The Dead Don't Bleed: Part 1, The Outbreak Read Online Free PDF Page B

outbreak of an unidentified illness in the immediate area.
    In response to any potential natural disaster the federal government had set up a system of alerts to immediately form the appropriate response teams. The failure of FEMA to timely and properly deploy their assets prior to and immediately following Hurricane Katrina in 2005 resulted in mandates to insure a similar failure never happened again. The new strategy was to prepare for the worst as early as possible. It was better to over-react and find their efforts were not necessary than to under-react and get caught with their pants down again. The protocol in cases of natural disaster put FEMA immediately in charge as the lead agency. Since this particular incident involved an unknown illness or disease, he would have access to experts from the Centers for Disease Control, a representative of that agency was already on the way to meet him in the crises center of the FEMA building at the 500 block of downtown Washington, DC. All coordination with any other agencies involved from the local sheriff to National Guard response would now be controlled from this room. The building was equipped and centered around a state of the art secure communications center where coordination at multiple levels of disaster response could be carried out.
    While he was waiting for their CDC liaison to arrive , he pulled up a chat window on his secure computer and fired off a message to the duty office at the NSA monitoring station who had been providing them with real time satellite imagery of the region affected by the earthquake and the expanding plume of material. What he was interested in now was an infrared shot directly down into the mine. This would show him the depth from which the material was originating. His hope was that it would give them an early indicator of what they may be dealing with. The initial opinion he received from the director of the Geological Survey department was that a pocket of methane gas was involved. Since this was a sand mine the director had reasoned that loose sand was the major component in the growing cloud and that methane particles were being formed together with sand particles and dispersed onto the surface as the plume expanded outward. While this was only a theory, the reported symptoms of patients being admitted to local hospitals was inconsistent with methane exposure. Determining the depth of the collapse and size of the underground pocket where this material was originating would narrow the list of suspects and also give them an idea of how much more of this plume they could expect. Since methane was only known to be found in shallow pockets of no more than three hundred to one thousand feet below the surface, anything deeper would exclude methane and maybe identify another possible culprit.
    He didn't have to wait long for a response and in a moment the high definition image started to materialize on his screen. The infrared imagery depicted the target area in a range of colors from red and yellow to gray and black, the density of the colors in this case indicated different depth measurements as well as concentrations of heat sources. The image he was looking at now had already been vetted by NSA analysts and a rough measurement guide had been included to the side of the image. Dr. Woods studied the imagery and was surprised by the findings, there had been a collapse in the deepest shaft of the mine as they had suspected. The primary theory was that a fissure of some type may have existed underneath one of the shafts. These fissures can be hundreds or thousands of years old and range in size and depth. Water buildup in the mine shaft above the fissure from recent bouts of heavy storms probably resulted in the collapse of the shaft into the fissure. The imagery confirmed what they had already suspected, the source of the plume was a gas of some type that was being released from the fissure. Something that had been trapped below the surface under