Caldera

by Larry LaVoie

  He motioned for the pilot to lift up and go to the second site on the agenda, a small village of two thousand, all dead from a cloud of toxic gas that had silently crept down the mountain settling on the low-lying village.

  On the way he collected gas samples near the smoldering crater, measured them using a portable gas chromatograph and compared the readings with a computer printout. This can’t be right, he thought. He directed the pilot to make another pass around the crater. Gas levels had dropped significantly lower than the day before. “Not good, she’s building up pressure,” he mumbled.

  As the helicopter hovered over the village he saw bulldozers excavating a mass grave for the decaying bodies. There were too many and no next of kin to claim them. In the high heat and humidity of the tropics, bodies decompose rapidly and a quick burial was the most humane thing to do.

  Mass volcanic destruction was not new to him. He’d seen it in Mexico, Ecuador, the Philippines, and Chile, but never had he seen death on this scale. This time it was exceptionally hard to stomach. Senseless death and destruction, he thought, but what was really eating at him was his slowness to respond. If he’d only answered his cell.... He logged in the gas data, checked the figures again, and thought Mt. Talang is not finished.

  From the helicopter he called the monitoring station and had them summon the local authorities. The seismographs were pegging every few seconds and gas levels were dropping rapidly; it meant only one thing, the mountain was getting ready for another eruption. The next one would be a big one.

  “I’m recommending we take it to Level Four,” Jason told the geologist at the monitoring station.

  “You think the mountain will erupt again within twenty-four hours?” the local geologist questioned.

  “We haven’t seen the big one yet. It could be sooner. Start packing.”

  On the way to his hotel Jason decided to make one last pass around the mountain to verify a lava outcropping he’d observed earlier. As the helicopter swept over the rugged terrain he could see numerous glowing fissures outside the crater. White clouds of steam billowed up toward them. “Give it some distance,” he told the pilot, but got no response. Growing more nervous, he tapped the pilot on the shoulder. “Get the hell out of here!” he yelled.

  They returned back to the border of the Red Zone. Jason motioned for the pilot to keep the engine running. He jumped from the craft in a whirlwind of choking dust and ran over to the supervising geologist, a small man with dark skin wearing a Panama hat and a dust mask. “We’ve got to move the Red Zone back at least ten miles,” Jason shouted above the whine of the turbine engine.

  “We’ve got more bodies to recover,” the man protested.

  “They’re already dead,” Jason said coldly. “Get the hell out before you join them.”

  He returned to the helicopter and they lifted off. He hoped the mountain would wait until the evacuation was complete.

  As they set down at the monitoring station thirty miles from Talang Summit the mountain exhaled a black ash plume that rose twenty-thousand feet into the sky turning day into night. The shock wave from the explosion rumbled for miles in all directions like a giant thunderstorm was passing through. Inside the station Jason asked the supervisor, “Did they make it out?” The man holding the phone set it down softly shaking his head. A giant hand clutched Jason’s heart, squeezing with a vengeance. Again he had not given them enough warning. Talang had devoured another hundred victims.

  Island of Hawaii

  Milton Bainbridge had been looking forward to the trip to Hawaii. His intentions were to relax and visit some old friends he’d not seen in several years. After arriving, he’d managed to get a foursome together, and spent the first day of his vacation on the golf course. He tried to relax, but his mind kept returning to Yellowstone. He feared the vacation was turning into a worry session instead of the R&R he’d planed. The first night he had not slept well, preoccupied with the thought that something would go wrong and Carlene wouldn’t call. Then there was Sanders at USGS. He knew his boss Peter Frank wouldn’t close the park without backing from Sanders, and given Sanders’ past, he needed some leverage in case Sanders wouldn’t listen to him.

  That evening over lobster tails, shrimp and pineapple flavored rum drinks, Bainbridge brought up his concerns about Yellowstone to some colleagues.

