The Blackout

On Tuesdays and Thursdays I teach swimming lessons. I have been teaching swim lessons for a good decade and I have never experienced what happened this last Thursday. I was teaching my last class of the day consisting of 4 students ranging in age from 5-8. We were in the deep end, right next to the wall and my assistant instructor had just gotten out to retrieve some kickboards. I told the kids to do a bob...but this time...try and touch the bottom. Kids love this activity because they like to brag about how far down they can go. After the kids went down for the bottom, every light in the pool facility went out. A complete blackout. There is not one window in the pool facility. It was so dark that I literally could not see my hands in front of me. I immediately went underwater starting on one side of the wall scooping each kid up. I emerged with 4 kids in my arms. Luckily they hadn't gone down too far. I swam them over to the ladder and got them all out immediately sitting them on a pool side bench. My swimming lesson was not the only one going on at the time. You could hear parents screaming their child's name asking if they were out of the pool. It was quite frightening as no one knew what was going on and no one could see a thing. Pretty soon, I hear, "the refineries have exploded!" If you're a wife of someone working at a refinery...you NEVER want to hear the word "refinery" and "exploded" in the same sentence. As I had to stay right next to my students...I couldn't do much but wait with horrific anxiety not knowing what was going on. Soon, flashlights came on and parents were able to come get their kids. I immediately ran outside to look at the refineries ( you can see them from the pool). When I looked I clearly saw the the shell refinery (Craig works at the Tesoro refinery) flaring (flame going out of a stack...with a lot of smoke). Not a big deal...refineries flare all the time. I immediately broke the rumor that the refineries were not on fire and they did not explode...shell was just flaring.
It turns out, that all of the power went out in town...including the refineries...causing Shell to use their flares. The power did return a few hours later.
I am very thankful that all children were removed from the pool safely (however I do have a lot of concerns that I need to address with the pool manager...i.e. emergency lighting?!?!?) I can think of a lot of scenarios in which a pool blackout would have gone a lot worse such as open swim in which many children are not with an adult.
Wow...it was quite the day with a lot of scares in a very short amount of time...