19 April 2010
Eyjafjallajokull
I won’t even try to say it. The people on the media have been challenged by the name of the volcano in Iceland that has caused all the trouble this week. I’ll defer to the style manual of the New York Times, which tries it as: EY-ya-fyat-lah-YO-kut.
It is the beginning of a week to cope with things that go boom, both naturally and unnaturally. I understand volcanoes, at least in principle. What I do not understand is the human heat.
The Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was blown up fifteen years ago this morning, just about the time this drivel is showing up in your weary in-basket.
Nothing has really been the same since. Militia murderer McVeigh killed 168 civilians, including nineteen little kids. The blast destroyed or damaged 324 buildings within a sixteen-block radius. It was amazing, the worst terror attack in our history up to then.
I heard about the attack it with an Army Colonel at the Nevada Test Site, where we were touring some old nuclear sites with a Staffer from the House Energy Committee. I had been tagged with managing the trip, and it was just luck of the draw that the Army Engineer was an expert on explosives.
He explained how fuel oil and fertilizer could make a powerful explosive combination. It was one of those things we did not know a great deal about, though the technique had been used in the first attack on the World Trade Center.
The Colonel was about to be a member of an extinct species. He had managed the site preparation for the last under-ground nuclear test conducted by the United States. At the time, there was concern that the skill-sets required to do another one were fading away to retirement, and only one team was still employed by the Energy Department.
We assumed at first word- along with everyone else- that it was mad Muslims that did it. The Colonel was a great guy to be around, since he had specialized in a variety of explosives all of his long career. He took a professional interest in the technology, and in a trailer amid the desert plain marked with the strange circular markings of old nuclear blasts, he told us how he thought it had worked.
Iraqi bomb maker Abdul Rahman Yasin had improved on the design used in the attack on the Marine Barracks in Beirut, Lebanon. According to expert testimony at the trials, the device was a sophisticated design composed of about 1,400 pounds of urea nitrate, with aluminum, magnesium and ferric oxide particles surrounding the explosive. There were booster charges of nitroglycerine, ammonium nitrate dynamite, smokeless powder, which were in turn surrounded by tanks of bottled hydrogen.
The cylinders were intended to magnify the fireball, and release more energy.
By comparison, the bomb manufactured by that domestic terrorist Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols was relatively crude. They used more than a hundred fifty-pound bags of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, three oil drums of liquid nitromethane, several crates of explosive Tovex and seventeen bags of ammonium nitrate/fuel oil mix.
At the trial, McVeigh claimed to have arranged the barrels in order to form a “shaped charge” to more effectively strike the building by piling the side of the rented truck closest to the building with bags of fertilizer.
To this day, I have not been quite able to come to terms with the fact that Americans, short of war, could do something so calculated and barbaric.
I put the suicide terrorists of the endless series of horrific bombings in Iraq and Afghanistan into a different sort of bin, though I don’t suppose I should. We are all humans, and our collective ability to demonstrate pure evil never ceases to astound me.
The EY-ya-fyat-lah-YO-kut eruption is something completely natural, though the effects are considerably wider spread. It makes me wonder at how interconnected we all are, the sane and the mad, surrounded by a natural world that dwarfs us. A pal in Stockholm wrote this morning to note that dozens of friends were stranded around the continent and even here, unable to get home.
Another friend noted that this really was small beans in comparison with the great eruptions of history. He knows his stuff, and is in the disaster management business, sort of the direct opposite of the Colonel of explosives.
My friend said darkly that the problem would come if the current activity triggers the Katla volcano, located just to the east on the southern coast.
There have been three related eruptions in recorded history, and Katla and the even-more active Hekla are known as the “Angry Sisters.”
In 1918, Katla tore chunks of ice the size of houses from the Myrdalsjökull glacier and hurled them into the sea. The scientists are watching things carefully, and nothing appears to be imminent there.
That is good, not that we could do anything about it. I think there was a time when we did not leave the house with at least the vague thought that something big was going to go “boom,” but I don’t really recall things that far back.
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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