Eruption 23

[Carolina Bornman]

Whenthe children were in the cafeteria, Rachel ran to her office. She checked in with her boss, then made a phone call to Ted Murray, an ex-boyfriend at Stanford who had recommended her for this job and convinced her to take it and who now worked for the Army Corps of Engineers at the Military Reserve.

She hung up, knowing she was scared, the worst fear of all for her: not knowing. While the children continued noisily eating lunch, she put on the running shoes she kept under her desk and ran all the way back to the banyan grove.

Within seconds, park visitors started coming at Rachel hard. The grounds were more crowded than she had thought. Mothers ran as they pushed strollers ahead of them. Children ran ahead of their parents. A teen on a bike swerved to avoid a child, went down, got up cursing, climbed back on his bike, and kept going. Smoke was suddenly everywhere.

Rachel Sherrill heard a chopper engine; she looked up and saw a helicopter come out of the clouds from behind the twin peaks. Saw it touch down and saw its doors open. Men in hazmat suits, tanks strapped to their backs, came out carrying extinguishers labeled cold fire. They pointed them like handguns and ran toward the trees.

Of all the kids, Lono was the one Mac had most aggressively encouraged to become an intern at the observatory, recognizing from the start how fiercely bright this boy was despite average grades in school.

Suddenly there was a bright flash of light, and the helicopter swung and seemed to flip onto its side. It spun laterally across the interior and slammed into the far wall of the crater, raising a tremendous cloud of ash that obscured their view.

In silence, they watched as the dust slowly cleared. They saw the helicopter on its side, about two hundred feet below the rim, resting precariously at the edge of a deep shelf below the crater wall, a rocky incline that sloped down to the lava lake.

Everyone in the room continued to stare at the monitors. Nothing happened right away; it was as if time had somehow stopped moving when the helicopter did. Then, as they watched, a few small boulders beneath the helicopter began to trickle down. The boulders splashed into the lava lake and disappeared below the molten surface.

The downed helicopter was at the opposite side of them, on a shelf above the lake. But its position was even more precarious now. The lava could spin at any moment, meaning the craft was perhaps seconds away from sliding down into the lava. Mac had already zipped up his green jumpsuit. He cinched the harness tighter around his waist and legs. He could loosen it when he got down there and put it around another person.

The lava lake was nearly circular, its black crust broken by streaks of brighter and more incandescent red. Steam issued from at least a dozen vents in the rocks. The walls were sheer, the footing uncertain; Mac stumbled and slid as he went down.

Although he was only a few feet below the rim, he could feel the searing heat from the lake. The air shimmered unsteadily in the convection of rising currents. Between that and the sulfurous odors swirling from the crater, he began to feel slightly nauseated.

As Mac descended along the sheer wall, inside his heat-resistant jumpsuit, he was sweating. Thin Mylar-foam insulation sewn between layers of Gore-Tex kept sweat off the skin, because if the temperature went up suddenly, the sweat would turn to steam and scald his body, meaning almost certain death.

Pilot Jake Rogers, on his side and in a tremendous amount of pain, looked straight down at the lava lake and heard the hissing of the gas escaping from the glowing cracks. He saw spatters of lava, like glowing pancake batter, thrown up on the sides of the crater.

Only twenty yards away now, MacGregor watched helplessly as the helicopter began a rumbling descent. He heard yelling from inside, and it must have been the cameraman, because Jake Rogers swore at the guy and told him to shut the hell up. The helicopter slid another twenty feet toward the lava, then miraculously stopped again. The struts were still facing outward; the twisted rotors were buried in the scree. The passenger door was still facing upward.

She meant the sulfur dioxide gas, which was concentrated near the lake. Sulfur dioxide combined with the layer of water on the surface of the lungs to form sulfuric acid. It was a hazard for anyone working around volcanoes.

The helicopter slowly rotated on its axis. Mac gripped the seat, trying to keep his balance, watching helplessly as the world outside spun, the Plexiglas bubble closer than ever to the glowing surface. Then it stopped, and the Plexiglas started to blister and melt, and smoke filled the interior of the helicopter.

But in the very next moment Tim was grabbing Glenn in his big arms and pulling him over the side. He quickly did the same for Mac, who glanced back and saw the helicopter enveloped in flames. Glenn tried to move back to the crater, but Tim shoved him hard toward their copter.

