The Legacy of St. Claire – A Twelve-Part Retrospective
Part 1: Dark Water
- Eddie Grayson, Zootopia Herald

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"I might not have been able to change what happened, but I could figure out why it happened."
Otto Hopps – Rabbit
Survivor of St. Claire Collapse

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I'm ushered into the kitchen to find Otto Hopps sitting at the window, watching his grandchildren and great-grandchildren working in the fields. His granddaughter, who affectionately refers to the elderly rabbit as 'Pop-Pop', introduces us and Otto immediately invites me to join him at the table.

The oldest member of the Hopps family is now in his early eighties; his once grey fur has gone almost completely white. Prior to St. Claire, Otto was a renowned expert in the field of hydroponic farming. After St. Claire, he became the one of the world's leading experts on the Collapse, and the driving force behind the now-famous Hopps/Westfield Report.

As we speak, he occasionally turns back to the window to his family at work.

I've heard that some city rabbits take offense to the idea that most rabbits work in agriculture. They say it's an old-fashioned stereotype, that rabbits can be found in all manner of careers, and so on and so forth. Well, I don't care what they say. Farming is, and always has been, a noble and time-honored profession for us. The earth is just a part of who we are; might as well be written on our bones.

Did you know that some families can trace their farm's history back for hundreds of years, passed from father to son and from mother to daughter for dozens of generations?

I didn't.

Well, they can.

Farming isn't just about scraping around in the dirt, either. Rabbits have always been of the cutting-edge of agricultural technology. While other farming mammals were still hiring oxen farmhands to pull their ploughs, we were already using tractors. When they were still overpaying for fertilizer from those damn price-gouging cattle conglomerates, we were developing our own mushroom-based alternatives. Hell, we were using midnicampum-based pesticides long before mammals in the city started braying about organic produce.

For me, it was hydroponic farming. At the time of St. Claire, it was poised to be our next leap forward. I can't blame some bunnies for acting like it was science-fiction. If you've been working in fields your whole life, the idea of farming without soil would be tough to wrap your head around. The truth was that it'd been around since the late thirties. It didn't really gain momentum till the sixties, but by the mid-eighties it was ready to make history. Imagine being able to cultivate six fields of vegetables, all stacked on top of one another. Six farms in the footprint of one.

St. Claire was outfitted with next-generation hydroponic facilities. We had over two-hundred-thousand square feet and we were going to use it to turn farming into a three-dimensional industry. We had only just started operations a few weeks earlier. I was already moved in but – thank the gods – my family was still back in Bunnyburrow. My wife had insisted that our children be allowed to finish the school year before they all joined me.

What can you tell me about experiencing the collapse?

Right to it, then? I suppose that's fair enough.

I was in the main hydroponics lab on Level 23, along with two other engineers – Colin and Grant – and our lab technician, Wilbur. We had a number of ongoing projects and wanted to get an early start that morning. It was just a hair past eight o'clock when the main foundations buckled and dropped the entire structure by about 4 feet. That may not sound like much, but it was enough to cut off most of the passages in and out of St. Claire.

It wasn't like you'd imagine. Things didn't go flying off the tables and no one was sent sprawling to the ground. It felt sort of like being in an express elevator, when the descent starts and you get that odd lifting feeling in your gut for a second. We didn't even realize something was wrong until a few minutes later, when our lab tech noticed that the water pressure had dropped to zero.

We weren't too concerned; not yet, anyway. The lights were still on and the climate control vents were still humming away. There were a dozen different reasons that the pressure could have dropped off, and we assumed that someone had just closed a valve somewhere and forgotten to report it. St. Claire was still pretty new at that point, and permanent residents had only started moving in three or four months earlier. The maintenance and operations teams were still in their shakedown period, and little hiccups like that were common as they got a feel for how the burrow's systems reacted to a growing population.

The tech who'd discovered the problem, Wilbur, tried to call Water Control. All he got was a loud error tone; dialing the main Operations Center or even the Floor Manager's office had the same result. That was when he tried the emergency line. The bright red phone was bolted to the wall next to the fire alarm and was supposed to be a direct hardline directly to the burrow's Emergency Services dispatch. I'll never forget the shock on Wilbur's face when he picked it up and discovered that the line was dead.

