all the north and a chunk of the south on either side of that gate - wired in, with the rest at least marked with tape or a cleared patch of ground. But holding the line wouldn't do any good if all the people inside it starved.
Nor did our latest acquisition help much. At the last staff meeting, I had demanded that along with the new corporate militia, that we organize a first aid organization and a fire service. The guard force's modest training in both roles was being overwhelmed by pressing needs, let alone the ever present potential for disaster.
Our first fire vehicle had been a Diesel powered 4 wheel drive pickup truck with extended bed. Married to a poly water tank and a skid mounted trash pump, with a rack for tools and hose, we had christened it what it was - a brush truck. Further modifications would have to wait.
Now I looked at an honest to goodness fire engine, escorted in by today's convoy.
"I found it at the side of the road, can I keep it?" asked Janine, who really should have known better.
The front doors read "Uvas Volunteers" - a small struggling volunteer department nestled in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Obviously they would have no use for it. The front fender had what looked like fresh damage.
I decided to solve three birds with one stone. Since the Data Center raid, Janine had attached herself to the Security Department in ways that I considered unhealthy and a poor example. Irrepressible, unwilling to wear a uniform, always carrying a fire axe ...
"Yes, Fire Captain," I replied. "The traditional punishment for bringing a puppy home is having to feed and water it, and clean up after it. This is all your puppy now. Find or make a uniform suitable to a Fire Captain of an actual department. If I recall correctly, that's some color of blue - NOT black. That is your new assignment. Take command of the site's Fire Brigade. I will square it with the SLE."
"But ... I'm not an Employee!"
"Even better. You can be spared to full time fire service duties. Congratulations on your new department. Department head."
Janine was just starting to grasp what a ferocious punishment I had found to inflict on her.
"I suggest you start working on your staffing plan right now. I will need the brush truck and two fire crew for tomorrow's convoy. Both will require full turn out gear, PPE, and Hazmat training at the Operations level, because I'm going to go clear a hazmat with them. Your newly acquired engine will need to be staffed for coverage while the brush truck is out on convoy. You have a lot of work to do. Go."
Her jaw dropped.
"Or you can go back to contract IT work. Your call, Captain."
She stormed off to Security Control. I chased her with an E-mail.
"Where do I park this?" Buddy asked from the driver's seat.
"Motor pool. How fucked up is it?"
"Lots!"
"Oh good," I murmured as it limped into the site, transmission slipping. But hey, it was a piece of apparatus, right?
I went back to the South Gate construction trailer we used as a gatehouse - soon to be a bunker - to my day's task of shuffling badge and access control logs for the semi-sacred Count, the twice a day precision list of who was on site and why. We had to have 100% accountability for persons on site.
Miss just one saboteur, and all of this is for nothing.
###
We were starting motor pool assembly of the convoy an hour early. This briefing would suck more than usual.
"Attention to orders!" Brooke called.
Everyone perforce listened up.
"The objective is the Dollar Barn on Leigh. As we all know, during attempted looting someone ran a truck into the front security gate while it was down, causing a collapse of the cleaning products section and a major hazardous materials spill, mostly of bleach but also of ammonia and other products. I have determined that it is within our capabilities to clear the hazmat spill and salvage undamaged goods.
"Recon has determined that the municipal water mains in this area are up. This is key to the plan.
"We will establish an outer perimeter per SOP during the operation. Laborers will wear full face respirators and Tyvek suits. The fire crew will charge two hose lines - one from the mains, one from the brush truck, lay out a decontamination area, and make initial entry. We will flood out the hazardous chemicals with massive quantities of water, preferably from the building's own sprinkler system but if necessary from hose lines. We will then load out the items ironically protected from looting by the hazmat spill with a special focus on the food and the health/beauty aisles.
"Overwatch will bring fire axes and pike poles as you will need to ventilate the roof and stand clear. We have three contingency scenarios. The first is if the decontamination effort is too big for us, I will call it, we will decontaminate ourselves and leave. The second is if we are met with force majeure, i.e. if our badge wearing friends show up and demand a share of our hard work. We will extract with whatever we have loaded, and leave them to it. The third is if we are interrupted by banditry. During our operation, we will defend the operations location with force and use deadly force only in direct point self defense - but be ready to break contact if we've bitten off more than we can chew."
