The Legacy of St. Claire – A Twelve-Part Retrospective
Part 3: Flesh and Stone
by Eddie Grayson, Zootopia Herald

[This interview contains some language that may be inappropriate for younger readers. – ed.]

ooooo

"There's an understanding among Burrowers that goes right back to the beginning of the organization. No one gets left behind."

Anton McMeadow - Rabbit
Burrow Engineer (Retired)

ooooo

Looking at a scale model of the New Haven burrow, it is easy to see why it is being hailed as "The Home for a New Generation".

The result of the first-ever joint design venture between rabbits, badgers, and foxes, a single glance at the blueprints is enough to highlight how different New Haven is from any burrow before it. Rather than being stacked one above another, the tunnels of each level will offset from the ones above and below. In addition, each level will be anchored by the sections above it. The result is a helix structure that is, according to both its designers and several third-party design inspectors, almost impossible to collapse.

Combined with its reinforced center-column wells, hydroponic gardens, and spacious living areas, it's no wonder why its development has already resulted in a half-dozen construction contracts across the Tri-Burrows. Standing alongside me in their presentation room is the project's head consultant, Anton McMeadow.

She's a hell of a thing, isn't she? [He gestures to the model in front of us.] Absolutely one-of-a-kind, and a complete departure from traditional burrow design.

I understand this is the Burrowers' first multi-species design collaboration?

Damn right it is. I can't believe it took us this long, either. Nobody knows reinforced construction like badgers. Lightweight, modular structures that are the next best thing to bombproof. And the fox designers we brought in came up with some groundbreaking ideas.

Was there any resistance to the idea of working with foxes?

No, we welcomed them with open arms and we all sang kumbaya round the fire. [He rolls his eyes.] We were bunnies and they were foxes; of course there was resistance. But the fact of the matter was that they knew their shit inside out. The self-reinforcing hexagon-passageways? That was all them. Same with the variable-geometry array of solar panels on the surface. As much as some bunnies might've pissed and moaned about it, those guys have been invaluable to the project, and not just as designers.

One of the fox architects, Raymond, once told me that there's this phrase where he's from - if you got nothing, use anything. See, foxes tend to get the short end of the stick when it comes to employment. Mammals think they're shifty, so they can't find work, so they don't have a lot of money, so they try to get the most bang for their buck by making deals and hunting out bargains. And goddamn did they ever make that work for us. I have never in my life seen mammals who could stretch a buck so far. They'd find ways to source top-quality materials for half of what our suppliers were quoting. Every single project of theirs has come in on time, under budget, up to code, and one-hundred percent above board.

I tell ya, Bunnyburrow is a lot different these days than when I first moved here. Up until a couple years ago, there was only one fox family living in the entire county; now there's dozens of 'em.

You're not originally from Bunnyburrow?

Nope. Born and raised out in Jackalope Falls, Warren County. Beautiful place, but not a lot of work to be had. That's why I left, a little over thirty years ago. I spent the first twenty-eight as a Burrower, and the last two and a bit as one of their engineering consultants.

I actually gave retirement a shot after Homestead. Thought I'd move back home, get myself a nice little cottage on the edge of town, and maybe relax for the first time in three decades. I tried to enjoy it, but all that sitting around just wasn't for me. I've been in the construction business my whole life, even before the Burrowers were even formed; I'm just not happy unless I'm getting my paws dirty.

Hell, I go back so far, I actually helped build St. Claire.

Oh...I didn't realize...I'm sorry.

Cut that shit out, kid. I didn't design the damn thing. Every construction company in the region worked on St. Claire in some way or another. When the Burrowers started up, where do you think they got most of their personnel from?

I was just a young buck back then, working for Hareigan & Sons and installing drywall in some of the residential units. I didn't have anything to do with St. Claire's superstructure. Her collapse was in no way, shape, or form my fault; I'd done nothing at all to contribute to what happened and, more importantly, couldn't have done a thing to prevent it. None of that kept me from joining up with the Burrowers on day one. Most of their earliest recruits were mammals like me, looking for work after the Housing Protection Act took our jobs away.

The burrowers had work for a drywaller?