Now we were getting worried. I decided to walk over to the Floor Manager's office myself and see if I could find out what was going on. That was when I discovered that the door was jammed. There didn't look to be anything wrong with it, but the frame had warped just enough that none of us could get it to budge. When I pressed my ear against it, I could faintly make out the voices of bunnies in other rooms; they were pounding on their own doors, obviously in the same situation as we were.

At this point, it'd been about twenty minutes since the water pressure had died. Putting our heads together, we tried to figure out what was going on. The hydroponics farm accounted for the largest percentage of water passing through the colony, and as such we had a direct line that ran through the main pumps. Our water throughput was kept at a carefully controlled flow rate, and the fact that the flow rate had stopped altogether meant one of two things; that there was no power going to the pumps, or that the pumps themselves weren't operational. Either of these was grounds for a full evacuation.

Why is that?

Water may be a necessity of life, my boy, but it's still the biggest threat to any burrow. You can have the best tunneling system in the world, but you'll always find that it's vulnerable to water. Underground springs, the water table, hell even just water seeping down through the rocks above after it rains. The first two things you install in a burrow is a ventilation system and a water control system. The first so that you can breathe and the second so that you don't drown.

St. Claire's system were absolutely cutting edge. They were not only designed to manage the intake and output of every colony resident, but in an emergency, they could operate at twice that amount for up to a week. There were multiple redundant control systems. The pumps were built to withstand anything up to a magnitude 6 earthquake. It was supposed to be, for all intents and purposes, foolproof. Capable of enduring every scenario the designers could imagine.

Then what went wrong?

What those designers had never imagined, naturally. A massive influx of external water; far more that our much-vaunted water control systems were ever intended to handle. As advanced as they were, the pumps just weren't up to the task and got overrun. That's why there was no pressure in the lines, why there was zero flow in hydroponics, and – as we would later learn– why there was rising water in the tunnels.

It was a little after eight-thirty when the power failed. The twin reactors that provided St. Claire's power were scaled-down versions of the ones that power that climate wall you have back in the city, and they took up the third, fourth and fifth levels from the bottom. The only thing below them was water control, and after that shut down the reactors were submerged within minutes. It's a testament to their design that they continued to generate electricity for another half-hour before the failed and the lights went dark.

We had an emergency kit in the lab, but it only had one flashlight in it. We didn't have those fancy phones that everybody carries around today with the flashlights on the back. We tried not to use it unless we had to, but still turned it on every few minutes just to reassure ourselves,

What about the air ventilation?

Lucky for us, that was a separate system, based on the surface and independently powered. The sound of those fans was probably what kept us from going off the rails entirely as we sat there in the dark. I couldn't even see my own watch, so I couldn't tell you how long it was before we started hearing other sounds from beneath us. They were infrequent at first, and that made it difficult to determine what they were. Each one lasted about ten seconds and occurred every hour or so – at least, that was by Colin's count. He'd had one of those fancy glowing watches.

I remember that Wilbur thought it might be someone trying to fire up the reactors again, but Colin shut that down in a hurry. He was our electrical engineer and was quick to say that if the fusion reactors were making noises that we could hear one-hundred-and-seventy-five levels away, then we had much bigger problems than not having any lights.

It wasn't long after that our team's structural engineer, Grant, started muttering about how the rumbling sounds were getting louder. He was sitting right beside me at the time, and I told him to shut his mouth. We were already on edge, and I didn't need him scaring everyone more than they already were. Even so, he'd start up again after each rumble, and I'd tell him to shut up again. We kept that up for a while, developing an almost comforting pattern, when the next rumble was accompanied by a slight tremor in the floor and Grant went stiff as a board. He sat rigidly for almost forty minutes when there was another rumble – at this point I realized they really were getting louder – followed by another, slightly stronger, tremor.

Grant let out the most terrified scream I've ever heard, scrambling to his feet and bolting for the door. I turned the flashlight on to find him pounding on the metal with all his strength, crying 'It's coming down!' over and over, and suddenly I understood.

Understood?

I might not have been a structural engineer like Grant, but I was still an engineer. No water pressure meant no pumps, no pumps meant that water couldn't leave the burrow, and rising water would have explained why there was no power; the reactors had drowned. That was when I remembered the sudden dropping sensation right before the water pressure died.

