Still Burning After the Fire Went Out

Hector got through to the emergency line. Adaeze got through to the regional office. Within ninety minutes there were hazmat vehicles on the access road and engineers from the energy authority walking the perimeter with instruments I didn’t recognize. They kept us in a holding area behind the gate and asked us questions in a careful, circling way — the way people ask questions when they already know something and are trying to find out how much you know. Nobody told us what was in sector nine. Nobody told us why a decommissioned and grid-locked facility had a live pressure system running in a sealed and damaged sub-chamber. The forms we signed before they let us leave used the phrase ongoing safety assessment and the phrase preliminary evaluation period and nothing else.
I drove home in the early hours. I sat in my car in the parking lot of my building for a while before I went inside, watching the streetlights on the wet asphalt. The PSM-7 on the wall of the processing hub — blackened, cracked, manufactured fifteen years before it had any right to still be working — had been reading a real pressure from a real source. Whatever was in that chamber had been running since before the collapse. Maybe since before the decommissioning. Maybe for reasons that had nothing to do with any process listed on any document we’d been given.
In my apartment, I took off my jacket and hung it on the back of the door. The smell came with it. Scorched rubber and old copper wire, caught in the fabric, patient as anything.

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About the Author

Tarek Al-Rami — a safety engineer from the night shift, where an ordinary job can turn into a nightmare.

— Tarek Al-Rami

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August 29, 2026

10min-stories