While I was out walking today in sunny 52 degree weather, I was thinking about BLEVEs, aka Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapor Explosions.  What brought that up?  Several things, actually.

This week, we were watching a TV program, 911 Lonestar, in which, as a result of a train wreck, a BLEVE was front and center.  By the way, that word is pronounced blev-ee, with the accent on the first syllable.

In the course of the story, first responders were trying to cool the tank when they ran out of water, so eventually it blew up. In the story, the firefighters were blown out of the area where they of course landed softly and safely in a puddle of muddy water.

As soon as the episode started, I knew a BLEVE would occur at some point in the plot.  How did I know that? I’m a writer.

During the publicity run up to the publication of Den of Iniquity, I did a number of on-line interviews.  One of the questions I was asked had to do with how much research I do for each book and what was the most difficult bit of research that I remembered?  

The truth is, when I’m writing, I’m doing research every single day, trying to fact check what I think is true as opposed to what is true.  In other words, research and writing go hand in hand, sort of like love and marriage, to quote a VERY golden oldie.

But it turns out, that TV episode reminded me of some research I did very early on in my career.  I’m not sure which book I was dealing with when I decided to use a BLEVE.  I was still living in downtown Seattle at the time, so it was prior to 1985.

There was no Wikipedia back then, so I called the non-emergency number for the Seattle Fire Department and explained my situation. They invited me to come down to their headquarters and watch a couple of videos. 

At the time, another relatively new Seattle-area author who happened to be a firefighter was writing books about … well … a fictional Seattle firefighter.  As a consequence, visiting the fire department seemed like venturing into enemy territory, but I went there anyway.  Turns out it was an eyeopening experience.

The first video, filmed in black and white, was of a train derailment in somewhere in Georgia in 1959.  It was evidently summertime. The train had run off a trestle, and barefoot kids, wearing shorts and riding bicycles, were standing on a nearby hillside watching the first responders deal with the fire when the tanker exploded. The resulting fireball killed 23 people, many of them unsuspecting onlookers  After that, the consensus of opinion in the first-responder world was to let tanker fires burn themselves out.

However, that important memo never quite made it to Kingman, Arizona.  In July of 1973, a blazing tanker fire in Kingman took out 13 firefighters all of whom had been fighting the blaze.

When the first view of that fire came on the screen, I recognized the name on one of the businesses showing in the background and said aloud, “Kingman, Arizona.”

At that point, one of my hosts turned to me and said, “You really do know BLEVEs, don’t you.”

I don’t believe I ever used that plot line in any of the books I was writing back in the eighties, but I did mention a fictional character who was a survivor of the Kingman incident and who was still dealing with PTSD in one of the much later Ali Reynolds books. In real life, that explosion took a terrible toll on a whole generation of twenty-somethings in a small community.

My research in that case may have ended up on the cutting room floor, but it’s certainly my most memorable, and seeing that storyline on TV this week is what put it in my head today when I was out walking. It’s also why I’m sharing it with you this morning.  

In other words, there’s a lot more to being a writer than meets the eye, and sometimes, what I don’t put into a book is even more important than what I do.