If whatever had shut down the water control infrastructure had somehow affected the burrow's superstructure, then every drop of rising water was going to chew away at each level's support chassis. Eventually the strain would be too much, and the level would be fatally compromised. That was the sound we'd been listening to for hours and hours. The sound we hadn't quite been able to identify, and that had now driven a structural engineer nearly mad with terror. Each rumble had been a level of St. Claire caving in on itself, one after another, gradually coming up to meet us.

I only had to look at Colin to see he'd come to the same conclusion.

What did you do?

What any sensible hydrodynamic engineer would do; I panicked and started banging away at the door right next to Grant. We probably would have kept it up until our paws broke if Colin hadn't slapped some sense into us. He told us that losing our heads wasn't going to solve anything, and the best thing to do was to sit and wait for help.

We gave up on turning the flashlight off after that. We just left it on until the batteries died a few hours later. We were supposed to have backup batteries, but we couldn't find them. From that point on, there was only darkness. You can't even imagine what it was like, huddled in the black, praying for a sound from above and hearing the floors beneath us crumble one-by-one. Each time, the sound of crumbling concrete and rending steel was just a little louder.

It reached the point where I was certain I could hear the screams that accompanied the loss of each level when the jammed door burst open and I saw the most beautiful sight of my life – the bright orange uniforms of Tri-Burrow Search and Rescue. They didn't even give us time to thank them before they were hauling us out of the chamber and into the main causeway, telling us to make for the surface as quickly as we could. Colin refused, insisting that if they were going deeper into St. Claire, he was going with them. I still remember the determined look on his face in the dim light of the lamps as he pointed uphill and told us to run. I never saw my friend Colin again.

The main causeway – the enormous tunnel that coiled its way through St. Claire from the surface to the bottom – was intact but dangerously unstable. I was running like hell for the surface, and I swear I could see daylight when that place took one last swipe at me; a twenty-pound chunk of falling concrete hit me at just the right spot, right between the L-1 and L-2 vertebrae. That's all it took. I hadn't felt a thing. [He gestures to the wheelchair that he's been confined to for the last three decades.] And I never would again.

Grant and Wilbur grabbed hold of me, carried me the rest of the way. I barely remember anything after that, at least until I woke up in a triage tent and one of the nurses broke the bad news. They needed the bed, so they transferred me to a hospital in Acrewood. They couldn't spare any wheelchairs or stretchers, so they rolled me to the evacuation train in a wheelbarrow.

What did you do afterward?

I thought about leaving town - Wilbur moved out to the coast and Grant took a teaching position in Zootopia – but I didn't feel like I had anywhere to go. I probably could have gone back into farming, but the fields aren't really made for wheelchairs and hydroponics – any water-based tech, really – just brought back ugly memories. So, I just sat at home, watching television and blaming everyone in sight. There was plenty of blame to go around back them. The architects blamed the surveyors, the surveyors blamed the builders, the builders blamed the material suppliers and the families blamed the whole damn lot of them...it just went around and round.

Then one day, about six months after the collapse, one of my younger kids asked me why I had wheels. [He chuckles] It was a fair question, I suppose. I told him I'd been in an accident, and he wanted to know what kind. I told him it was a cave-in, and he wanted to know where. You know how kids are; curious little things. Well, it didn't take long for me to reach the end of my answers. Not only was his curiosity far from satisfied, but I was realizing how little I really knew about the accident that had crippled me. Since I had nothing else to do, I grabbed a pen and some paper, wrote down all of his questions, and I promised him I'd find out the answers.

Now, here's a piece of wisdom from an old rabbit; three of the most important things you need in life are a destination, a reason to go and the means to get there. I might not have been able to change what happened, but I could figure out why it happened. I knew I'd need help, so I called up the son of an old friend. He was a defense attorney in town. He'd been a real hotshot, but the sheer weight of all the lawsuits he'd been fighting off had driven the poor mammal to drink. I said to him, 'Barney, I need to do something, but I need your help to do it.'

How did he respond?

The hell if I know. The damned fool was too drunk to string more than a few curses together. I wasn't put off, though. I'd dealt with drunk farmhands and drunk teenagers; I could handle a drunk lawyer.

I got my daughter to drive me into town and right up to that fancy-looking office of his. Turns out the shyster didn't have a ramp, so she decided to handle things herself. She marched right in there, grabbed that foul-mouthed lush by the ear, hauled him outside and dunked his head in a rain-barrel till he was sober enough to talk. Can't say as I was surprised, though. That one's always been a firebrand.

