“I’ll start by telling you what the President has not shared with you: a brief but very powerful description of what the world is in for when Yellowstone erupts.
“And here’s a spoiler for those of you who thought that getting people out of the danger zones was going to fix the problem.
“This thing is gonna be big, and it’s gonna be ugly.
“And it’s going to affect all of us. Every single one of us. Not just the ones in the evacuation zones.
“The President has been misleading you. I don’t know if it’s intentional. I’d like to think it isn’t, but with the government’s track record of cover-ups and kidnappings and murders it wouldn’t be surprising.
“I hope he’s been less than forthcoming because his government scientists are a bunch of cowardly yes-men who are trying to paint a rosy picture for him.”
Julianna’s phone rang again.
She ignored it.
The good doctor had her full and undivided attention.
Chapter 7
Hamlin continued his press conference, staring directly into the television cameras and showing a strong resolve, but otherwise very little emotion.
This was a man with a powerful message to the world.
This was a confident man who knew what he was talking about.
“I am neither paid by the government, nor a yes-man,” he continued. “I’m not beholden to tell the President or anyone else what they want to hear.
“I am here of my own accord with only my conscience to answer to. And my conscience would be troubled indeed if I wasn’t straight with you.
“The world is in trouble. Big trouble.
“I’ve reviewed all the data that Geo-Dynametric’s people gathered, as well as comparable data points collected during similar collection efforts since 1955.
“Comparing such data allows us not only to verify that an eruption is imminent.
“It also allows us to see that the rate of expansion in the lower magma pool is increasing dramatically. It’s getting ready to blow, and much sooner than the President is ready or willing to admit.
“In the days immediately preceding eruption the eruption area will bubble. The ground will actually swell, like a tick getting ready to pop.
“New fissures will open up, spraying steam and hot dry air hundreds of feet into the air.
“The ground will start to crack.
“Heat from the cracks and the fissures will start forest fires. Millions of acres will start to burn uncontrollably.
“Massive earthquakes will knock down all structures within a hundred miles.
“Plumes of gray ash will travel upward for miles and will make airplane travel impossible for most of the North American continent. Prevailing winds will carry the ash around the world and disrupt international flights as well.
“When the volcano blows it will be four hundred times more powerful than the eruption at Mount St. Helens.
“To put it in different terms, it will be more powerful than every atomic bomb ever exploded, every nuclear weapon ever tested, and every bomb exploded in every war ever fought, combined.
“It will leave a hole in the earth three times as big as the grand canyon.
“The pool of magma is forty two miles wide and sixty one miles long. It is eight miles deep.
“And eighty percent of that magma will flow upward and out of the earth.
“Many of you who were alive when Mount St. Helens blew remember the thick layer of gray ash which covered the earth in the area surrounding the volcano.
“It killed anything and everything for hundreds of square miles.
“Picture that times a thousand.
“Everything within the inner and outer evacuation zones will be covered by up to four feet of ash.
“Depending on the amount of precipitation and the prevailing winds the rest of the United States and the southern third of Canada will be covered by two inches to two feet of ash.
“America will lose forty percent of its agricultural land for a minimum of twenty years. Twenty percent of its woodlands.
“Sixty percent of its lakes and rivers will be poisoned for generations, because the ash will be toxic to marine life.
“A worldwide famine will ensue which will last for years.
“Casualty rates in the United States will exceed twenty percent the first twelve months. By the end of five years almost half of Americans will die.
“Here’s the worst of it… there’s absolutely nothing we can do to prevent it, nothing to delay it and very little we can do to minimize its impact.
“The President maintains the eruption will occur no sooner than several months from now.
“I’m here to tell you he’s wrong.
“Geology and volcanology are my life’s work. It’s what I do. And I’m here to tell you his calculations are incorrect. He’s either intentionally misleading you, or he’s being misled himself by government scientists who are terrified of inciting panic.
“In my view panic is inevitable. It’s as inevitable a part of this as is death and destruction.
“In my view the sooner we are honest with you the more lives we can save.
“I’ve been reviewing the data just to make sure my calculations are correct.
“And they are.
“By my calculations we’re out of time for talking. We don’t have the two years the President has been hoping for.
“We don’t have the several months he’s saying we have as a minimum.
“According to my calculations the eruption is imminent. And it could happen any day now.”
Julianna checked her phone to see whose call she missed.
It was Deputy Dave.
She almost called him back.
She enjoyed his company. And after watching what she just watched she might very likely need a shoulder to cry on.
He had very expansive and very muscular shoulders.
But no. She’d promised Jamie she’d call her back after she finished watching the video.
She dialed Jamie’s number instead.
