Free Tulsa
15-02-2006, 00:58
It was early Saturday morning in Free Tulsa. Hundreds of boats were journeying out into the blue Pacific for various leisure activities, watched carefully by unarmed Coast Guard lifeguard/rescue vessels. At Ocean Platform Sigma-Four, the center of the New Bixby province, a massive construction project was underway. The nation had grown to a point where building further surface platforms was no longer viable except as forest and agriculture sites, and Sigma-4 had been chosen as the site of the first access tunnel to the seabottom section. The Sigma-4 seafloor settlement was complete, and the spiraling automobile tunnel connecting it to the surface was nearly done. At the tunnel entrance construction site, unbeknownst to the crews, a disaster was brewing. Some unused scrap metal had been carelessly left on the road. At 7:23 AM, a semi truck carrying several thousand gallons of synthetic gasoline drove past the construcion site. A drunk driver going the opposite direction, foolishly ignoring the speed limit, drove over a pile of scrap metal, lost control, and slammed into the semi. The ensuing explosion caused the detonation of a massive pile of dynamite and plastique that had been left over from the supply used for blasting rock out of the seafloor. A massive fireball erupted, destroying a half-mile section of the six-mile platform, and, worse, destroying the northeast anchoring pillar and two of the connecting bridges. The entire platform listed, the northeast corner sinking into the deep blue pacific.