Dusk Through Narrow Streets

Yet again, lame blogger is lame, because I should have talked about this a long time ago–but in light of recent events (and plenty more eruptions since), it bears mentioning.

In his official Republican response to President Barack Obama’s speech to the nation [on Feb. 24. Shut up], Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal said repeatedly that “Americans can do anything!”

With one exception, apparently. We don’t need to keep an eye on simmering volcanoes.

Jindal singled out “volcano monitoring” as an unnecessary frill that Democrats stuck in the recently adopted stimulus package.

“Their legislation is larded with wasteful spending,” Jindal said. “It includes … $140 million for something called ‘volcano monitoring.’ Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington, D.C.”

Jindal’s comments provoked an eruption of their own. Alaska politicians, liberal bloggers and some scientists began pointing out how useful it is to let people know when a volcano in their neighborhood is about to explode.

Read the rest of the article: Alaskans fume over Jindal volcano-monitoring gripe.

Yeah, it’s old news. But considering that not long after Jindal said this, Redoubt started going off? It hasn’t caused tremendous damage by any means, and even though I’ve been amused by the fact that a number of Google searches leading people to my blog have been something like”has redoubt killed anyone” (it hasn’t), the danger is real. It’s especially dangerous for airplanes–why do you think flights keep getting canceled because of the volcano?–and it’s only our ability to monitor the situation that keeps everyone out of trouble. I mean, let’s say we couldn’t monitor Redoubt and other Alaskan volcanoes by anything except whether we can see it actually erupting. Say we also know that it’s a Really Bad Idea to fly an airplane through an ash cloud. So even assuming that doesn’t happen, what do we do? Shut down the airport every time we get some seismic activity or a little plume of steam? I mean, you can imagine what that would do to the economy here, right? And again, that’s assuming something worse didn’t happen.

So, yeah. We kind of need our volcano-monitoring.

I should also mention that we’ve had some ashfall and semi-regular eruptions of varying magnitudes, and I almost got stuck in Juneau or Fairbanks (horrors) because of one, but it’s time for bed. So I leave you with an awesome link I got off Twitter: a whole bunch of insanely awesome volcano-eruption photographs. These shots are truly amazing. Some are unlabeled, but I think this one is probably from Hawaii (although I thought that about several that were labeled and was wrong on each one), and judging by what I can see of the mountain’s shape and by the trees, I’m guessing this one is from Redoubt’s 1989 eruption. But I could easily be wrong.

Alaska’s kind of famous for its earthquakes–I imagine the one in ‘64 is relatively familiar to people, if nowhere near as much as, say, any in San Francisco because California is the center of the universe–but I’m not sure how many people connect the plate-tectonic activity we get with earthquakes to the same kind of thing that results in volcanoes. We are part of the Ring of Fire, after all:

So there you go, we get earthquakes and volcanoes. Active ones, particularly out in the Aleutians. Not the sorts of fun, dramatic volcanoes you see in Hawaii (well, in pictures from the 1980s when Pu’u O’o was actually doing things, now it’s more like a trickle into the ocean) with lava fountaining into the air, and thankfully not the sort you hear about every now and then on Montserrat that’s sending pyroclastic flows down onto another village. But we do get plenty of ash from our volcanoes, when they go off, and the current thing is that Mt. Redoubt is gearing up for a good eruption. We’re not talking a Mt. St. Helens-type problem here, but Redoubt’s just across Cook Inlet from Anchorage, so we’d be getting lots of ash while towns like Kenai would get even more. UAA’s been sending out e-mails asking faculty and staff to cover their computers at the end of the day, and people have been doing that where I work; we’ve been doing it at home, even. We’ve got no idea when the thing’s going to go off, but when it does, the ash will be so fine it’ll get in pretty much everywhere. Which reminds me, I should really check to see if I’ve got an extra air filter for my car and some medical masks in the trunk. The last time Mt. Redoubt blew its top, we had smoke and ash disrupting air traffic for five months, plus enormous amounts of dirty snow, apparently (it was in Dec. 1989, so I was maybe three and don’t remember).

To be honest, though, I think the whole thing’s kind of funny–not because I’m not taking it seriously, but because, I mean, you don’t ordinarily associate volcanoes with Alaska, especially not when the main weather problems I’ve kvetched about have involved insanely cold temps and too much snow. Also because a look at Google News shows that Mt. Redoubt’s showing up in the LA Times and the Boston Herald and all kinds of things–heck, there’s even a place in Austria reporting on it. And I do think that’s amusing, because nobody really gives a crap about Alaska unless there’s oil involved–or if we’ve got a volcano about to go off. Then everyone’s interested.

Personally? I’m really hoping for a volcano day off school.