“Well?”
Apparently Jamie had no time for telephone etiquette.
“Well what?”
“What did you think?”
“I think what he’s saying jives with what we’re seeing. I mean, fissures are opening up all over the area and spraying steam high into the air.
“I told you about that one that opened up in the creek and caused a big explosion when it made contact with the cool water. It killed two people.”
“Is this what it’s going to take to convince you to get out of there Jules?”
Julianna didn’t answer.
“Jules? Talk to me, Jules.”
“Yes, Jamie. This is the one thing that is going to convince me to get out of here.
“As soon as we’re finished.”
Chapter 8
Julianna Cervelli wasn’t the only one who hadn’t seen the news conference the whole world was talking about.
Toward the end of the video Julianna noticed the YouTube version had been viewed almost three hundred million times. The counter was climbing even as she watched it.
But Darrell and Rocki, our hapless traveling writers, hadn’t seen it either.
Two weeks before they’d grown tired of hearing of the whole Yellowstone thing.
It was everywhere they turned.
It was on every television channel.
Every radio show.
Many of the radio stations that had always played music before converted to talk radio formats discussing only one topic:
What everyone now called “The Yellowstone Event.”
Included were two of the satellite radio stations Rocki and Darrell had always tuned into their RV to while away the miles on the road.
One was a rock and roll music station. Not pop music, but music from the sixties and seventies. When rock and roll was still good; when the lyrics were well written and every other word wasn’t a curse word.
The other was a great country station.
Not like modern country stations, but rather a station that played what they called classic country and western.
Again, from the fifties through the seventies.
They played country music from artists most young country music fans never heard of who played country tunes from the old days… before country music went trashy and heavily synthesized.
When those two stations went away the traveling writers made a pact.
They’d heard enough about the Yellowstone event.
Yes, they knew it would change their lives forever.
Yes, they knew it would kill millions of people.
But scientists were saying it was at least a couple of years away.
And some were saying it could be as many as twenty or thirty years away.
A few said that it might never explode at all.
They, like every living breathing person on the face of the planet, had watched the Kilauea eruption with rapt attention.
And it didn’t appear to kill anything except an abandoned Ford Mustang.
They, like many others, associated that eruption with the coming eruption at Yellowstone.
In their view, the whole Yellowstone thing was being blown way out of proportion.
No pun intended.
If it was like the Kilauea eruption it would be very nonclimactic.
If it didn’t happen for years they’d likely be dead anyway from old age.
Their children and grandchildren all lived outside the evacuation zones.
They decided they were wasting their time worrying about Yellowstone and went back to worrying about other, more pressing, things.
Like finding enough first-person ghost and UFO stories to write their books and pay their bills.
For traveling full time and spending up to eighty dollars a day in gasoline wasn’t cheap.
“Let’s do this,” Rocki suggested. “Every time we stay at a hotel we’ll turn on the television to catch up on the news.
“But as soon as we hear the word ‘Yellowstone’ we immediately turn it off and hit the pool or take Penny for a walk.”
To her husband it was the best idea she’d had in months.
So no, they hadn’t heard Wayne Hamlin’s plaintive pleas for everyone to take Yellowstone more seriously.
They hadn’t heard his dire predictions of what would likely happen not in the years ahead, but perhaps in the next few days.
Their current plans were to make their way back to Arkansas to drop off Penny Fourpaws, and then to drive the wrong way up highways where ninety percent of the traffic was coming the other direction.
They planned to drive right into the belly of the beast.
Chapter 9
There was another line of thinking regarding the whole Yellowstone affair.
It came from a very small but very vocal group of Americans who thought the pending eruption was an elaborate hoax.
They weren’t given much credence except for late night conspiracy radio markets. Basically, the same crowd who believed the government was going to implant microchips in Americans’ bodies and lock them up in FEMA concentration camps.
Responsible media outlets sometimes called these people the “tin foil hat crowd.”
It wasn’t a term of endearment, nor a complimentary term.
It meant most people thought them to be nuts.
Still, there were some very forthright and sincere people within their group.
And maybe they had a solid basis for their beliefs.
After all, the federal government has been run by crooks and charlatans for a very long time; people who run for Congress and the State House for their own benefit, and the benefit of their cronies.
“Look at all the ways our government has lied to us in the past,” tin hat leaders were saying. “Look at how they’ve raised our taxes while inserting tax breaks that only they and their rich buddies could take advantage of.
“Look at how they’ve sent our sons to war, while protecting their own in boarding schools.
“Look at how they’ve created laws to restrict our freedoms, and other laws to help them steal from us.