[He laughs.] Of course. It's not as though they just showed up, dug a hole, and called it a burrow; the actual excavation is only part of the job. You've also got the plumbers, electricians, framers, drywallers, painters, and everybody else who turned a hole into a home. Of course, just because they hired me as a drywaller didn't mean I was content to stay a drywaller. It's a decent job when you're in your early twenties; simple, repetitive, and it paid better than flipping burgers. But as a career? Absolute crap. No one should be forty-five years old and still hammering up drywall panels for fifteen bucks an hour.

I wanted more out of life than that, and when you're young and dumb, the best way to get that is start learning things. The 'young' part is gonna go away no matter what. Getting rid of the 'dumb' is up to you. If I saw another mammal doing a job I thought looked interesting, I'd start asking questions. If I liked what I heard, I'd start buggin' them to teach me how to do it, too. The Burrowers has this thing where you could only apprentice for one trade, but you could assist with as many as you wanted. Assistants didn't earn their trade ticket, didn't get paid any extra, couldn't join the union, weren't entitled to any overtime, and had to work under the supervision of a qualified tradesmammal. Most mammals avoided it like the plague, but they couldn't keep me away. I didn't need the fancy perks; I just wanted the know-how.

After a year I knew how to weld, run electrical lines, install plumbing, you name it. My only goal was to get to a place where I could start making a little more money. That's probably why it surprised me when my foreman, this salty old meerkat named Sal, asked what school I was trying to get into.

Was he referring to a trade school?

That's what I thought, but it turned out that while I'd been hopping around and learning everything I could, he'd been under the assumption that I was angling for a scholarship.

Scholarship?

Yup. If they thought you had the brains and the temperament for it, the Burrowers would send you to college to earn a degree. You just had to agree to work for them for five years after you'd finished. I didn't know any of that at the time, though. I just laughed it off and said I didn't have the grades for any scholarship. Then Sal cuffs me upside the head and tells me that's too freaking bad, because he'd already recommended me, and I wasn't about to make him look like an asshole.

From that day on, Sal would be on me like a goddamn tick anytime I'd start to slack off. If I wasn't doing my job, I was assisting a tradesmammal. When Friday came, he'd be right there with another goddamn book for me to read over the weekend. Then he'd quiz me on the fucking thing the whole next week. I finally got fed up with it, got right in his face and asked him what his problem was. You know what he says to me?

He says, 'My problem was that I was forty-five years old and still hammering up drywall panels for fifteen bucks an hour. Then someone came along about ten years ago, kicked my lazy tail into gear, and now I'm your boss. You do what I tell you and, in a few years, you could be mine.'

Did you end up being awarded the scholarship?

Nope. [He winces.] Sal really lay into me for it, but what surprised me was how disappointed I was. That's why he didn't let up on me, and I didn't complain about it. When the scholarship came around the next year, he recommended me again.

And you got it that time?

Sure didn't, and you better believe I paid for that with another year of working for Sal.

...third time was the charm?

[He laughs.] Forth, actually. Four fucking years of working for the saltiest foreman in Burrower history. By that point, I'd spent so much time assisting tradesmammals that both the welder's and plumber's unions actually offered to write off my ticket and make me a union member. My hourly would have gone from twenty bucks an hour to forty-two, overnight. Sal wasn't having any of that shit, though. He somehow convinced me to stick it out, and when I finally made it my parents were so over the moon that they named Sal my godfather. Picture that, will you? A sixty-one-year-old meerkat suddenly ending up with a twenty-seven-year-old rabbit for a godson.

Naturally, from the moment I started school, he'd gone from harassing me about my work to harassing me about my grades. He didn't let up for another four years, right up until he got to watch me graduate with my Structural Engineering degree.

That must have been a very satisfying moment for him.

Sal? Satisfied? [He snorts.] Not likely. As soon as I'd graduated he shifted smoothly back to harassing me about work. He was sixty-five and he'd been riding my ass for a decade; I think it was just a habit by then.

That said, I'm pretty sure the second proudest day of his life was the first time I got appointed the lead engineer for a burrow project. It wasn't anything fancy – just a small unit for a family of sixty. The first day, I gather up all the team leads and give them an overview of the project, our timelines, survey info; all the regular shit. I'm just finishing up when I hear this snort from the back of the room, and there's Sal leaning against the back wall.

He rolls his eyes at me, leans over the one of the other crew leads and says 'Can you believe this prick? Telling us what to do like he's the big expert?'. It probably would've stung if he hadn't been smiling at me the whole time. I was grinning just as big when I told him to stow his fucking attitude and get to work. I swear, Sal starts beaming like all his birthdays had come on the same day, and you know what he says? He says 'Whatever, kid. You're the boss.'