  Dining with him were three men he’d worked with throughout the years; Fred Allen a retired geologist with USGS, Francis Danforth supervisor of the activity at Kilauea and Ted Raymond a geology professor at the University of Hawaii. The three had been called to the island in eighty-three after the latest eruption of Kilauea. Danforth and Raymond had stayed to make Hawaii their permanent residence.

  “I’ve been watching Yellowstone for a number of years,” Bainbridge said, “the recent activity is concerning.”

  “Come on, Milton,” Francis Danforth said. “You don’t have to be so dramatic. Everyone knows Yellowstone is active, but the mountain vents itself, been doing it for eons.”

  “It’s more serious than that. I’m thinking about calling an alert.”

  Francis Danforth had been an outspoken critic of Milton Bainbridge in the past and the years hadn’t mellowed him. “You’d have to be pretty presumptuous to think after six-hundred-thousand years Yellowstone is waking up on your watch ... but you were always an arrogant bastard.”

  Bainbridge held his cool. St. Helens was the first volcano that an accurate prediction of an eminent eruption had been made and he had been the one to make the call. It didn’t set well with some of the senior scientists at the time and many had doubted him. Danforth was one of them. After the eruption Bainbridge had been heavily criticized for not following his own prediction, and leaving some scientists in harm’s way inside the Red Zone. Of course, there had been no way of knowing at the time. Who could have guessed the side of the mountain was going to blow out. Who the hell invited Danforth? Bainbridge thought. His hindsight was always twenty-twenty.

  “You’re right, of course,” Bainbridge said sarcastically. “Kilauea has been in continuous eruption for the past thirty years. You’ve been sitting on your ass not having to worry about predictions.”

  “Don’t get your skivvies in a knot, I’m just trying to put it into perspective,” Danforth said.

  “Nevertheless,” Bainbridge addressed the others, “if Yellowstone erupts, at the very least, the states surrounding Wyoming will have to be evacuated. That’s a hell of a big red zone. I’ll need some support from the scientific community if it comes to that.”

  Danforth lifted his cocktail glass complete with miniature bamboo umbrella in a mock toast. “You want to evacuate the states surrounding Wyoming; let’s see, that would be Idaho, Utah, Montana, South Dakota, and Colorado, have I missed any? Oh yeah Nebraska. They’ll haul your ass off to the loony bin along with any one supporting you.”

  “You’ve had too much to drink,” Ted Raymond said to Danforth. He turned to the others. “He gets this way when he drinks.” He ran a bronze hand across his balding head. “Sanders puts the word out every other week that predictions better be right. That fiasco in El Salvador made him gun shy. If this is real, you’ll need our help. What can we do?”

  Bainbridge leaned forward putting his elbows on the table. “I thought I’d invite Sanders to the mountain where he could see things first hand. I think there’s too much for him to ignore, but if he doesn’t bite, I may call on you for support. You start reviewing the data. He respects your opinion.”

  Fred Allen, in flip flops, ragged tan shorts, and a flowered silk shirt raised his empty beer bottle to the barmaid. “I’m surprised at you, Milton. Thirty years ago you would have crammed an alert down Sanders’ throat and put your job on the line doing it. I’ve already been following the activity in the Yellowstone system for the past few weeks and you’re right to be concerned, but I’m not sure my opinion is respected by Sanders. We never did get along that well.”

  “Go ahead and make idiots of yourselves
,” Danforth said. “You won’t see my stamp on a Yellowstone alert.” He pushed his chair back and stood up. “If you gentlemen will excuse me I have to see a dog about a man.”

  They watched Danforth stagger off. Bainbridge took a sip from his glass and held it up to the others. “You suppose he’ll remember any of this tomorrow,” he said with a grin.

  Sumatra, Indonesia

  Outside the Jakarta Sands Hotel Jason stood before a mob of reporters knowing full well with the satellite links his every word would be broadcast live into the homes of viewers around the world. Erupting volcanoes were always big news.

  “Dr. Trask, why didn’t the USGS put out a warning Mt. Talang was going to erupt?” a Japanese reporter asked in perfect English.

