Okay. I've lived through tornadoes--seen a few up-close-and-personal-like. I've done blizzards, bitter cold fronts, and 100-mph-straight-line winds. I've lived through ice storms that had trees cracking and falling all around our home. I've even done a hurricane in a mobile home, piled up with my five brothers in a bathtub with a mattress over top of us for seven hours straight. (No, it wasn't pretty, and I may still need therapy to get past that particular trauma...) In the past three weeks, I've been through at least half a dozen earthquakes. A little creepy, but kind of cool, considering that none of them have gone over 5.8 on the Richter scale.
But what I haven't done--and honestly never expected to do--was experience a volcanic eruption. And the Alaska Vocano Observatory tells us that it's coming. Since Mount Redoubt is 100 miles from Anchorage, we really shouldn't need to worry about lava. But we will get ashfall from the estimated 9-mile-high pyroclastic cloud.
Ashfall. Hmmm....sounds kind of soft and benevolent, doesn't it? And from what I remember from the movie Volcano with Pierce Brosnan (which I've seen about nineteen times, thanks to my love affair with End-of-the-World movies), the ashfall was really the least of anyone's worries, right?
Wrong. You can't drive a car in ashfall. Do you remember the big Suburban in the movie, plowing through piles of ash and winding carefully through fiery bits of volcanic material? Yeah, well...ash makes your car stall. Kaput. Once there's ash in your air filter, you're not going anywhere. And you know how they casually use all of those phones, microwaves, seismic equipment, etc.? Yeah. Um...you can't do that during an ashfall, either. The AVO recommends I wrap my laptop in saran wrap prior to the ashfall. TV? Same goes. Needless to say, that means the power goes out, too...no TV, no fridge--do you remember anyone stocking up on gallons of water or cans of soup? No, me either.
Worse, though, is what the ashfall does to the human body. Apparently, ashfall from a volcano isn't like the stuff at the bottom of your fireplace. It's made up of pyroclastic rock fragments and glass. You can't go outside in an ashfall without a mask and goggles, and even that's not advised. So what? Hollywood didn't think we'd still think Pierce was a hottie with goggles and a face mask on? Puhleeze. We couldn't possibly be so shallow, could we?
I'm really impressed, though, with how the various organizations are working so hard to inform the general public about the potential dangers and precautions they should take. UAA sends me a daily e-mail update; Alaska Daily News has links to the latest info on the AVO website; our Squadron 1st Sgt. (i.e. Lonnie) has very thoughtfully e-mailed and called spouses with loads of useful information; our Squadron RAV has done the same.
It's a good thing, too. Even with all of the hours I've spent watching End-of-the-World movies about volcanoes, Hollywood did nothing to prepare me for the real thing...
3 comments:
Hollywood is indeed a disservice to us in certain situations. So they lied about volcanoes too. Volcanoes and childbirth...what next? Santa? Crooked politicians? Seriously, be safe and think of this as a creative opportunity
So did you buy your Saran Wrap?
Volcanoes, you gotta lava 'em!
Actually, we're STILL waiting for the volcano to blow. They downgraded it for a few weeks, and then last week, we went back up to a "Threat Level Orange," which is apparently a not-very-good-thing. It's like the boy who cried "wolf," though--by the time the thing actually blows, no one will be ready for it anymore... :)
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