Which daughter was this? [Otto has nearly a dozen.]

My oldest, Bonnie. She's a good girl, takes after her mother. [He grins.] Between you and me, her own daughter is every bit as headstrong.

Which granddaughter is that?

Son, the Hopps family is one of the largest rabbit families in history. I have a couple hundred grandchildren spread around the world and I love 'em all to pieces, but do you really expect me to remember all of their names? [He leans closer and lowers his voice.] It's Judy, though. The doe who showed you in? Real firecracker. I'm so damned proud of that girl, I could just burst.

[He leans back, clears his throat, and coughs loudly into his handkerchief.] Excuse me. Now, where was I?

Your daughter had just finished trying to drown a lawyer in a rain barrel.

Right! So, we got Barney more or less sobered up, dragged him to the diner, got some real food in him, and I told him what I needed. You see, up to that point, there hadn't been a real investigation into St. Claire. Sure, there'd been some trials and the occasional news exposé, but no one was really digging into the heart of it. Lawsuits were being filed, but everyone was too focused on who they were blaming rather than what they were blaming them for.

At one point, he downs a whole cup of black-tar coffee in one gulp, looks me in the eye, and say 'So what the hell do you want from me, Hopps?'

In short, I told him I was going to go pick a fight, that I needed him on my side, and that between the two of us we might be able to give all those grieving mammals some closure. Six coffees and four plates of fried carrots later, we already had a plan of attack.

That was how the Hopps/Westfield Report was written?

No, that didn't come till later. In the beginning, it was just two angry rabbits with a room full of structural plans, geological surveys, topographical studies, engineering papers, post-incident reports, and a three-foot stack of blank Freedom of Information request forms. Gods above, I don't know how many times I read through all those reports and studies, to say nothing of the ones compiled since. I guess as much as I was searching for answers, I was searching for some closure of my own. As if understanding what happened would make it easier to cope with.

What did you find?

In short, a perfect goddamn storm of miscommunication, uncertainty, and short-sightedness.

We investigated a dozen potential sources for the water that drowned St. Claire, and how it had so quickly overwhelmed the systems meant to control it. In the end, we determined that the source was spillover from the Willow Valley hydroelectric dam. Although St. Claire's designers had coordinated with the beavers operating the dam, things were a little different back then. Interspecies relations weren't quite as strong, and obviously some critical information wasn't communicated. Hell, it took Barney and I over a month to even get ahold of the dam's operations logs.

We learned that the autumn rains that year had far exceeded expectations. That's not so good if you're a farmer, but downright dangerous if you're a dam-operator. By mid-November, they were already expecting the emergency spillway to come into effect, and in the early evening of November 22nd it did just that.

The excess water was released into the Willow Valley river. That should have been the end of it, except when the dam had been built the banks of that river had been higher and stronger. Decades of farming had reduced them to softer soil, and there were even some artificial wetlands for growing rice or cranberries. No one had worried about it, because until that day the river had been a gentle, slow-moving strip of water.

By the late evening the river had begun to overflow its banks. Hundreds of rabbits saw it happen, but no one knew who to contact about it. A few called the Sheriff's office, but the deputies working that night didn't have any idea how to respond. The banks finally broke around four in the morning. St. Claire's seismic sensors picked it up, but since it was so spread out the technician reported it to the Tri-Burrows Emergency Management Office as a system error. There were thousands of tons of water flowing downhill toward the burrow, and no one inside knew about it.

St. Claire's steel foundations had been drilled into solid granite bedrock, and there were nearly two-hundred million tons resting on them. They were rated for more, but only in the form of direct overhead weight.

The burrow flood-control system was set up so that any significant water accumulation on the surface, whether it was rainwater or seasonal flooding or whatever, would be diverted to drainage pipes that ran along the outside of the structure. Those pipes would carry the water to the bottom of the burrow, where the pumps would do their job and send it off to the Pine Ridge river, just like the rest of the drainage water. When the overflow from the dam hit, the system did its job exactly as it was intended to. That was where it all went wrong.

