Kiss My Ash
So if anyone has been watching the news lately you may have noticed that Alaska has been experiencing some strange natural phenomenon. A volcano, to be specific. Now I realize that when someone thinks of Alaska they probably don’t automatically start imagining lava spouting volcanoes, but we do have volcanoes up here. A lot of them — most of them just don’t explode all that often.
Mt. Redoubt though, this guy loves to blow off some steam now and again. So after a hand-full of explosions, with ash clouds reaching 50 and even 65,000 ft into the air, the ash finally reached anchorage yesterday. It started off looking like a bank of fog moving in. When I first saw it I didn’t even think of ash, even though I had been expecting and fearing it would come. It wasn’t until I started getting calls from friends in various parts of Anchorage–panicking about the ash falling–that I realized what was going on.
I had to quickly start rushing around, sealing up my house to make sure no stray ash got in. They say this volcanic ash is almost like little bits of glass, very sharp and extremely damaging if you breath it in or get it in your eyes. They even say that if you are unlucky enough to be caught out driving in it, you can’t use your windshield wipers because it will just scratch the glass up. Not to mention it will muddy up your oil and clog up the air filters.
Businesses closed, the airport closed. Folks were running around wearing face masks.
Can you even see the ash in this picture? If you didn’t know to look for it, you might just think that was a bit of dirty snow. All this drama and trouble, and that is all we have to show for it? Not that I want the city covered in 2 inches of ash, but you would sort of imagine that it would look more dramatic than what is in this photo. That is my backyard by the way. If that ash wasn’t laying on snow you wouldn’t even know it was there.
Mt. Redoubt could still keep on exploding, lets hope this doesn’t keep putting a halt to city life.
April 3rd, 2009 at 2:03 am
It does look just like dirty snow. I’m just glad it wasn’t as bad as it could be. Besides…gave us a extra day!