  Jason felt perspiration bead on his brow. It wasn’t the high humidity and the ungodly heat that made him sweat, but the relentless persistence of assholes like this guy. He wished he could tell them to fuck off, but that would make things worse. He was trying to change his image at USGS. The only thing worse than reporters was the pounding he would get from Sanders when this was all over.

  “I’ve told you all I can,” Jason said. “The Red Zone has been moved back and will remain at thirty miles from the summit of Talang until further notice. We think the last eruption vented the system. There are signs the mountain is going back to rest. We won’t know for sure until we can get back on the mountain and replace the monitoring equipment that was lost in the blast. Thank you.” He elbowed his way through the crowd and disappeared into the hotel.

  It took Jason less than ten minutes to pack his bags and slip out the back door of the hotel. He needed to get away from the press.

  Hawaii

  It was early morning the third day of his stay in Hawaii. Milton Bainbridge looked like an astronaut, dressed in a silver heat-resistant suit, as he gingerly walked across the hardened crust of recently solidified lava on an active lava flow on Kilauea. He marveled at how much better the protective clothing was now that Kevlar with a metallic vapor-deposited surface had been invented. The only discomfort was not from the searing heat under his feet, but from his own sweat inside the protective gear. It was like wearing a portable steam bath. The air reeked of sulfur, a smell that brought back memories of St. Helens. He remembered measuring the vast quantities of sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide that filtered through the fissures as magma deep within St. Helens fought its way to the surface.

  “Careful Doctor,” the call from the young woman startled Bainbridge back to reality.

  He tilted his head down at the glowing hole in the earth’s crust knowing only a thin layer of hardened lava kept him from plunging into a raging river of molten rock. He grimaced and looked at the young woman through the gold reflective shield in his head gear. She was about the age his wife had been when they had visited a site near here on their honeymoon. “This island has been growing for a lot of years,” he said.

  “We’re trying to determine changing composition of the gasses,” the girl instructed. “Kind of a crude method.”

  Bainbridge nodded holding up the sledge hammer head that was attached to a long cable. It weighed about five pounds, and the technique for collecting magma samples was the same as he’d used as a student fifty years earlier.

  “Go ahead. Try to hit the center of the stream.”

  Bainbridge tossed the weight into the glowing torrent making sure he held tightly to the end of the cable. “Like riding a bike,” he said. He felt the cable become taut as the slug with the solidifying magma fought the current. Hand over hand he reeled in the ball of lava as he would a prized fish. It was hard work and had not seemed this difficult years ago.

  “And you said you’d forgotten how to do it,” the girl cheered.

  Bainbridge pulled the glowing slug through the opening. He looked at his boots smoldering from the intense heat of the lava flow he was standing on, amazed he couldn’t feel it through the insulation. I’ll probably burst into flames, he thought. He remembered a time when a walk out on an active lava bed was paramount to suicide. More than one of his colleagues had succumbed to the weak crust plunging to their death in a hot spot. Today with the infrared thermal imaging equipment the hot spots could be easily avoided. They could even monitor the hot spots and ground swelling from satellites.

  The young woman who had escorted him across the lava flow steered him clear of thin areas in the crust with a hand-held GPS as they returned. Once in a safe area she helped him remove the protective gear. She pointed at a white Ford Explorer approaching in the distance. “That’s our ride to the volcano observatory headquarters,” she said.

  Free of the cumbersome gear, Bainbridge heard his cell phone ringing and wondered if he’d missed a call. He reached for the phone, saw it was from Carlene, and put it to his ear.

  “Dr. Bainbridge. Do you have time to talk?”

  Carlene wouldn’t be calling if it wasn’t important, he thought. “What’s happened?”

  “We had a six-point-two this morning and another one just now.”

  He listened to her recount of the two earthquakes. She sounded terrified. These were the strongest quakes in Yellowstone since the one at Norris on the northern boundary of the caldera in seventy-five. “Keep the recorders running,” he said. “I’ll check it out from here and call you back.”

