Special From Mt. St. Helens

"It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step into the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you may be swept off to."
Bilbo Baggins

Special From Mt. St. Helens

posted 10/14/04
I stopped at Mt. St. Helens on the final day of my trip to see how our local volcano was doing in its current eruptive phase. I'd been watching it through the various media as I piled miles on the bike and decided it would be a good story. Of course real time views are already available on line and the print and video media do a good job of covering this story too so I decided to try to get a look at some of the "story behind the story" by talking to the locals and the media themselves. I took the turn off I-5 at SR504 and proceeded up to the Mt. St. Helens visitor's center. I asked the ranger where the media could be found on the mountain and he snorted, "Where can't they be found!" He then indicated that if I simply drove up the road it would be obvious from th enumber of satellite trucks when I found the media.

I sped away and each turn brought me closer to the mountain. A new steam puff was clearly visible and growing as I rounded a corner past Kid Valley, "home of the famous buried A frame house".

A little farther and I was at the Castle Lake View Point and a Ranger was barring the way. "May I see your press pass?" She said. Of course I don't have one being a lowly digital freelancer. Thinking quickly I said, "I'm with the Sanjuanisalnder.com. My editor called me while I was on assignment in California and I've been on the road all day to get here." Of course she hadn't but I knew that she would have if she only knew that I was in the vicinity.

"Oh, they're starting the press conference right now so just park up front and go to the briefing area behind those satellite trucks." I hustled in and found the crowd gathered in front of Dr. John Pallister of the U. S. Geological Survey. The mountain steamed behind him as he briefed the crowd on the most recent information.

Much was a restatement of the cautious information that I'd been hearing on the news but there were some surprises too. The activity was low but it was now being called a "dome building eruption". The surface was heating up. He predicted that magma would probably reach the surface. [Last night, 10/12/04, glowing lava was seen at the vent] Then he gave the real stunner when he said that there was a 10% chance of an explosive event at least equal to the 1986 eruption! This would be a level 4 VEI. I asked some questions about gas mix at the vent, as that's usually a precursor to eruptions. As fresh magma moves up, it degasses like an uncapped beer and CO2 and SO2 are given off in greater amounts. He said that that this was hard to monitor due to the absorption of gases by water in the current situation so I asked him if there was any attempt to measure change in pH in ground water and springs at the dome. As gases are absorbed, the water becomes acidic and pH goes down. He replied that a project to do just this had been scheduled to go in just prior to this most recent event starting up. Now, it was considered too dangerous to place the instrumentation to do this monitoring so it would have to wait.

I was unfamiliar with the VEI so I asked some more questions and found that it stood for the Volcanic Explosivity Index and that it's a measure of the rate and amount of energy release during an eruption. This is a fairly new scale first proposed in 1982.

This event was a .5 to 1.0 on the VEI so far. The big eruption of 1980 was a 5 and Krakatoa was a 6! "Holy cinder cone!" I thought. "A 10% chance of a 4 and the climate affecting eruption of Krakatoa only a 6!" Then I remembered how the Richter scale for earthquakes worked as a logarithmic progression. Richter 4 was 10X more energetic than Richter 3 and Richter 5 was 100X as energetic as the Richter 3. Each number was a power of 10 so what looked like small changes were really much larger than they first appeared. I asked about the VEI and found to my relief that it was also a logarithmic scale. Still, a VEI of 4 gives an ash plume of 6 to 15 miles in height and enough ash to be a nuisance within 50 miles of the vent.

I digested this while I watched the media taking notes. These folks had been watching the mountain for many days now. At one point there had been 23 satellite trucks and almost 100 reporters at this site. Now we were down to 8 trucks and about 20 media folks from ABC, NBC, CBS, the AP, local stations, and sanjuanislander.com of course!

After this 10% figure from the USGS was given, I listened to an interesting discussion between one reporter from NBC and a woman who I assumed was his director. She wanted him to do some live shots out of a helicopter over the dome and he was adamant that odds of 1 in 10 weren't safe enough for him to go. I mentioned that 1in 10 spread out over the month the eruption might really only mean that the chance of an eruption in the next hour was more like 1 in a 1000 but he was having none of it. I then pointed out that in the event that he was lost during a sudden eruption while covering the story, he would at least get a rest stop named after him. That seemed to not be a popular suggestion and he ignored me after that.

I still wanted the story of what it had been like covering this event but found most reporters reluctant to talk to a digital reporter. In fact, one young woman from AP immediately said "My boss wouldn't want me talking to you" Old media vs., new media. They were probably still smarting from the savaging the bloggers gave Dan Rather after the recent, phony National Guard reports.

I circulated some more and talked to the camera crews a bit. They seemed more down to earth than the reporters and were enjoying a relaxing scene that unfolded at the mountains pace. Afterall, a volcano takes its own sweet geologic time to clear its throat. St Helens seems to be doing just that. Glowing lava is now visible at the new dome and whether the mountain coughs or just burps will be out of our hands and in these days of relentlessly bad news and worse politics, it's a fascinating diversion to simply watch nature without human interference.

After my time on the mountain, I decided to stop at the town of Toutle and see what the locals thought of all the excitement. There were tourists aplenty but they all had that glazed look of those who have either been through a hurricane or who have been interviewed repeatedly by too many media. Passing them by, I chanced on a loggers bar known as The Snag and decided to walk in to experience some local color.

It was dark inside and the air reeked of chainsaws, sawdust, and something dead and hairy. As I passed by one booth in the rear, a voice whispered to me.

"Psst! Hey buddy, are they gone yet?"

At first, I thought that there had been a small earthquake; the timber of the voice was so low. I felt the question rather than heard it. My eyes were slowly becoming used to the dark and looking in the booth I saw a large shape looming across an impressive width of the wall. "Do you live here?" I asked.

"Sorta" the shape replied. "I don't normally come to town much."

"What's your name?" I asked.

"S. A. Squatch." he replied.

"Well Mr. Squatch, who are you referring to when you asked if 'they'd' left?"

"The media. All those sissy reporters from the big cities. I can't prowl my woods without being spotted and all I want is a little privacy."

"So why are you in a public bar?" I asked.

"The reporters won't come in here," Mr. Squatch said. "The loggers took to mussing up their blow dried hair and after a few near death encounters, the media leave the Snag alone. If I wear old levies and some red suspenders I blend right in and the price of a beer buys me peace and quiet."

I looked him over and as my eyes were now fully adapted to the dim light, I could see what he was talking about. Not only did he look normal, he even appeared more human than some of the real loggers sitting in an adjacent booth. I realized that my subject probably wouldn't appreciate an interview since he was trying to avoid the media so without revealing my identity (and noting that he was taller sitting down than I was standing up!) I thanked him for his time, bought him another beer, and headed home to file this story.

- The Old Squid

news @sanjuanislander.com

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