March 24, 2009
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Redoubt Volcano News and Images
Redoubt had another explosive ash eruption around 8 PM yesterday. There was ashfall here in the Valley, but the ash advisory had been lifted by the time I woke today.All images courtesy of AVO/USGS
On March 18, Dennis Anderson captured this image from near Homer. The steam plume has been showing on Redoubt’s summit off and on for months.
In a flyover on March 21, Cyrus Read of the Alaska Volcano Observatory captured this image of the upper vent in the summit crater.
Then, on March 22, Redoubt eupted.
John Bailey produced this false color satellite image of the ash cloud drifting toward the Susitna Valley at 5:30 AM March 23, 2009.
On a flyover March 23, after the initial five explosive ash eruptions, Game McGimsey captured this image of flooding along Drift River.
Cyrus Read of AVO captured this image of tephra deposits along the flooded Drift River.
There is a tank farm, an oil transfer terminal, at the mouth of Drift River. Twenty years ago, when Redoubt erupted –
After several weeks of growing explosions, a big blast hit the lava dome, oil workers abandoned the scene by helicopter and the oil terminal was swept by a flood that turned the Drift River, briefly, into the largest river in North America.Federal, state and industry officials debated for weeks what to do about the [at that time] 900,000 barrels of crude stored in the river’s 100-year floodplain. Oil levels were eventually reduced, then the tanks were emptied. For more than a week, that meant shutting down production on 10 Cook Inlet oil platforms, because there was no place to send the oil.
. . .Information on the capacity and current contents of the terminal is classified under the federal Maritime Transportation Safety Act.
”That’s not public information,” said Chevron’s Roxanne Sinz. “We can’t release any numbers.”State and federal oil spill officials will go a bit further. They say the storage at Drift River is being reduced this week. But they won’t say by how much.
. . .The secrecy surrounding Drift River this week was exasperating to Bob Shavelson, executive director of the environmental group Cook Inlet Keeper. What’s a bigger danger to the oil terminal, he asked Friday — the volcano or al-Qaida?
“It’s a perfect example of using terrorism to mask a public concern,” Shavelson said. “How do you have an adequate oil spill response if you don’t know the volume?”
A tanker is now at Drift River taking on oil, U.S. Coast Guard spokeswoman Sara Francis in Anchorage said Friday. The tanker will carry the product to Nikiski, where Tesoro has a refinery.
But Francis said she did not know how much oil would be left at the Drift River terminal.
The oil industry publication, Petroleum News, says “Drift River terminal is ready for anything.” To that, I say, “Yeah, right.”
AVO can’t say how long we are going to be watching ashfall advisories even more carefully than we usually watch the weather reports. No matter what anyone says, nobody can reliably predict how secure the Drift River Terminal is against volcanic activity. A spokesperson for Cook Inlet Keeper, without saying where the information came from, said that the terminal now stores 5 or 6 million gallons of oil.Speaking of oil, and enviromental disasters, since my entry last week about the Exxon Valdez spill, I have been working on another piece, based on research, rather than the personal experience I reported that time. It still needs work, but will probably be posted today or tomorrow.