“Look at how they’ve started nonsensical wars that didn’t need to be fought, and made themselves and their friends rich by investing in the arms industry.
“Look at how they’ve written laws to benefit big business, then gone to work in plush jobs for those same businesses once their time in Congress was up.
“Why would you think it inconceivable they’d be above chasing Americans off of federal park land, so they could then hand over the park land to their friends in the oil industry?
“After all, this is the same bunch of thieves who confiscated privately owned land for a pipeline, while at the same time every stinkin’ one of them was taking kickbacks from the oil companies laying the pipe.”
The undisputed face of the tin hat crowd was a man named Wally Williams.
And he did have a valid point or two.
The House of Representatives and the Senate had been places where criminals outnumbered honest men for a very long time.
That’s why the latest polls showed they had the approval of only nine percent of the public.
As one late-night television host noted, Americans liked jock itch and dandruff more than they liked their congressmen and senators.
Williams didn’t claim there wasn’t a volcano beneath Yellowstone.
That was a scientific fact which had been well documented as far back as the early twentieth century.
No, rather what he was disputing were the claims of modern day scientists who were maintaining the explosion was imminent.
And that it would be catastrophic.
As evidence he very loudly and continuously pointed to three recent events.
The first was a very embarrassing report written up in one of the nation’s largest newspapers.
It detailed an incident where two high school teachers sat eating lunch in a public eatery not far from Congress.
They were from Iowa and were in Washington for the very first time. And they were delighted to see the Speaker of the House, Representative Ron Johnson from the great state of Ohio, seated at the next table.
The tables were so close they could hear part of Johnson’s conversation. He asked the man next to him how he and his colleagues could use the “whole Yellowstone thing” to their advantage.
His lunch mate, who was never identified, replied with a huge smile and a single word.
“Oil.”
The two women were so distressed by what they’d heard they ran right to the press.
Williams’ second bone of contention was a scientist named Riley Cavasos. He went on record early on, saying a representative of Ennotek Oil Company came to him and offered him a hundred thousand dollars.
All he had to do, Cavasos claimed, was to go on national television and maintain that Yellowstone was going to erupt within the next year, and to maintain that position every time he was asked.
Cavasos said he declined the offer because it was unethical. And that while the data definitely showed the eruption was overdue, no reputable scientist could say exactly when it was going to happen.
Mr. Cavasos was killed shortly thereafter in a very suspicious automobile accident. It was said he lost control of his vehicle on a dry straight road and went into a ravine.
His body was severely burned, though his car never caught fire.
Williams’ third piece of “evidence” to back up his claims was that an internal document of the biggest oil company in North America came to light just after Yellowstone became a national concern.
The document came from an anonymous source, but every indication was it was authentic.
It detailed the company’s future plans to drill in Montana and Wyoming and made mention of the huge oil reservoirs beneath those two states.
It also said they would work with “our friends in Congress” to open up large seg
ments of “national park lands” for oil exploration, and “for future drilling.”
He could have added a fourth piece of tell-tale evidence: that stock for the oil companies went up significantly on the day the Department of the Interior announced Yellowstone was closing permanently.
But that might have been just a coincidence.
Chapter 10
At an isolated site in northern Wyoming a tiny crack opened in the forest.
It was unseen by human eyes, for most humans had already evacuated the area, and because it was in the middle of nowhere.
Northeast of the massive Yellowstone Lake, half a mile east of a smaller lake called Turbid Lake, it wasn’t even accessible by nearby State Highway 14.
There was a dirt service road about a mile away, made by the park service to facilitate firefighting equipment in event of a forest fire.
But it hadn’t been used in a considerable amount of time.
The crack which opened up way out in the middle of nowhere would never be noticed by humans.
But it was distinctive, because this was where the eruption began.
In the weeks before the crack finally opened the ground began to swell.
It was almost as though pressure was building beneath the earth and was looking for a way to relieve itself; to vent the extra pressure.
And that was, in fact, exactly what was happening.
That’s what a volcano does when it starts to stir, then bubbles and moans and groans until it finally breaks ground.
The sole purpose a volcano has when it erupts is to relieve the pressure within the earth made by its superheated rock and its expansion.
The crack was only a foot long and a couple of inches wide and opened on a rock outcropping in the elevated forest.
If a hiker or birdwatcher had been nearby they’d have described a sound not unlike cellophane cracking.
After the earth opened up they’d have described a very strong scent of sulfur.
Like someone had just struck a very large match.
If that didn’t scare them out of the area, they’d say the next thing they noticed was a slow and deliberate bubbling or gurgling sound.
The Yellowstone Event (Book 5): The Eruption Page 3
