Natural Disaster (Book 1): Erupt

by Lou Cadle

  “Lahar.” The head seismologist, Barner, pushed past Norio, who slid forward to lean against the wall inside the doorway. “Avalanche I called up to you a few minutes ago, and I swear it’s a lahar we’ve been seeing. Certain of it, now that I’m hearing about the gauges. No eruption or big quake, but a lahar anyway.”

  Kate got up, walked past him, and Norio fell in behind, trailing her out the front door. Barner, the woman hydrologist, and he joined her in staring toward Mt. Hood, half-expecting to see an ash cloud. That’s the way it was supposed to go with Cascades eruptions. First, an ash/magma eruption, blast wave, hot ash rises, some hot ash falls out of column creating nuee ardente that rush down the mountain, a lahar forms because of hot pyroclasts melting the snow, the ash cloud tops out and the lighter ash drifts with the prevailing winds. That was textbook.

  But they were looking right at the mountain. No ash cloud. Either the lahar was from the heavy rains this spring or…or what? The helicopter sat at the edge of the parking lot, the pilot looking curiously at the four of them.

  Kate strode back inside and Norio followed. She got behind her desk and pulled up current—or slightly delayed, as the data was collected and sent only every fifteen minutes—western flank seismograms on her computer. “It’s still—” she began, but she never finished. Everyone crowded behind her desk to see. The waving line at the end of the transmission told the story of a steady shake. “Yeah. That’s a lahar. A big one.” She looked to the woman from hydrology. “You think it was big enough to snap off the antennae?”

  “I think it took out the whole gauge system.”

  “Carol!” she called to her assistant. “Get me Mt. Hood Village and Sandy chiefs of police on the phone. Then Gresham and Trout River, in that order. Right now! Then get VDAP up here. All of them.”

  “What’s up?” came Akroyd’s voice from behind him.

  “Lahar speeding down the Sandy River,” Norio told him.

  “Shit,” said Akroyd, his eyes wide.

  Kate snapped her head up. “You two, get in the air right now. Fly up the Sandy. Radio me as soon as you see it, get me an estimate of speed and the GPS numbers for the leading edge.”

  The hydrologist spoke up. “Based on how long between the two lost signals, 100 kph up there.” She blanched. “It’ll slow with grade change of course, but…” She trailed off.

  Kate looked at Norio again. “Get going!” He and Akroyd hurried out.

  As they passed her, Carol called to Kate, “Got the Sandy police chief on line two. Mt. Hood Village, no answer. Gresham says theirs is in a meeting.”

  “Get him out of the meeting! Christ!” Kate shouted.

  Norio sprinted out the door and yelled to the pilot. “Get it started! We need to go, now.” He couldn’t stop himself from smiling. This was exciting.

  The pilot stared at him blankly for a second then jumped in and began to poke at his instrument panel, pulling on his headset one-handed.

  Akroyd lagged behind, but they were both inside and belted in before the rotor came to life overhead. Norio put on his headset and said to the pilot. “Go over to Troutdale and fly up the Sandy River, as fast as you can. Max it out.”

  The chopper lifted and pivoted south, the pilot talking to air traffic control as he gained speed. “Tell them it’s an emergency if you need to,” said Norio. “Tell them to…” He wanted to say, divert all traffic away from the volcano, in case an eruption is coming, but that was Kate’s call, not his. He shook his head. “Nothing. Never mind.” It might only be a lahar, independent of eruptive activity entirely. Rainy spring like this, it was possible.

  The pilot got them over the Columbia River and its little islands, and over Troutdale in Oregon where they caught the mouth of the Sandy. They flew up the river. Norio was thinking, come on come on, hurry up, but he knew the pilot was moving as quickly as the machine could go. They passed Gresham, and the land beneath them rose. Houses became sparser and concentrated only in the river valley. “Is that Sandy, the town, already?” asked Akroyd, as they came upon a concentration of houses and a tiny airfield. A number of cars filled the road—maybe someone had gotten the evacuation started that quickly.

  “Yeah,” said the pilot. “The airport and the edge of town. The central town is south, over there.” He pointed. Norio lifted his gaze and saw the thicker cluster of houses. Damn lucky they had built most of the town well off the river.