There was a roar, and the force of the explosion nearly knocked them all to the ground. A yellow-orange fireball burst up beyond the crater rim. A moment later, hot, sharp metal fragments clattered onto the slope all around them as they hurried to the red HVO helicopter.

During eruptions, lava flowed in channels down the flanks of the volcano. The surface of the lava flow cooled and formed a crust, while the lava below the hardened surface continued to flow. At the end of an eruption, the lava drained out, leaving empty tubes behind. Most lava tubes were only a few yards wide; some, though, were large caves. The HVO had mapped more than eighty tubes, and many of them were very deep.

Huge white clouds blasted upward with a continuous, deafening roar. Standing by the giant circular steel vents, Oliver Cutler looked up to watch the steam clouds boil in the sky; his wife, Leah, was next to him. The camera guy and sound guy who frequently traveled with them, Tyler and Gordon, were a few yards away.

The ground beneath their feet vibrated even more powerfully. A louder rumbling filled the air. And as dangerous as they knew all this was, feeling the power of the volcano was part of the essential thrill of what they did; they felt a rush of excitement every time they showed up at a place like this.

Kenny, Rick, Mac, Jenny, Briggs, and the army guys all walked outside, shoes crunching on black lava. It was sunny up there at eleven thousand feet, with a light, fluffy cloud layer about five thousand feet below them.

During the discussion, something had nagged at Mac. He gazed at the summit now, shielding his eyes against the glare of the sun, looking past the engineers and Colonel Briggs and Jenny and the guys from the data room to where steam vents hissed into the air.

Whenever the volcano began degassing, there was always the question of whether it was gas released by magma or groundwater being heated to steam. Steam eruptions had occurred on multiple occasions in the past, and Mac knew the dangers they presented, and not just to the environment.

At four seconds, she heard the preliminary crack-crack-crack-crack of the small calibration charges, the ones that thecomputer used. Ordinarily, it took the computer three seconds to make its final calculations.

Of course the computer would take a certain amount of extra time to recalculate the blast timings because one side of the building was wet, and that changed the calibration impacts. But not twenty damn seconds.

Hawaiian Volcano Observatory intern Lono Akani found the image he needed. In shades of purple, yellow, and green, it showed the summit crater and the northern rift zone curving off to the right. He zoomed in; the image softened and began to blur, but he saw the dark patches around the summit that indicated the air chambers.

As he was heading toward the main entrance to see if anything was going on outside, he heard a loud banging on the front door. One of the army guys opened it, and Lono saw a pretty, dark-haired woman wearing shorts and a T-shirt, hard hat under her arm, walk in like she owned the place. Two men, also carrying hard hats, were right behind her.

Lono was just a kid, but he knew when people were lying to his face. The story about roads was a crock. Why would Mac suspend interns at HVO without even giving a reason to the intern standing right in front of him?

A few hundred yards from the rim, Mac, Jenny, Iona, and Rick got out of the jeep. As soon as they stepped out, they felt the full force of the heat coming down the mountain at them. It was like an oven door had been flung open.

They could hear the roar from inside the caldera. The earth suddenly shook with a harmonic tremor. Sometimes it was called a volcanic scream; it felt like the hum of a giant bass. They all held on to the jeep to keep from falling, and for a fleeting moment Mac worried that the jeep might tip over.

The heat became more suffocating as they made their way up through the rocks and brush. But Mac knew they needed to do this and do it now. The reality was that they were fast running out of time. Rick and Kenny and the rest of them could do all the projections they wanted about the rate of the rising magma. But John MacGregor was here because of what he considered the cardinal rule of his job: You had to be there.

Their group was on the northeast side today. There was no more conversation as they made their way the last fifty yards or so to the rim. The roar from the caldera had built up even more, and the sky had darkened somewhat, clouds lower than the top of

Mac saw Jenny and Rick and Iona staring down at their own boots, which were detaching at the soles. Rick Ozaki furiously stamped his feet on the ground and extracted from his pocket a roll of duct tape to repair his boots.

General Mark Rivers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had been appointed by the previous president and stayed on when his successor took office. Rivers had offered to step down; the new president had refused to accept his resignation. That was partly due to his competency but mostly due to his popularity, not just with all branches of the armed forces but with the public. Rivers was being considered for a fifth star because of his leadership in both Iraq wars and in Afghanistan.

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