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of course; it was plugged in.  The surge would have knocked it out.   Hell, that surge would have knocked out Superman!   Sheri thought.   So, what just happened?  Had a nuke gone off?  It hadn’t been a bomb inside the dam, they would have felt an explosion.  Cutting the lines, all of them, even simultaneously, wouldn’t have shut the power off inside the facility.  Aliens?  No, they only blow up national monuments…usually.  Sheri, you are sick.
    “Is everybody OK?”  Sheri asked of the other seven technicians and engineers in the control room.  If this had been a drill, there would have been supervisors on shift within shouting distance of the entire plant, but there was only one on site tonight, and he was in the cafeteria.  One more nail in the coffin of the idea that this had been a drill.
    Nobody was stepping up to take control of the situation; not that there was much to control except getting everyone out of the control center.  They were under almost one hundred and fifty feet of concrete, steel, and water. Without the air pumps they had about thirty minutes before the air got stuffy.
    “HEY!”  That got attention, if only for a couple of seconds; now to get people moving.   “Ok, folks, we’ve only got about thirty minutes before the air is going to get stale down here.  Who knows why they put the control room at the bottom of the dam but they did.  Jack and Pete, help Carol up the stairs, but bring up the rear.”  That got her a sour look from Pete.  So be it. Carol was pregnant and Pete was able-bodied; he could deal with it.  “We need to get up top, let’s go people.  We’ve done this a hundred times if we’ve done it once.  When the power comes back we can do most of what we need to from half a dozen different places up there and come back down later.  You’ve got two minutes to grab your stuff.”
    The key is not to let anyone think you aren’t in control; if you question yourself or let them question you it will devolve into chaos and someone will get hurt.  Let them write me up for ordering my peers around after everyone is safe.
    It didn’t take quite sixty seconds once everyone snapped out of their initial shock.  Sheri was right, they’d done this at least a hundred times; it had simply caught them flat-footed.
    The emergency lights in the stairwells were working, which was both a good sign and a testament to the design and construction of the backup system.  Sheri wondered idly if the transfer switch had started to kick in during dip or at the beginning of the spike.  Oh well, another one of those things she figured she might wonder about for a while.
    They heard voices up ahead as a couple of technicians were climbing out of the dam and picked up Chuck, their supervisor, near the top.
    “Sheri, we got anyone else down there?  On the way up a minute ago, Jerry said two of the turbines arced over fifty feet between them.  He’s been doing this for thirty years and he’s never seen anything like it.”
    Chuck was shaking his head, eyes wide, as he continued.  “He said that those two seized up while the rest spun down when the lights went out, from what he could see.  Those two turbines that seized are shot, Sheri, and if that spike was as big as you said--and don’t give me that look, I believe you--I bet the rest are shot too.”
    Sheri felt some of the supernatural calm of earlier this morning give way to whatever the next stage of shock was.  The stage that gave you trembling knees and sweaty hands, apparently. “Super.  Now what?  I got everybody out, I now defer to you oh great and powerful management-type guy!”  Sheri said it with a shaky smile, but she was serious.  She’d stepped up to get everybody out of the control room but she really didn’t have a clue what to do next.
    “Ha ha ha.  Well, the manual says we, um, uh, let’s see, oh yeah, this isn’t ever supposed to happen.  We drill for it, sure, but actually having a spike