Working with the U.S. Geological Survey might be the best work on the planet, says Andy Lockhart, a geophysicist who specializes in volcano monitoring, instrumentation and crisis response. The work is useful and exciting, he says, and there’s a lot of travel and interesting people.
That travel has involved 13 countries, where Lockhart has worked on about 60 volcanoes. He has been at the Cascades Volcano Observatory since 1986, but he mostly works overseas with the Volcano Disaster Assistance Program, a joint effort of USAID’s Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance and the USGS. They work in developing countries to mitigate the effects of volcanic eruptions.
Sue Zalokar: Your work sounds pretty exciting. By exciting, I mean in a way that also causes some universal anxiety in terms of thinking about “the big one,” whether it’s Mount Rainier erupting or the Cascadia subduction zone shifting and releasing enormous amounts of pressure.
Andy Lockhart: It should cause concern. Some people should be anxious about it. Those would be people who are in charge or have authority (in the community) to make changes in infrastructure.
For the (average person), concern is the right level of involvement to have with an earthquake.
With a volcano, it’s a much lesser problem. There, the reach of a volcanic eruption is pretty well known and limited. For example, those of us in Portland, Vancouver — we really have got nothing to worry about (in terms of a volcano). We’re good. I don’t lose any sleep at all over these volcanoes.
Now, if you live up in the Puyallup River Valley, that’s a whole different thing. And if you live up on Government Camp, then it’s a long-term hazard, but not the same kind of thing as an earthquake where you sort of wait for it, wait for it, wait for it, and then here it is. With a volcano, in addition to having a limited geographic scope, they kind of broadcast their intentions. That’s the big difference.
So the hazards of a volcano here in the Cascades, these are explosive volcanoes, like St. Helens. They’re not the droolers like in Hawaii. We sometimes get lava flow like in Hawaii, but the more common thing is that they’ll blow up, they will build a dome, like St. Helens did in 2004, 2006. They’ll blow some ash around, and then occasionally, they will collapse like St. Helens did in 1980.
The hazard that we really look for in the Cascades, more than anything, unless you are very close — like within a couple of kilometers, say a mile or so — is a lahar, the mudflow and debris flow that comes down the rivers from these volcanoes, like in 1980, what came down the Toutle River.
Those things can extend for many tens of miles, all the way to the ocean. Like the Toutle River in 1980. Or in the case of Rainier, all the way down into Commencement Bay near Tacoma.
Those are areas where a lot of people live. Lahars have happened before; they’ll happen again.
That is the main hazard in the Cascades that we worry about.
There is also the hazard of ash being blown up. Ash is basically little shards of glass and sand-like particles. People who were around in 1980 will know what that is all about. That stuff tends to blow downwind. Downwind here is usually to the east. Once in a while, the wind will circle around, and if there is an eruption going on, it’ll broadcast ash around. The level we see here in the Portland area sort of falls into the “nuisance” category.
As far as a hazard goes, if you or somebody already has a serious respiratory problem, then it could be bad. Like being in a bad dust storm. But it’s not a serious hazard the way the lahars are. Lahars are limited to the river valley, so for example, around Mount Hood, down the Sandy River.
When the Lewis and Clark expedition came down the Columbia in their log canoes, they grounded on the sandbar coming out of the Sandy River, and that was from volcanic lahar deposits from an eruption that had happened a couple of years before. We have pretty abundant data that it happened in the Sandy — a deep, canyonated river. There are people who live along the bank, but it’s not a big, broad, flat river like the Puallyup or where people live all along the banks there.
S.Z.: Tell me about the work that you do with the volcano assistance program.
A.L.: The U.S. Geological Survey has observatories in the United States. There’s this one in the Cascades (in Vancouver, Wash.), there’s one in Alaska, there’s one in Hawaii, there is one for Northern California, and then there’s one for Yellowstone. Here, in the Cascade Volcano Observatory, we have the responsibility for looking over the volcanoes in Oregon, Washington and Idaho.
We also have the Volcano Disaster Assistance Program. That’s the program that I work on. There are quite a few of us, 10 or so, that do this international work. We work for the USGS, but our expenses overseas and part of our salaries are paid by the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance, which is under AID. Which of course is foreign aid. So the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance, their job is like when there is a hurricane or a typhoon or an earthquake or there has been a disaster, these are the people who go in with the water supplies and shelter and food and with water purification to save lives.
The idea came about in 1985. There was a very small eruption at a volcano in Colombia called Nevado del Ruiz. It was a fairly small eruption, but it generated a lahar that came down through a town a few hours after the eruption and killed about 25,000 people. Everyone instantly saw that this had been a terrible lack of communication and lack of awareness. It was something that could easily have been avoided. The U.S. went down there and spent a lot of money on the rescue.
They realized two things. One, it could have been avoided by people getting down there and doing work ahead of time. That would have avoided a lot of deaths. If you’re a cold-hearted, it would have saved the U.S. a lot of money. No matter how you looked at it, it seemed it would be a better idea to try to get ahead of some of these things than to respond to them.
Volcanoes, because they kind of broadcast their intentions, they give you the opportunity to get ahead of it and prepare populations and maybe get people out of the way so that the results aren’t as tragic.
