Something In The Water

The accident

It was around 3 o'clock in the morning, early Saturday morning in the middle of summer, when a large truck carrying metal drums filled with toxic waste was driving down a narrow road in a residential neighborhood. The road took the truck from a secluded chemical plant to a toxic waste facility, far away from the traffic and from any potential protesters.

Unfortunately, the driver was driving a little too fast, and he flew through a sharp turn in the road which was right by a large apartment complex located in the center of town. The complex had several swimming pools for its residents, including a small poll, located in the corner of the facility and right off the parking lot.

When the truck flew through the corner in the road, one of the smaller drums became detached from the others on the flat bed of the truck and fell off the truck. It landed with a loud bank on the pavement, creating a small tear in the aluminum. From there, the metal drum rolled onto the parking lot and smashed through the wired gate. From that point, the drum rolled straight into the swimming pool, where it plunged into the water and sank to the bottom on the shallow end. Luckily, nobody was making use of the pool at that time of the night.

The truck driver realized something was wrong when he heard the drum land on the pavement and roll towards the facility. The noise got even louder when the drum smashed through the wired fence. This alarmed the security guard, who rushed to the pool area. He was later joined by the truck driver, who called two other co-workers on his cell phone. The four men then use two ropes to hoist the small but heavy drum out of the swimming pool and back onto the cement floor along the side of the pool. Even though the driver did notice a small leak near the bottom of the drum, he decided to remain quiet about it. He figured he was already in enough trouble for causing this accident, and he didn't want to stir up even more panic by announcing that a trace of toxic waste had spilled into the public swimming pool at an apartment complex.

The truck driver called in the incident to his supervisor and said that the damage to the facility was just a broken chain-link fence at the gate to the swimming pool. There was a small leak in the drum but nothing major and the amount leaked was too low to cause any concern. Besides, nobody would notice that toxic chemicals had leaked into the swimming pool anyway...