When the non-dairy creamer plant explodes in the Valley Hulk is quickly on scene, walking through a crowd of onlookers on the outskirts and safely at a distance, the crowd parting to let him through, comments at his back as he passes:
“I guess it’s time to drink my coffee black.”
“I’d say. Imagine what that stuff does to your innards.”
“Look, there’s Hulk.”
“What’s he think he’s going to do?”
The Valley is a bad place for this explosion and resulting fire, other industrial facilities in proximity, a developer’s idea of tony, assisted-living apartments that have to be evacuated, one resident expiring from the commotion.
To any of the firefighters or first responders on the scene, no amount of damage from a miscalculated leap can overshadow what they see that day, and they’ll tell anyone who’ll listen. No one sees what the Hulk does beyond the first responders, and the things he does are what make him the ever-loving Hulk. Things he does and does gruffly, that no one else can do, never responding to praise or thanks with anything more than a harrumph, his gruffness taken for modesty, part of the Big Lug mystique.
He controls the fire as it tears across a dry plain of neck-high weeds toward an acetylene production facility, this done by hopping around the front perimeter of the fire and blowing it to a standstill, Hulk able to generate 30-40 MPH gusts of breath, holding up the blaze as firefighters attack it from both flanks.
He lifts a collapsed cinderblock wall, still relatively intact, a wall only a crane could lift, beneath which are several people badly injured though still alive, Hulk carrying each of them to safety. He works through the rubble, casting aside blocks and girders and other decimated sections of the plant until he finds each of the fourteen people killed in the explosion, and carrying out their corpses, holding the corpses limply in his arms, almost reverently, carrying them out one at a time.
The shame of it is no one gets pictures. Of Hulk facing down the angry blaze, hopping frenetically from spot to spot wherever the fire attempts further incursions across the empty field of weeds. Of Hulk lifting the huge wall, maneuvering beneath it, balancing it on his hands, walking with it until it’s clear of the site, negotiating the imbalance of rubble from the decimated plant, uneven mounds of cinder blocks and steel girders with the huge wall aloft, tossing it out of the way. Of sooty Hulk carrying out the injured, of Hulk carrying the corpses, of Hulk going back into the mess time after time until no one alive or dead is left behind. The firefighters and first responders have their stories, and great stories they are. How legends are made.
For the media, the Hulk angle doesn’t have legs. The patchwork, decades-old plant standards, regulations of volatile chemicals that don’t stack up against those of other countries, lax inspections, testimony in a Senate chamber about how this could have happened in the first place more compelling news.
