A little righteous anger Part 2

As the story ended last time Stephanie and her friends were trapped in a college dorm. Poisonous gases filled the air outside the windows. Many questions remained. Would they be rescued? Would they live to tell the tale? Who would play their characters if this were made into a movie? And of course the question that everyone wants the answer to.. .WHat DO hot college chicks do when threatened by poisonous gas? Many have speculated. Some have suggested pillow fights or asphyxiation fetishes. Good guesses all, but no, the answer is much different and it involves..yes. THE SHOWERS!!! (ooohhh aren't you all tingly inside?)

Doors opened up and down the hall. People were waking up. The RA finally came to our room and said that she'd been told to send everyone to the bathrooms. We were to turn on the showers to put moisture and humidity in the air, breathe through wet washcloths and stay in the bathroom with the door closed until further notice. Al and I lived across from the bathroom. We crowded in along with all the other girls on our side of the 4th floor. Someone brought in a radio in hopes that eventually someone would announce something and we would all know what was going on. But it just played country music. All four showers were running and the air in the bathroom slowly began to feel a little better. I kept the washcloth over my face. At some point my roommate must have inhaled some of the anhydrous air because I remember her coughing uncontrollably. I wanted to help but I didn't know what to do. We all sat on the cold tile floor. Most of us had brought our blankets or pillows and most of us were in our pajamas. I don't remember if there was praying on our side, although Kirstie later said that they were praying in the bathroom on the other side of the 4th floor. I may have said a couple silent prayers. Mostly there was annoyance and confusion. "Why aren't they announcing anything on the radio?" "Damn these stalls are uncomfortable" "I can't take it anymore. I'm going to pee. No one listen, okay?"
The RA came in, then left again. She didn't have any useful news. Then she came back and announced that we were going to the first floor. We should not try to go back to our rooms, just come as we were, (like sheep) and follow her downstairs to the first floor and stay together. I believe there was some confusion as to whether anhydrous gas rises or sinks. Because of some misinformation, the RA's had concluded that anhydrous ammonia being a gas, must rise and therefore we would be safer in the first floor bathrooms. (WRONG!!!!!)
I felt a slight dry burny feeling in the air as we stepped out of the bathroom. We filed down the hall. I was terrified because I didn't know if the RA knew what she was talking about or what was going on. Would we have to go outside? We went through the door into the stairwell. The air was MUCH worse here. I felt a little panicky at the pit of my stomach. What was the RA DOING? Why were we following her orders? The air was definitely worse here and now we would exert ourselves going downstairs. What if we passed out? I could literally feel it getting more painful to breathe as we descended the steps. This was not good. I prayed that the RA's knew things we didn't know and that there would be some sort of help on the first floor...or that the bathrooms there wouldn't be too crowded.
We all stood in the hallway near the main doors on the first floor. We were waiting for further instructions from the RA's. They looked scared. Finally they said that they'd been told that anhydrous gas actually sinks. And so we would all be safer on the 4th floor. Right. So we turned around and filed slowly BACK UP THE FRICKIN' STAIRS. Back to the bathrooms...except I think there were more of us this time. It was crowded in the bathroom and I was sorta fed up with everything. I think by this time we'd all figured out we weren't really going to die. We just had to sit on a stupid cold bathroom floor and wait all night when we'd rather be sleeping in our beds. But the air in our rooms was probably tainted with poisous anhydrous ammonia gas. So we sat on the tile floor wedged in between the bathroom stalls and talked, or complained. Some of us tried to curl up on the floor and go to sleep. It was a LOOOONG night. Around 5:00 a.m. we were given the all clear sign and told we could go back to our rooms and sleep if we wanted. I believe it was about this time that there were finally some sort of announcements on the radio. Now that it was beginning to get a bit lighter and visiblity was a bit better, lots of people were going to the emergency room and it was crowded. I believe they said you should only come if it truly was a life or death emergency.
Al and I went back to our room. I wanted to sleep, but was a bit wound up. Al lay on her bottom bunk and coughed uncontrollably. I stared at her awhile. "Are you going to be okay?" More coughing. Al had mild asthma. "Should I take her to the emergency room?" I thought. "I don't know if it's safe for me to be driving out there yet. I don't know if we can bother the RA's and I don't know if she's bad enough to go to the emergency room if they're already full." She kept coughing. I rewet her washcloth for her and decided she probably wasn't going to die quite yet. She breathed through the washcloth until she fell asleep. I lay in bed and tried to breathe through my washcloth, but eventually it felt smothering and annoying and I tossed it away and tried to sleep. I felt angry and upset and scared and frustrated. I finally fell asleep and when I awoke mid-morning I called my parents and let them know it was all okay. Classes were cancelled for the day and the town was basically shut down because everyone was at home cleaning the residual white powder that the gas had left off of carpets and out of drapes. If they weren't at home cleaning they were in the hospital with major burns to their lung or eye tissue. A few of us remained seemingly unscathed. Cat and Al and Kirstie and I chose to carry on with our plan of a road trip to Moosejaw. We packed our things and left early afternoon with high spirits. I remember stopping for gas on the way out of town and noticing that the women's bathroom in the gas station still held that ammonia smell. We talked and laughed as Al drove. We were escaping the poisonous gas. We even wrote a movie about our experience on the way and Cat may share the details of that movie with you, but probably for a fee.


That is my story. It is anticlimactic, but scary nevertheless. There were others who had experiences MUCH worse than spending the night in a dorm bathroom. Many people fled to the shelter of friends' homes outside of the city. Other people simply drove their cars through the blinding white fog up to the north hill or the south hill where the air was clearer. Deer died. Small birds nesting in trees near the train wreck were asphyxiated immediately. Household pets were affected. Most painful of all was the simple fact that a young healthy man suffocated to death on his front lawn in a trailer court near the deraillment. He'd heard the noise the deraillment made, went outside to see how he could help, and became disoriented by the blinding fog of gas. He wandered around until he collapsed and suffocated laying in the snow. Emergency crews found him in the morning.