I broke down the elements of the plan. It was simple but nasty.
We had too much experience with this. I didn't have my heart set on the store aisles. I had my heart set on the as yet unpacked cardboard boxes in the back room. Separated by at least one interior wall from the hazmat, they may well have fared better.
I motioned the fire crew and my handful of hazmat folks to the side.
"When you are working, I need you to inspect the bleach bottles carefully. I need _intact_ bleach containers only, placed in the salvage drums we are bringing. Just the bleach. Because reasons. Getting this much bleach is a major fork in this operation."
We rolled out. We rolled up. We charged hose lines. Covered by a fog nozzle, my breacher defeated the already broken back doors with a sledge. Then I put on my own respirator. I was already wearing the Tyvek suit, booties, ad nauseum ... with my duty belt over it and my radio double-bagged in plastic. I know you're not supposed to use duct tape for sealing gaps in protective gear, but it's what we had.
I made entry with my keys: a bolt cutter and a wrench. My eyes traced the ceiling and found the sprinkler system pipes. I followed these back to the riser. I cut the lock off the riser valve and made sure the system was charged. Then I stole a store stepladder and carefully climbed across the spilled chemicals and set it up to reach a sprinkler head.
Without a respirator, I'd be dead by now.
I wasn't about to set it off with a match. But I did tap it with a hammer until it started spraying water all over the place.
Two sprinkler heads later, I slunk outside for a heat exhaustion break. The spray of the fog nozzle washing me off felt good.
A large, unfriendly crowd had gathered along the sidewalks, watching us loot their neighborhood store.
Crap.
Sharon sidled over to me.
"Boss, I've got a bad feeling about this."
"Yeah."
If we packed and left, the crowd would hurt themselves on the hazmat. If we finished decon and started loading, the crowd would probably hurt themselves on us, which would not help our community relations worth a damn.
I went back in.
"Change of mission. No sorting, no bleach salvage. Load cardboard boxes out the back. Time now, haul ass. No decon, no time. All three truck beds, hazmat dirty. Only load two, third truck bed is only for personnel. Decon team, switch to flooding out the store immediately."
The team got really busy, really fast.
I took a roll of our precious HAZMAT tape and taped off the storeroom from the front of the store, using upside down shopping carts as if they were cones.
We didn't have gas sensors, not that you could tell them what to sense for in such a mucky situation. Imagine a spill under your kitchen sink times a thousand.
"Take five," I called on radio. This was not permission to take a break. This was a five minute warning that we were leaving in five minutes.
Guards eyeballed each other, the crowd, and their assigned vehicles. Mental rehearsal of what they would do when it was time to go.
We had the two pickup truck beds half loaded. The laborers would have to ride outside in the third truck, because we needed to keep some people 'dirty' to decontaminate and unload on campus. I went to each laborer personally and explained, nice and loud through my respirator, that this was their last box to load. Then I had the fire crew decontaminate me.
I held up a finger. Just one.
One minute.
"Team, ignore the distraction and begin tactical loading when you hear it."
The laborers went from their last box directly to the back of the third truck. I counted twice. A missed count was a dead laborer.
I took off my respirator and let it dangle by the straps. Then I picked up the bullhorn I keep in my truck for these kinds of situations.
"Everyone Out! The hazardous chemicals are on fire and they're going to explode! GO GO GO!" I shouted precisely.
The Hate Truck blipped its siren, then the brush truck took up the tune. Instead of fighting the nonexistent fire, the fire crew ran back dragging the hose behind them.
"GO GO GO!" I shouted again as I climbed into the passenger side of the truck.
And just like that, as if we had rehearsed it .... we had ... we were all up and moving, from stationary in control of a building and parking lot to full on run and gun in less than thirty seconds.
The crowd rushed forward, to see what they could steal. Hopefully they wouldn't manage to hurt too many people. We'd washed down the store interior as well as we could, at the price of not being able to salvage any of it ourselves.
But we wouldn't have to kill any of them to break contact, which was my biggest nightmare.
Even in Apocalypse there's things you'd really rather not do.