St. Claire, like most burrows, was tapered; widest at the top, narrowest at the bottom. If you need a visual, imagine a beehive. However, when designing an underground structure, the idea of it being top-heavy doesn't really come to mind. When the flood-control system was designed, it assumed that the water would be more-or-less evenly distributed. In this case, it all hit on one side.

The drainage pipes filled up, but rather than seeping into the burrow itself, the excess drained into holding tanks until the pipes were clear. That added thousands of tons to one side of the structure, shearing some of the supports on that side. Suddenly, all that weight was pressing into the foundations at an angle. Only about eight degrees, but it was enough to overwhelm them.

The rest, I'm sad to say, is history.

This situation hadn't been anticipated by the designers?

Perhaps, although to be fair none of the dozens of surveys leading up to construction had reported any of the significant warning signs that Barney and I discovered.

When all was said and done, the problem came down to co-operation. Or rather, a lack thereof. Instead of a single design team, there were three different firms who under any other circumstances would have been competitors. Although no one can say for certain, there are strong indications that these companies allowed their competitors to make mistakes in order to make themselves look better later on.

The same could be said of the twenty-two construction companies that turned those designs into reality. Not only were they all competitors as well, but they were made up of all manner of species and those species didn't always get along.

I suppose fate dealt with them all in the end. Every single construction company were involved in St. Claire ended up going out of business. Seventeen of them drowned in lawsuits, and the remaining five struggled on for a short while before they were put out of business by the HPA.

HPA?

The Housing Protection Act. Exactly the kind of reactionary garbage that politicians use to get votes. It was a law that said private construction companies couldn't build any burrow that would hold more than 15 rabbits. I'm sure it played well in the campaign speeches, but it came with a very large and extremely predictable flaw; larger burrows still needed to be built, but now nobody could hire any of the companies that were actually equipped to do so.

Barney and I realized we had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and that was when we put together the Hopps/Westfield Report. We compiled all of the data we'd uncovered and lay out all of the conclusions we'd come to. We consulted with dozens of specialists working in the same area. Finally, we outlined our proposal on how to prevent it from ever happening again.

We didn't expect to make much of a splash when we published that report. We expected a nod from the Tri-Burrows government, and if we were lucky they might implement a few of our more approachable suggestions. We were utterly stunned when they decided to go forward with our core solution; the creation of a unified federal department that would be responsible for all major burrow, den, and warren construction.

A little more than six months after the report was published, the Subterranean Habitat Engineering Corps officially commenced operations. It didn't take long for folks to get tired of that mouthful of a name, though, and pretty soon they were just being call the Burrowers.

A lot of the bunnies in my generation wanted it to be a bunnies-only operation. Homes built for rabbits by rabbits and all that. Barney and I had been very specific on that point, though. It didn't matter what we thought of another species personally, the fact was that poor interspecies cooperation is what killed St. Claire. If we were really going to learn from our mistakes, we had to put our bias behind us.

Then again, who am I to talk about interspecies tolerance? I once told a fox, right to his face, that his fur was red because he was made by the devil. That rascal just smiled and asked if my long ears meant I was made by a jackass. [He begins to laugh, but it is overtaken by another coughing fit.] Excuse me.

In any case, those older bunnies got shouted down and today the Burrowers employ thousands of trained personnel across dozens of species. From engineers and architects, to cave divers and every kind of tradesmammal.

What do you think about your children and grandchildren who chose to join the Burrowers?

Proud of 'em, every single one. Just like I'm proud of all the ones who went to college. When I went to college to study engineering instead of agriculture, it made me the black sheep of the family...so to speak. Now I get to watch an entire generation proudly do the same thing. Heck, I have grandkids who've gone to school for all sorts of things. Never thought I'd see the day when a Hopps could prosper with a Fine Arts degree.

[His laughter is once again overtaken by coughing, and the handkerchief he places over his mouth comes away spotted with blood.] Excuse me. It must be dusty in here.

How does it feel, being one of the relatively few survivors left?

I'm afraid I don't have a solid answer for you on that one. It varies from day to day.

Sometimes, I'd give damn near anything to be able to get out of this damned chair or take a deep breath without hacking up blood. It feels like I was robbed of a better version of my own life. Other days, when I watch the younger generations thriving and growing and taking their place in the world, I find I'm so filled with hope I could just burst.

Maybe that's your answer, then. Maybe any rabbit with a family has something to live for.