Excerpt: The Brass Plate

The infotainment talking heads on local cable and radio had consistently predicted scattered showers. Even the relatively reliable Chronicle was looking past the day’s weather to the potential fury of the approaching Alaskan front. But the swiftness and ferocity of the storm caught even the most experienced meteorologists by surprise. Even as Julie Li ran from her Grandfather’s grocery to the Lotus Blossom restaurant – informally known as Lo’s - to socialize with her friends, the atmosphere had reached a tipping point. And like a bucket being tipped over onto its side the skies emptied their contents onto an unprepared Nob Hill and Chinatown.
The rain fell so hard that storefronts facing each other across the main avenues were indistinguishable. Without warning, anything or anyone caught on the street was instantly saturated. Merchants throughout Chinatown closed their doors to minimize the damage caused by rainwater flooding their businesses from the street. Shopkeepers, patrons and tourists were all united in their capture and containment by the natural elements. Experienced shopkeepers were wary and they swiftly moved below street level to begin elevating business inventories and personal possessions up and away from the siege of basement flooding. Traffic along Grant Avenue was halted by several minor collisions as windshield wipers were unable to wick away the rainfall fast enough and visibility was instantly eliminated.
Torrents of water rushed along the edges of the streets, quickly overwhelming the catch basins in the intersections, then spilling into the sewer system. Once in the sewers, the rainwater formed underground rivers that cascaded down Nob Hill. The rains of Chinatown were joined by the waters that had been collected in the catch basins in the exclusive neighborhoods at the very top of the Hill. As the rainwater increased in volume and acceleration, it increased in pressure. Once the sewers reached the Financial District the sudden change in decline created by the flat land of historical landfill acted as a natural flow restrictor. With rainwater flowing into the sewers at a faster rate than it could be removed at the bottom, the sewers began to fill like a narrow, tall pipette of water. Essentially damned at the lowest point and pressured by the accelerated rainwater from uphill, the system quickly began to de-pressurize in predictable ways. In the Chinatown intersections at the bottom of the Hill, large, iron sewer covers were blown up from the street and floated like pool toys upon fountains of pressurized water. The sudden redirection of pressure from the mainline sewer line to ancillary systems caused weaker points in the system to fail. Toilets designed to handle modest flows and small gravitational pressure simply exploded. Those that didn’t explode simply regurgitated recent ingestions. Basements flooded. Catch basins at the lowest points along the streets between Bush and Pacific refused to accept more water and the street intersections flooded. Over the space of fifteen minutes Chinatown found itself besieged from the skies above and the earth below.