  He hung up and immediately had second thoughts. “How fast can I get to the airport?” he asked the escort.

  Chapter 4

  Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) sensors were part of an array of twenty-one set strategically around Yellowstone. Satellites in geo-synchronous orbits gathered data from the sensors and radioed the information to tracking stations around the globe. As long as they were functioning, anyone with a computer could monitor Yellowstone as well as hundreds of other hot spots around the world. Three of the stations had quit sending signals to the satellites.

  “Keep the information flowing,” Carlene said out loud, noting the stations were down. The show must go on. She pondered the remote location of one of the defective sensors. It could only be accessed by helicopter or snowmobile this time of the year. Packing in was an option in the summer months only. Helicopter would be the fastest. As soon as the ground stops shaking, she thought.

  Carlene rescued her cup of coffee before it walked its way off the table in another earthquake. She tried to sip the warm brew, but the number of tremors lately had taken their toll and she was shaking so badly she set the cup back on her desk. She found it difficult to concentrate and even harder to hold back the tears. She checked her watch and tried to determine when Bainbridge would be back. She had waited as long as she dared before calling Bainbridge and now wished she had made the decision to call him sooner. I should have expected the increased seismic activity, she told herself, but the magnitude and frequency of it had scared her. She let out a long sigh. Better get this over with. She made a call for the helicopter so she could repair the damaged sensors.

  “Pelican Cone,” Carlene told the pilot. Pelican Cone was just outside the caldera boundary at an elevation of 9,643 feet. The sensor was placed above timberline and the last time she’d visited it was more than a year ago in late summer. The sensors were buried in concrete and were considered indestructible but the electronics were exposed and vulnerable. She had taken a pleasant full-day hike from the main trail that led along the south end of Mirror Plateau. A lot of effort to clear a family of rats from the shack housing the electronics, she thought. She hoped this was nothing more serious.

  “Probably nothing more than a broken antenna or a frayed wire. A quick trip,” she told the pilot.

  The morning air was clear with high cumulus clouds in a powder blue sky. The Allison C20 turbine was using its entire 400 shaft horsepower to gyrate the overhead blades of the Hughes 500 helicopter in the thin mountain air. The craft was not much more than a Plexiglas nose-cone attached to a pair of skids and four flimsy looking blades, but it was maneuverable and with a top speed of 130 knots the trip to th
e side of Pelican Cone would take less than twenty minutes.

  Once in the air, she had a panoramic view of the snow-covered landscape. Everything was white for as far as she could see. “So much for global warming,” she said nervously.

  On the edge of a clearing, a herd of Roosevelt elk trekked through waist-high snow drifts keeping close to the tree-line where they could disappear in seconds if they sensed danger. Is this a good idea? She questioned the decision. She tapped the pilot on the shoulder. “Can you land in this much snow?”

  “Are you kidding? You’ll have to bail out?” He grinned.

  Carlene didn’t laugh. “Take me around to the north side and I’ll see if I can spot the sensor.”

  They rounded the peak and to her surprise, the North Slope was enveloped in a blanket of steam. “Drop down a bit more, Carlene said. “I thought I saw magma.”

  The pilot nodded and dropped the craft close to the sloping ground. They hovered on the edge of the fog bank.

  Carlene motioned to the pilot. “Lower.” As they descended, the prop-wash dissipated the steam in grey tornados exposing jet black ground with glowing red stringers showing in the cracks. Fresh magma, she thought. She saw the sensor tilted at an awkward angle. A charred pile of ash was all that remained of the electronics shack. “I wish it were rats,” she mumbled.

  Her first year of graduate school she had spent the summer helping to install tilt meters around Yellowstone. She remembered the pains they had taken to make the concrete slabs housing the tilt meters perfectly level. In an instant everything had been demolished. She put her hand on the pilot’s shoulder. “Might as well get a Co-spec reading. Can you circle the crater?”