April 7, 2009

  • Prudent Volcano Response

    A week or so ago, in response to criticism about how the responsible agencies were handling or not handling the hazards of a possible oil spill from the Drift River Terminal tank farm due to flooding caused by eruptions of Redoubt Volcano, a Unified Command was created, with the Coast Guard, Department of Environmental Conservation and Cook Inlet Pipe Line Co. agreeing to work together and consult each other on decisions and action.

    Into last week, Cook Inlet Pipe Line Co. and the U.S.Coast Guard were saying that the 6.2 gallons of crude oil left in two tanks at the Drift River Terminal were being left there to stabilize the tanks in case of a flood.   The state Department of Environmental Conservation and the environmental action group Cook Inletkeeper questioned the wisdom of that.  Apparently, the ones with the last word in the matter turned out to be the organization tasked with cleaning up such a spill, Cook Inlet Spill Response, Inc.,  who said they had the capability to respond to a 3 million gallon spill.

    Photo from CSPRI – the tanker Seabulk Arctic
    taking on oil this Sunday at Christy Lee loading
    platform with Mount Redoubt in the background

    Now, most of those millions of gallons of crude are floating off to a refinery somewhere, in the belly of the tanker Seabulk Arctic.  Sea water will be pumped into the empty tanks at the tank farm.  Ballasting the 5 empty tanks with seawater was not an ideal solution, because they all contain residues of oil and sludge which will present a disposal challenge when the crisis is past.  Additionally, at least one of the tanks is described as “decommissioned,” suggesting that it was leaky or damaged in some way.  After the Unified Command agreed to suspend Cook Inlet Pipe Line Company operations, Chevron stopped production at its ten platforms on the west side of Cook Inlet, since it has no place to send the oil.

    Bob Hallinen of ADN caught this photo from Anchorage
    of Redoubt at sunset on Sunday, April 5, 2009.
    AVO lowered the alert level from red to orange again today, and I have heard people asking why they keep upping and downing it.  The answer to that is fairly simple.  If they keep it on orange when Redoubt is spewing ash, it could be a hazard to aviation and public health.  If they left it at red during the periods when the volcano is relatively quiet, planes would be grounded and nobody would get in and out of Alaska or back and forth from town to the bush.  I would think they were upping and downing too much if they were going from red to yellow and back all the time.  Orange just means you can fly or breathe right now, for a while anyway, but that the situation could change at any moment.

    Greyfox, down in Wasilla, experienced his first ever ashfall last week.  He went out in it to cover his car’s windshield and said he felt the burn in his lungs.  When it was falling here, we stayed indoors.  Enough snow fell immediately after the ashfall here that I couldn’t see how much we had gotten until the snow melted off my car.  The car’s windows make of it a little greenhouse, so on days like this the snow doesn’t stay long on the car the way it does out on the ground on top of the whole winter’s snowpack.  Enough ash had drifted or blown under my improvised windshield cover (two cat food bags and one big magnet), that I wouldn’t have been able to see where I was going before I cleaned it off. 


    Nick Appegard, flying at 16,000 feet on Iliamna Air,
    captured this shot of Redoubt’s ash plume
    drifting off toward Anchorage yesterday.

    Nearer to the action, people on the west side of Cook Inlet, and on the Kenai Peninsula across Cook Inlet from Redoubt, have been getting more ashfall than we have here in the Susitna Valley.

    “It felt like sand coming down with the breeze. Now it’s all in my hair and everywhere. I went outside to get a little footage and I was covered,” Sheila Isaac said.

    She said when they went outside neither wore a particle mask and they immediately regretted it.

    “I could feel it in my chest, in my lungs, it wasn’t a good move,” Sheila said.

    D’ya think? 

Comments (3)

  • Thank you for the update and the explanations. 

  • Interesting stuff.  The photos of Redoubt and lovely.  Gotta wonder about the last knucklehead, though. 

  • Wow. Is this because god is pissed at at Iowa and Vermont? Can this be blamed on Obama or on Bush? Someone has to be responsible, right? Those pictures, and your explanations, are wonderful. Thanks for the update. Be safe!

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