Goddamn right I was.

You said that was the second proudest?

Oh yeah. He outright told me that the proudest day was when I got picked for the Homestead Development Project.

How did Homestead's design process differ from St. Claire's?

There were about a thousand differences, but it really came down to coordination and detail. Homestead was the single largest Burrower undertaking in the organization's history. It was going to be the burrow of the future. It was supposed to show that we'd learned from our mistakes, because we had.

Nobody said it out loud anymore – not that they had to – but everyone was scared shitless of another St. Claire. It was completely woven into the Burrower mindset as the ultimate nightmare scenario. Some of the old boys like me joked about it, saying stuff like 'So your wife left you, took the kids, emptied your bank account, burned down your house, and you've got cancer? Well look at the bright side...at least it ain't St. Claire.' That didn't mean we didn't take the possibility one-hundred-percent seriously.

The very first day of the planning process, every mammal involved in the project was handed their very own copy of the Hopps/Westfield Report and told to memorize it line-for-line. All the designers, architects, surveyors, and inspectors worked in pairs; each one double checking the other's work. Every single blueprint was scoured for flaws, and if there was even the slightest indication of a vulnerability, an engineering team would be assigned to hunt it down and kill it. The planning time for St. Claire was four years; Homestead took seven.

I swear to you, on my dear departed mother's grave, the goddamn space station wasn't planned this carefully. We were flat-out certain that we had every eventuality covered, and everything was going according to plan...right up until it wasn't.

Do you remember what you were doing when the alarms went off?

Who doesn't? It was a little after lunch, and I'd been top-side all morning walking a bunch of rookies through basic inspection techniques and introductory structural maintenance. Any other week and I would've been working on one of the lower levels. Instead, I was trying to take it easy. I was twenty-one when I joined the Burrowers, and I'd worked with them for almost thirty years. I guess you could say that Homestead was supposed to be my retirement tour.

Nobody really reacted at first, not even me, but that was just a result of bad timing. An hour earlier, the site office announced that they'd bumped the seismic alarm tests up to that afternoon. They were going to do it overnight, but I guess they wanted more mammals on site in case any of the alarms didn't work and needed repairs. When the sirens started blaring, I honestly didn't pay them much attention. It actually took me a minute to realize that the alarms hadn't stopped, even though tests are only supposed to last a few seconds.

What was the overall response on site?

Less than fucking ideal. There was confusion everywhere, like no one knew what they were supposed to be doing.

Aren't Burrowers prepared to deal with that kind of situation?

Kid, nothing can prepare you for that kind of situation. Imagine if you were told, every single day, that today was the day your house might burn down. When it finally happened, do you think you'd stand there rationally and think 'Well, there it goes'? I doubt it.

Besides, most of our experienced personnel were down below. The mammals on the surface were mostly support roles. There were maybe a hundred Burrowers around who'd seen a major cave-in before, and barely a dozen who really remembered St. Claire – myself included. Sure, they'd all trained for something like this, but now that it was real it felt like every damn one of them was looking to the mammal beside them and asking what to do. I knew that if someone didn't start getting shit squared away, that uncertainty was gonna turn into panic.

I grabbed the bullhorn I'd been using to 'motivate' the trainees, cranked the volume, jumped up on a truck and started shouting orders. I honestly didn't know what the next move was, either. I needed time to get a fix on the situation, and I was gonna buy that by just giving everyone something to do. I told everyone in earshot – and when you're dealing with rabbits, earshot is pretty damn far – to either find their partner, or to team up with someone in the same trade. That ate up about ten minutes, which was enough time to alert Tri-Burrow Search & Rescue and call up Bunnyburrow General and tell 'em to get ready for a shitty day.

Once everyone was paired up, I had them spread the word for all available Burrowers to gear up and be standing by for orders outside the main causeway in fifteen minutes. I must've sounded like I knew what I was talking about, 'cause just about everyone in sight scattered. The only ones left, most of whom were looking at me like I'd grown a third ear, were the old-timers and hard-chargers; the most capable and experienced mammals there.