  The pilot steered them up the increasingly curvy river course and there, in the distance, Norio saw the leading edge of the lahar, a gray, tree-studded deluge churning down the river valley. “See it?” he asked the pilot, pointing.

  “Damn! What the hell is it?”

  “Lahar,” said Akroyd. “I want to text my wife,” and he clicked off the radio.

  “How far is it from there to that little airport we just passed, do you think?” Norio asked the pilot.

  “Ten miles, maybe?”

  “Okay, get to the leading edge of the thing and pace it down river, try to get a rough speed on the thing. And can we get patched through to CVO on your radio or—never mind, I’ll use mine.” He dug his radio and Bluetooth out, stuck the ear bud in one ear, leaving the other ear under the headphones so he could hear the pilot and Akroyd, and radioed in to the CVO, asking for Kate. She came right on.

  “It’s ten miles from the outskirts of Sandy. I’ll give you the speed in a couple minutes.” He looked down. “People need to head into the town proper,” he said. “If they live close to the river, you need to tell them to evacuate up the sides of the valley.”

  He could barely hear Kate with the sound of the helicopter. “Done,” she said.

  “They’re going to die if they’re within a few hundred feet of the river. This is a huge lahar. A monster.” It spread well beyond the banks of the river. The few trees on the banks that it hadn’t pulled down were big, sturdy ones, standing now in several feet of mudflow. The pilot had reached the leading edge of the flow and spun the ‘copter around. “Hold on,” Norio said to Kate.

  The pilot paced the lahar, looking out his window and back at his gauges. “About forty miles an hour,” he said. The front of the wave crashed along, uprooting trees, yanking a cabin fully into the flow; it was fast and dangerous, a wild thing.

  Norio said into the radio, “Sixty-five kilometers per hour. Sixteen clicks to Sandy Airport. So fifteen minutes to get that neighborhood evacuated.” He felt himself flushing; he hadn’t needed to do the arithmetic for her. Kate could divide by four.

  Kate’s voice was replaced by the woman hydrologist’s. “Kate says thanks; she’s talking to the Sandy police right now. Can you fly back up over the lahar’s track? Give me more details?”

  Norio conveyed the request to the pilot, who was looking grim.

  Akroyd came back on the headset. “I’m too much a gas guy. I forget the formulas. How much will it slow?”

  Norio calculated slope and flow roughly. “Might only hit the Columbia at twenty miles per hour or so.”

  “Fast enough,” muttered Akroyd. “I’m so glad our house is well away from the river.”

  In silence, they flew up the Sandy River Valley. Mud and debris filled the valley, in a mile-wide swath at points. Whole blocks of the little tourist villages that had been there at dawn were obliterated.

  “I’m swinging over to Welches,” the pilot said, and they drifted south of the river valley at a place it jogged north. Another little village was under them, flooded, but barely, it looked like, with signs of people moving easily on the streets. They couldn’t evacuate west now. The road out was gone.

  “Stick with the Sandy River—no need to do the Zig Zag right now,” Norio said, and the pilot veered north again, following the river valley uphill. They took it all the way up to the origin, and when they arrived, it became obvious where the lahar had started. Massive chunks of ice were strewn where they’d been flung out from the source of the lahar.

  “Wow,” said Akroyd. “Look at the avalanche track.”
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br />   “You’re missing half a glacier,” said the pilot.

  “I wonder what the volume of water was,” said Akroyd.

  “Or will be,” said Norio. “There’s plenty new coming down.” Fresh water overlaid the destruction, a new, bigger river cascading down over the mess of the transformed Sandy. As they watched, the glacier calved a new section and the flow of water cascaded over it, around it, rushing from the force of gravity and around any obstacle to get where it was going: into the river valley. The calved bit tumbled downhill, as if in slow motion.

  “Hang right here on top of the start of it for a second,” said Akroyd. “I want gas readings while we’ve got the chance.” He’d managed to grab the COSPEC.

  The helicopter hovered in one place while Akroyd collected data then directed the pilot upslope another quarter-mile. In the near distance, three thin plumes of steam rose from the mountain’s peak, definitely not the ones from yesterday. New gas sources.

