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After an extended vacation at Wigwam Village Motel (AKA the Cozy Cone Motel) in Holbrook, Arizona, the superheroes returned to Moab Ranch.

Sitting on the front porch in the afternoon sun, Silver Girl asked, "Do you remember when we first met, back in 1991? The Other had just returned from Hollywood, where he had pitched Moabbeys movie script to the executives at Atlantis Pictures."

"Yes," said Coney the Traffic Cone. "They laughed him out of the studio, saying, 'You want us to green light a movie about a coyote, a plastic traffic cone, a mythical flute player and a metalized girl? No one would believe that.'"

From a shadow in the corner, Moabbey the Coyote remarked, "All of these years later, at least we proved that we exist. Kokopelli and Coney have traveled the Four Corners region. There are pictures of Plush Kokopelli and Coney all over the internet."

"Good point", said Silver Girl. "But werent we supposed to save the world, thus proving our superhero abilities?"

"I have a plan", said Moabbey. "I reworked our movie script to make it into a disaster movie." He went on, "What makes a disaster movie so compelling is its realism. From the comfort of an air-conditioned theater, the audience can visualize wide scale destruction. The script for our disaster movie starts in a Phoenix movie house."

"Here is my pitch. - A patron in a Phoenix theater watches a movie is about water, coal and electrical power in the West. Everything centers on the Colorado River. In the Upper Colorado River Basin, there has been an extreme drought. In Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona, there has been a protracted hot summer.

Behind Glen Canyon Dam, at Lake Powell, the water level falls to unprecedented low levels. When the siphons from the lake can no longer supply water to the Navajo Generating Station, the plant goes haywire. Belching coal smoke and nitrous oxide, its three massive flue-gas-stacks collapse in a heap on the ground.

In the Lower Colorado River Basin at Lake Havasu, power transmission from the Navajo Generating Station abruptly terminates. As the siphons and pumps of the Central Arizona Project can no longer lift water over the Buckskin Mountains and on to Phoenix and Tucson, the CAP canal runs dry. With overall water supplies cut by eighty percent, Phoenix cuts its water usage by only half that amount.

Soon, reservoirs run dry and Phoenix cuts water usage to a minimum. Because Phoenix saves so much water, there is insufficient effluent to keep the sewage plants operating. That curtails the delivery of treated wastewater to the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station, west of Phoenix. The Salt River Project utility resorts to pumping ground water in order to cool the nuclear reactors at Palo Verde.

As the Tonopah Aquifer retreats farther underground, one by one, each of the four nuclear reactors at Palo Verde goes off-line and shuts down. With curtailed electrical supply in Phoenix and Tucson, there is insufficient power to keep air conditioners running. In this 'movie within the movie', the residents of Southern Arizona panic and try to leave en mass. Credits roll and the theater lights come up. After the movie, as the theater patrons leave the auditorium, they find that the toilets will not flush and that the water taps in the restrooms are dry.

As they exit the theater, our disaster movie becomes a survival movie. With a near empty water system, only those Arizonians who planned will survive the trek across the desert. For weeks, everything from RV's to motorcycles clogs the roads leading to California. When they pass over the Colorado River at Yuma, Needles or Blythe, the former Arizonians find that the Colorado River channel is now a dry arroyo.

Coney the Traffic Cone
Daredevil Pilot

To be continued...

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