Except for a handful of Foremen, they were all specialists. There was about a dozen Medics, which was goddamn blessing all on its own. I sent them over to the causeway entrance to help the injured as they were coming out and buy time until they could be evacuated. There was the usual grab bag collection of Smokies, Bashers, and Fish, but I'll be damned if I knew what to do with 'em right then, and a pair of Blast-Rabbits. [He laughs.] Though only one of them was actually a rabbit.

Hang on. You do know what I'm talking about, right? Cause the nicknames can get a little confusing. [I nod.] Okay, if you say so.

Well, then we had our three Pathfinders. I recognized the bat brothers, Pierre and Andre Chauve-Souris; those two had been around almost as long as I had. The third Pathfinder was a fox I hadn't met before, and I'll be goddamned if he didn't look anxious as hell. He was standing stiff as a board, tail puffed right out, and I thought I knew why when I saw the ZDC markings on his coveralls and not a corrections officer in sight.

Did that concern you? Seeing a convict without a guard?

Looking back, it probably should have, but he was a Pathfinder and the Chauve-Souris brothers seemed okay with him. Besides, he wasn't looking around like he wanted to escape; his eyes were fixed solidly on the tunnel entrance. A few burrowers would emerge every few seconds, coughing and stumbling, and each time he'd sorta lean toward them like he was trying to get a closer look.

Anyway, we had way bigger problems right then. Between all of us, we managed to hammer out a rough plan of action. Each of our Pathfinders would take a crew of about twenty other Burrowers with them. They'd clear a path as they went, and if they found anyone or came across a situation they weren't equipped to handle, they'd hold position or fall back as needed while we sent up the necessary specialists. I'm not gonna claim it was a perfect plan but considering what we were working with it seemed like the way to go.

All three of them were gone the second I said go, like I'd shot them out of a damn cannon. They rounded up their teams and by the time the main body of Search & Rescue arrived on site, we were about as close to organized as we were going to get. I'd gotten everyone pointed in the right direction, but I'm not too proud to know when I'm out of my depth. I left SAR in charge of managing the rescue operations while I booked it for the site office to try and figure out what the hell was going on.

It turned out that while we'd been scrambling to get things on the move outside, our administrative team had been hard at work. I gotta give it to them; they dealt with a lot of chaos and handled it like professionals. Somehow, even with everyone running around like headless chickens, they managed to compile a list of who was still missing in under half an hour. It wasn't a pretty picture. Even with a healthy margin of error, the most optimistic estimates were still showing that there were nearly a thousand Burrowers unaccounted for.

By the time I set foot in the site office, they'd already started collating the incoming damage reports as quickly as they were coming in. The Site Manager was grabbing every single engineering mammal she could find, getting us to compare the incoming information to Homestead's schematics. The problem was that none of what we were being told made any sense. We went over every damn inch of those blueprints, and I knew that superstructure like the back of my paw.

The kind of failures that were being reported just couldn't happen.

Do you mean that it was extremely unlikely?

No, I mean it was extremely fucking impossible. Like, drop a glass and it only shatters on the inside kind of impossible. It was as if a third of the load-bearing members just decided to up and fail for no particular reason and the other two thirds didn't get the fucking memo.

Major collapses are like a chain reaction. Something goes wrong, then the things around it go wrong, and so on and so on. That reaction usually comes to a halt, but it's always a gradual progression. Each event has a little less energy than the last until the chain just runs outta steam. Homestead's collapse just stopped, and none of us could figure out why. The last support beam to fail wasn't particularly reinforced, and neither was the one after it. There was no physical reason for the chain reaction to just freeze in its tracks there.

We wanted to get someone down there to investigate, but everyone was prioritized to conduct rescue operations and we were limited to only two ways into the burrow. Of the eight significant openings in and out of Homestead, six of them were blocked; four had collapsed altogether. All we had to work with was the main causeway entrance and the northeast maintenance tunnel.

To this day, we have no idea how the northeast entrance stayed intact. It was right in the middle of the most heavily damaged area. By all logical sense, it should have gone to pieces. In the two years since, we've managed to reconstruct and analyze everything about Homestead, but we just can't explain that one. Even today, a lot of burrowers are superstitious about it; some of them to the point that they'll only enter an active construction site from the northeast. As far as I'm concerned, the Gate* is just one of those weird as hell things. Most of us were just thanking whoever or whatever was listening that we even had two ways in. We were on the clock; any good luck was welcome.

On the clock?