  Not simply a random spring flood lahar. He was willing to bet it was much more. “Can we go over there?” he asked the pilot, pointing to the rising steam in the distance.

  “Need fuel soon,” he said. “I only had half of a tank to start. We should fuel up and come back.”

  Norio glanced at his watch, amazed to see they’d been up an hour already. It seemed far less. He thought about it, felt the pull of the steam plumes and the secrets they might hold, but said, “Okay, go back to Gresham in a straight line, then follow the lahar down to the Columbia before fueling up. Got enough fuel for that?”

  The pilot nodded.

  “We’ll come right back to the peak after that. Sound good, Akroyd?”

  “I want to get over that steam,” said Akroyd. “There’s no sulfur right here. There may be other plumes we can’t see. So yeah, ASAP, get right back up here, get over the visible venting. Unless Kate says otherwise.”

  The pilot swung them back down across the land, cutting off the loops of the river, back to the outskirts of the town of Sandy. Neighborhoods they had just passed over were gone, replaced by mud and trees poking from the mud every which way. A small plane from the airport was canted onto one wing with a log punched through the fuselage. Bridge supports stuck out into thin air, and the remnants of the bridge’s deck were nowhere to be seen. The pilot said, “That’s Ten Eyck Road, I think, where the bridge was.” At the edges of the destruction, Norio saw an overturned RV and, further down, a log truck twisted ninety degrees from the road, still upright but with its load spilled onto the road. Mud still surged around it, nudging it downhill.

  “I hope everyone got out of that valley,” the pilot said. They could all see that was a vain hope.

  “Rafting,” said Akroyd. “I mean, people float that river in the summer, raft it, canoe it. I wonder if there were any out this morning.”

  They caught up with the lahar’s leading edge just after Gresham. It had spread out and slowed as the land flattened out. Neighborhood streets far from the river bed were coated in mud, and they could also see many people there standing on top of their cars, safe for now. The helicopter hovered over the leading edge and Norio watched it churn through the low valley, cutting off a big loop of the old river course and making a new one through a suburban neighborhood, carrying off cars and whole house sections before tearing them into lumber scraps. Norio got back on the radio and described what he was seeing to whoever was listening at the CVO. As he watched, roads were washed away and bridges collapsed. It hit Interstate 84 and peeled away the multi-lane concrete bridge like it was made of balsa wood. They watched it enter the Columbia River, cross the river, dump debris up onto an island. It took out another bridge that spanned from the Washington side to the island.

  “That’s Route 14,” said Akroyd. “It’s crossing into Camas.” And the lahar did, spreading out upstream and downstream into the broader Columbia as well, but the momentum taking some of it directly north and into the lowlying areas of the small town on the Washington side. Houses were pierced by logs, and cars were swept into the mud, spinning and being pushed northward. Small figures ran but too slowly. How many people could run sixteen miles an hour?

  “People are dying,” grated Akroyd. Norio looked back to see tears in the man’s eyes. Norio felt a cold shock at the destruction but also a thrill that he was witnessing this. The ever-changing earth in action. It was awe-inspiring.

  “We need fuel, and now,” said the pilot. As he said this, two other helicopters came into view, news choppers with the station call letters painted on them. Everyone back at CVO would be able to see the destruction on the TV soon enough.

  Once on the ground, he turned on the DOAS mounted outside and called Kate on his cell phone and reported in, mentioning the news choppers. Ahead of him, a windsock fluttered toward the southeast. He wondered if the wind direction and speed was the same at higher levels—no clouds to help him judge that.

  “We have remote imaging from three hours ago,” Kate said, “and we’ll get more later this afternoon. There’s a slight additional bulge just north of the central peak and thermal signals from the north. We think a western magma chamber may have melted the glacier.”

  Amazing. “We saw new gas plumes. What do you want us to do next?”

  “Go north to look at the bulge and get GPS and gas readings on the new plumes you saw. I’ll text you GPS coordinates for everything the remotes saw, right after I hang up. Stay within range of cell towers until you get them.”

  “Good.” They rang off, and Norio watched Akroyd walk across him from the building.

