“You can’t hide the problem, Mayor,” Tatum warned, his voice rising to an even higher pitch. “Hualālai presents one of the most severe volcanic risks in the United States. We’ve been warning about the threat of runaway development along this coast for years.”
“I recommend,” Koa said, once again taking the lead, “we state the facts in a calm, straightforward manner, emphasizing we’re at the early stages of this crisis, and there’s no cause for panic.”
Heads nodded in agreement. They decided the governor and the mayor would speak first, expressing condolences and emphasizing the extraordinary emergency resources made available by the state and county. Koa and ‘Ōhai would then lay out the facts and answer questions.
When their meeting broke up and the group headed out into the storm to brief the press under a makeshift tent, Koa’s cell phone rang. He looked at the screen and recognized the number. He answered the call he’d been expecting from Deputy Sheriff Mary Perko. “Your brother’s here in the lockup,” she reported.
“Mahalo,” he responded. Ikaika, Koa’s youngest brother, serving a minimum four-year sentence for burglary, had been subpoenaed to testify against another felon. Mary Perko had retrieved Ikaika from a contract prison in Arizona where the state of Hawai‘i had sent him after revoking his parole. Ikaika, the black sheep of Koa’s family, stuck like a thorn in Koa’s side, causing conflicts for him as a police officer and embarrassing him at every turn. The chief blamed Koa every time his brother got in trouble, and, in his early days as a detective, Koa had feared that Ikaika would get him fired. Still, now that Ikaika had been hauled back to the Big Island, Koa would have to make time to see his brother. It would be a difficult reunion.
The press conference quickly became a zoo. Thick sulfur fumes hanging over the school forced authorities to hold the press conference in a makeshift tent half a mile away. Over a hundred media and print reporters, many from the neighboring islands, gathered in an unruly semicircle around an improvised public-address system. Governor Māhoe expressed condolences for lost loved ones and offered prayers for the injured children. Mayor Tanaka repeated much the same themes.
‘Ōhai briefed the press on the fatalities, promising to release the names of the dead after completing family notifications. He identified the hospitals treating the injured kids and confirmed four missing children and one missing teacher. Finally, he recounted various acts of heroism by teachers and first responders who’d raced into the building to save youngsters.
When Koa stepped to the microphone, he told the press about the likely volcanic nature of the episode, repeatedly emphasizing the lack of evidence of terrorism and dismissing any immediate need for evacuation beyond the area already cleared by the police. He declined requests for pictures from inside the school building, citing safety concerns. The police, he disclosed, had ordered a robotic vehicle to search those parts of the school building first responders had yet to reach.
Concluding his remarks, he took questions, which came flying from every direction. He answered those where he had solid information and deflected the others until the authorities had more information. When the press conference wrapped up, he breathed a sigh of relief but realized his ordeal with reporters had only just begun. The KonaWili school disaster would be front-page news around the world, and this first press conference offered just the barest glimpse of what was to come.
Not long after the press conference ended, reporter Walker McKenzie—widely known as CNN’s “Mister Disaster”—arrived with a camera crew in tow and a bevy of assistants to prepare a KonaWili segment for the next day’s From All Angles news show. Koa recognized the handsome, urbane reporter, dressed in his trademark white dress shirt with rolled-up sleeves, and knew he was about to enter a maelstrom of international publicity. He filled the celebrity journalist in on the information already made public. McKenzie, unlike local reporters, raised the question nagging Koa: “Why had the department of education built an elementary school atop a volcanic fault along the slope of an active volcano?” Koa wanted to refer the question to the DOE chief but instead told McKenzie the location of the school would be addressed as part of a comprehensive investigation of the disaster already underway. Still, Koa knew the reporter had opened a Pandora’s box as deep and dangerous as Hualālai’s volcanic cone.
CHAPTER THREE
FIRST RESPONDERS WORKED through the stormy night. By six o’clock, technicians in Honolulu had loaded a bomb squad truck aboard a Coast Guard C-130H cargo plane. The turboprop carried the vehicle to Kona’s Keāhole airport, and by nine, it arrived outside the school. Koa watched technicians steer an Andros F6B robotic vehicle down a ramp and prepare it to reconnoiter the school.
Four and a half feet long, the contraption featured eight wheels and a cart-like body with a complex manipulator arm extending out over four feet. It could go where no kanaka, no human—even in the best protective gear—could survive. Techs attached two cameras to its arm—a fire-resistant video camera and a thermal imager. The robot’s two powerful halogen lights allowed it to capture video in the otherwise pitch-black interior of the school building, while its thermal imager needed no light to detect heat sources, even those obscured by heavy smoke. They activated and tested the robot’s microphones.
The bomb squad truck featured a filtered ventilation system, so they positioned the vehicle close to the school despite the gases continuing to pour from the wrecked building. ‘Ōhai obtained architectural drawings and construction plans for the KonaWili school, which he taped on the wall of the truck to guide the search.
Koa and ‘Ōhai watched a technician use video-game-like controllers to direct the robot into the school. Monitors showed readouts and pictures from the robot’s video camera and thermal imager. Bright red numbers flashed the temperature—120 degrees, twice as high as the rainy night air outside. The tech swiveled the robot’s camera for an overall view of the situation. All of the heat and gases appeared to come from the south end, leaving only haze in the northern end. First responders had already cleared the north area.
The robot headed south, checking the main office and classrooms until it reached the last third of the southernmost wing. Here the Andros F6B reported temperatures above 280 degrees. An impenetrable yellow sulfurous haze reduced visibility to near zero. An ominous rumbling sound filled the air and echoed off the walls. Blistered paint turned cinderblock walls black. Fire-resistant ceiling tiles lay crumbled on the floor. The wooden classroom doors had disintegrated into charred heaps. Remnants of twisted metal, seared clean of wooden parts, stood as grim reminders of children’s desks.
The robot painstakingly circled the room, lowering its mechanical arm close to the floor to see as much as possible under the layers of yellow smoke, until the video camera stopped on an elongated patch barely visible against its surroundings. The robot crawled forward until the video revealed the image of a small child, its clothes burned away, its body charred.
“God, that’s one of the missing keiki,” ‘Ōhai said, choking on the words.
Koa was no stranger to death. As a child, he’d discovered a childhood friend hanged. As a teenager, he’d killed a man. His closest Special Forces buddy had died in his arms. He’d seen dead children in Afghanistan and killed his share of fanatics in Somalia. As a cop, he’d investigated gruesome murders and lost witnesses he should have protected. Death and guilt were irrevocably intertwined in his psyche. Still, the sight of the tiny charred body hit him like a fist to the gut.