Oh, yeah. If we were too slow then there'd be nothing to recover but cold bodies.

We weren't dealing with a collapsed building or some dumb kit that fell down a well. In those cases, the trapped mammal is usually safe as long as their surroundings are stable, and they're not seriously injured. Sometimes you can even get some food or water in to keep their spirits up.

That's not the case in a cave-in. There could be thousands of tons of rock between them and any kind of resupply, even if starvation or dehydration were the most immediate problem. What they really need to worry about is hypothermia, because it gets cold down there. Real cold. Especially if you can't move around. Bit by bit, the rocks leech the heat out of you. That's why Pathfinders carry so many rations; burning raw calories is the only way their bodies have to generate heat.

Deep cave rescues are always pressed for time, which meant we had a week's worth of digging to do, and about a day to do it. We had diggers working as fast and as hard as they could, trying not to think about how the structure around them might be about as stable as a house of cards in a stiff breeze, and never once complaining or asking to be pulled out. Most of them probably never even considered it, even when every rumble or creak had them jumping.

Why not?

[He sighs.] Here's the thing, kid; there's been an understanding between Burrowers going right back to the beginning of the organization. No one gets left behind. There were a lot of rabbits at St. Claire, hundreds probably, who might have survived if the rescuers had the infrastructure to get to them and the determination to do it in time. Nobody wanted that to happen to them and nobody wanted it to happen to a friend. That's why we were pushing with everything we had, kid. Because we knew that they'd have done the same for us.

We kept at it all afternoon and on into the evening. As the sun started getting low, we had these high-power floodlights brought in to keep the area lit. We knew word had long since gotten back to town, and we had our first visitor just as the sun dropped below the horizon.

There's this local fox - come to think of it, he was actually the only local fox back then. Anyway, his name's Gid** and he'd started his own bakery about a year earlier. He came driving up in this ridiculous-looking pink truck, trailer in tow, completely ignoring every single laugh aimed his way. He'd pulled his whole damn Carrot Days Festival setup out of storage and before we knew it he had a tent-kitchen set up right on the spot. It took about ten minutes for one of our mechanics to hook him up to the site's power grid, but for the rest of the night that fox was a goddamn baking machine. That little tent of his was pumping out every kind of baked deliciousness you could think of, and you can't even imagine what it did for morale. Burrowers would drag themselves out of the tunnel, half fucking dead from exhaustion, then that fresh-baked bread smell would hit them and their faces would just light up.

It was just an hour after Gid arrived that other locals from town started trickling in, looking for any way they could support us. A couple of other local businesses started to set up their own tents, then a couple more did the same. By nine o'clock, we had a regular goddamn town square on our hands. They made sure that every belly was kept full, that there was never a shortage of tea or hot chocolate, and that a tired mammal always had a warm place to lay down. What's more, not a single one of them would accept so much as a dime; they didn't even have tip jars out.

It wasn't just businesses, either. I saw the entire Bunnyburrow High School football team working as stretcher-bearers. They were rushing back and forth to carry the wounded to the medical tents, where volunteers were offering whatever care and comfort they could to the injured mammals there. They never hesitated or gave it a second thought. They could help, so they did help.

We were still going strong when the sun came back up. The initial collapse had happened a little after one o'clock in the afternoon, and we were rolling into the eighteenth straight hour of operations when a runner came tearing up from one of the forward rescue teams. I didn't hear what they said at the time, but I sure as hell saw the fear on the site manager's face. A second later she was sending up a general evacuation order; they got all personnel back on the surface as fast as their feet could carry them. [He laughs quietly.] Well, at least they wanted all personnel topside. But like the old song goes, you can't always get what you want. They could order a full evacuation, but that didn't mean everyone was going to follow those orders.

There were three who didn't. No...who couldn't. Those three mammals went deeper into Homestead because they couldn't stomach the idea of retreat. They were honest-to-gods heroes, and a lot of Burrowers are alive because of them.

Who were they?

I got three names for you, kid, so you'd best write 'em down; Mikaere Ngata, Mike Gatherpole, and Nicholas goddamn Wilde.

~o~o~o~

* Since the Homestead incident, Burrowers have come to refer to its northeast tunnel entrance as The Iron Gate.

** Gideon Grey - Owner of Gideon Grey's Real Good Baked Stuff and first non-rabbit recipient of the Bunnyburrow Civic Integrity Award.