  “Finally got a hold of my kid at home,” he said.

  “Oh, good,” Norio said. He probably should have asked about Akroyd’s family. “They’ll be fine, though, right? Your house is nowhere near the river.”

  “Yeah, but I wanted to make sure the kid wasn’t down there for some reason. I told the wife I figured there’d be some panic buying, to leave work right now and shop while she could. And what if there’s an eruption tomorrow or the next day? I wanted her to know.”

  “Ahh,” said Norio. He didn’t really get the need to call. It would be on the news, right? “Here comes the pilot.”

  “We’re all set,” Corey said. “Fuel for at least three and a half hours.”

  Norio looked at his watch. 9:48. They’d get a lot done this trip. He looked forward to gaining more knowledge. The lahar had been a rare event. What else was going on with that mountain?

  14

  Camas, Washington, 8:28 a.m.

  Chad gripped the box cutter and with a practiced swipe took the top off a box of Safeway canned French-style green beans. The box was two-thirds shelved when he heard the siren coming from outside, faint, barely reaching into the store. When it didn’t stop after a few seconds or change pitch, he paused in his work.

  Down the aisle from him, J—for Javier, but he went by the initial—was stocking canned tomatoes. He looked up and said to Chad, “what’s that?”

  It wasn’t fire. It wasn’t police. “I think maybe it’s the siren at the paper mill.”

  “What’s it mean?”

  “Accident there, probably.” Some sort of toxic chemical spill? He imagined the guys at the firehouse flying into action and felt a wash of emotions so twisted up, he found hard to tell them apart from one another. Jealousy, anger, sadness.

  He felt stupid, too, for reacting so strongly to one overheard insult, but he had been fixated on what he had heard Kane say at the station for two days. He hadn’t slept well for lying there while his mind went round and round. Combined with his failure in the physical test, he was, for the first time, asking himself if maybe he didn’t want to fight fires, if he should look to some other future for himself. He was shocked at himself, at how easily a lifelong dream had been called into question from a couple of minor blows in a row. That made him think maybe he didn’t have the strength of character to do the job anyway. Lower and lower his confidence dropped. And now, stacking cans, he was doing it again. Maybe shoving ca
ns onto shelves and sweeping up popcorn was all he was good for. Stop it.

  By the time the box was empty and the older cans neatly stacked at the front of the shelf, all the labels facing forward, the siren still hadn’t cut off. “I wonder what’s going on,” he said to J, who gave an uninterested shrug. Chad broke down the box and added it to the stack of flattened ones at the bottom of his cart, slipped the knife back in his pocket, and pushed the cart out of the customer area and through the double hinged doors into the stock room.

  His supervisor, Yancey, was entering stock into the computer. “Have a radio?” Chad asked him.

  “IPod in my desk,” Yancey said, not looking up.

  Chad shook his head. “I want A.M. 1670.” The emergency channel. “I’m going to run out to my car for a second,” he said.

  Yancey glanced over. “Taking a break?”

  “I want to hear what the siren is about.”

  “What siren?” Yancey said.

  Chad realized that here in the storeroom, it was inaudible. “Be right back and let you know.” He went to his locker and grabbed his car keys and went outside, where the siren was much louder, droning on and on. He walked to the edge of the lot where the employees parked. Traffic sped by him, the siren not seeming to have altered the patterns of the morning rush hour. He got in his old beater Civic and turned the key to auxiliary. Now he was glad he had the beater, with the crappy old radio that made it easy to punch in the station.

  “—avalanche of mud and rocks. Estimated time of arrival at mouth of Columbia, 10:25. Recommend evacuation of the following areas.” Then came a long list of mountain towns, Troutdale, Washougal, and Camas. Everything on the Sandy River. Everything lowlying, which meant the landing, the sewage treatment plant, the paper mill, over by the community center, and nearly all of downtown Camas, where his house was. Where the Safeway was.

  Chad listened to the announcement finish, his heart speeding. The announcer started up again: “A large lahar has been detected on the Sandy River. A lahar is dangerous flood and mudflow, triggered by rain or glacial melting and an avalanche of mud and rocks. Estimated time of arrival—” When he realized the announcement was repeating, he shut it off.