That has been the motivation for the work that we have been doing since, well, 1986. We started out working solely in Latin America and then since have sort of broadened our skills. Now we’re planetwide. We only work in countries that would qualify for foreign aid. We don’t do crisis response and institution development in places like Japan and Italy and Iceland. They are already developed. We work with countries that are developing or on the edge of the developing spectrum.
In some places, they are perfectly capable of doing routine work on their own, but when there is a crisis, they don’t have the backup, the sort of depth to take care of things on their own. That is largely insofar as hardware is concerned.
For example, we just sent equipment to Comala, Mexico. The Mexicans are excellent volcanologists. They are our peers, and we learn from them as much as they learn from us, but in this case, they had nothing in the ground to replace equipment that was destroyed in an eruption in Colima. We have a supply of equipment, so we sent them stuff from our supply.
A similar thing happened in Chile a few years ago. But by and large, most of our work is in countries that really cannot do it themselves. Or do it to a degree that they just need some help.
S.Z.: How about climate change? We talk a lot about how we affect the atmosphere. Is our presence having an effect on the Earth, stone, soil, magma — the very ground beneath our feet? Does fracking or coal mining affect volcanic activity?
A.L.: No, they don’t. It’s surprising. Even big earthquakes. A lot of people assume that when you have a big earthquake, that it is going to set off a volcano. But in fact, that almost never happens. It’s really rare that even a big earthquake has anything to do with a volcano on an immediate time frame.
In the second world war, the main base of Japanese military and naval activity, in a place called Rabaul, New Guinea. It was big naval base, built on the edge of a big, volcanic caldera crater. There were a couple of volcanoes that ring the crater and they had been recently erupting. The U.S. Air Force thought, well, we’ll just bomb these craters and start these volcanoes erupting and harm the Japanese. So they bombed the crater and nothing happened.
The forces that are involved here are well beyond anything that people can bring to bear on. It’s really outside of our ability to manipulate.
S.Z.: What about the impact the volcanoes have when they erupt? That must put incredible amounts of carbon dioxide into the air. Do eruptions have an effect on greenhouse gases?
A.L.: They can, but in terms of climate change, the man-made contributions to that vastly outweigh the volcanic contribution. There have been studies done, and the volcano effect doesn’t even come close to what humans are doing to the atmosphere.
S.Z.: Did you read the piece Kathryn Schulz wrote for The New Yorker, “The Really Big One”? The piece forecasts massive devastation in the Pacific Northwest.
A.L.: I did. I also read the follow-up article that she’d written in the last couple of weeks on how to prepare for it.
S.Z.: What were your thoughts?
A.L.: It was a little overblown in terms of some of the terminology, like she quoted the FEMA guy who said everything west of I-5 was going to be toast. Well, that’s not really helpful. But the fact is, it’s going to be a very destructive event, and there is going to be a lot of damage (especially to) places like unreinforced masonry buildings in cities like Portland and Seattle that were built before the seismic codes or that have not been reinforced.
Also, areas along the coast in the tsunami zone, which is basically 100 feet of elevation or less, (are hazardous areas in a big earthquake). Those places are going to be washed by tsunamis just as the one in Japan a few years ago and the one in Sumatra (Indonesia) a few years before that. Those place are going to be heavily damaged.
A lot of the infrastructure here is going to be knocked down: power, water. It’s not apocalyptic, but it’s going to be really bad.
I think that people who live here should be looking around, looking at their homes and better understanding the hazard. Mostly people should be preparing to take care of themselves for a while. What we’ve been hearing is that FEMA doesn’t really think that they would be able to get in here to (stabilize and rebuild) for at least a couple of weeks. The prudent person would say, “Well, how can I take care of myself for a couple of weeks?” And then you make those preparations. And then you can sleep well at night.
I’m not planning to move out of the area. I don’t see it as that much of a problem, but there are measures that a prudent person should take.
S.Z.: I understand that in terms of geological time, we are a drop in a bucket. Schulz’s New Yorker piece noted the pressure building on these plates, and how it’s exceeded by 50 to 60 years already. How much of this can we take to heart? The other side of “It might happen and be devastating” is “It might not happen at all.”
A.L.: Yeah, sure. Those sorts of statistics, I’ve got to be frank with you; I do not retain those in my head very well. I looked at that and my takeaway was: This is a significant issue that I should be thinking about and take measures accordingly so that they are in proportion with the hazard.
The sort of “We’re overdue” talk or “It’s another 100 years out”? The Earth is not a metronome. And what’s more, on sort of a geologic scale, this stuff is happening continually. It’s just that our lifetimes are so short that they appear to be episodic. I don’t really think of these as, “You’ve had one, now wait a certain amount of time and another one comes along.” That tends to be the way things work, but I’ve been fooled before in that sort of pattern recognition on volcanoes enough that I don’t really trust it.
Frankly, it has been a long time; pressure has been building. You can see this pressure in the deformation studies that they do. Yes, that joint has to break and release the pressure. It sounds like there’s a significant chance that it could happen in our lifetimes, that it’s worth taking some precautions.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.