Editorial 10.6, June 2008, by Deirdre Helfferich Disaster Channel Alaska disaster and mitigation network The other day, Hans and I ate out at the Eagle, munching on our properly-cooked burgers (the best burgers in town!) and watching the tube. This is about the only time I ever watch television, as we have no reception at our house (thank the many gods). It was, as is often the case in our local pub, tuned to the Disaster Channel. I’m not sure what they actually call it, but this is the supposedly-educational satellite channel that has all those shows on how a sudden ice age will freeze us all in our beds, or a giant meteorite will vaporize us as we’re walking down the street, or—for variety’s sake—how just such a catastrophe wiped out all those interesting dinosaurs millions of years ago. This time it was an hours-long special on megavolcanoes. Specifically, on a massive super volcano called Toba, that blew into the stratosphere some 70,000 years ago, triggered the last ice age, and dang near wiped out the human race. Or at least, that’s how the endlessly repeating snippets of video infotainment disguised as an educational show told it. (They really have fun doing those special effects. Over and over and over again…I suppose it cuts down on the production costs.) In Alaska, we have the dubious distinction of being a state ripe for disasters in all shapes and sizes—but without the population to get wiped out or made homeless by sudden conflagrations or upheavals or floods. There’s just not that many of us in the state. And while there are some small areas of Alaska where, for example, they build on soil that will turn to jelly during earthquakes (despite ample warnings in the form of a 8.4 Richter scale [9.2 Moment magnitude] earthquake in 1964 that leveled much of Anchorage, they’re still building on the wrong kind of substrate down there, geology notwithstanding), for the most part, Alaska is pretty much empty of towns and people. Floods and fires and windstorms do in a lot of wildlife, but not much in the way of human beings. (Avalanches may be another matter—all those fool snowmachiners actually going up there to do “high-marking” and then getting all surprised when the mountain comes down on them. Go figure.) Aside from the lack of population density, another reason we do well in the face of disaster in the 49th State is that we keep an eye on this kind of thing. The Volcano Observatory, the Tsunami Warning Center, the Avalanche Warning Center, the Geographic Information Network of Alaska (GINA), and the Alaska Earthquake Information Center, and a host of other geographic, biologic, atmospheric, and geologic monitoring service centers all maintain an alert watch on wildlife populations and health, fire and vegetation, weather and temperature, seismic rumblings (including infrasound monitoring to listen for nuclear bomb testing), and other events and conditions that spell potential disaster, and let us know what’s up and where not to be when the hammer falls. And they do a good job. So you you can see why I was a bit shocked when I heard that much of their funding was going to run out as of September. Although most of these centers are affiliated with the university and the State of Alaska, and the state benefits hugely from the disaster avoidance network that is formed by all these centers and observatories, their funding largely comes from the feds: earmarks. According to Jonathan Dehn of the Alaska Volcano Observatory, we are one of the only states in the union (if not the only one) that has its response to disasters dicated to it by the federal government. This is because our disaster response and monitoring organizations are largely funded by the federal government. This is not a comforting thought to me, given the anti-science and anti-functional goverment stance of the current administration (recall what they did to FEMA). But them who pays the bills calls the shots. Too bad for Alaska. Social reaction to natural disaster Sarah Palin, very oddly, looked at one such natural disaster recently and decided that the Juneau avalanche this April that wiped out Alaska Electric Light and Power’s Snettisham transmission line wasn’t really a disaster after all, and so didn’t call for some sort of financial help from the state. This has got a good portion of the population of Juneau mad as laundered cats, because, unlike GVEA, AEL&P is a private power provider, and, according to the Juneau People’s Power Project, they didn’t take certain elementary precautions in avalanche country:
The Capital City Weekly has a nicely balanced article on the affair (www.capweek.com/stories/061108/news_20080611001.shtml), and gives AEL&P's quite reasonable-sounding explanations for why, given the costs involved and the likelihood of an avalanche the size of the one that wiped out the tower, it really didn't seem necessary. (Of course, until disaster strikes, such preparations never seem necessary…) The JPPP, concerned that the profit motive was ultimately responsible for the way in which AEL&P handled their pre-avalanche emergency preparedness, wants to make the power company a public utility. Juneau has responded admirably to the loss of available power, reducing its electricity use by a good thirty percent. This has been, arguably, directly due to the post-avalanche rise in in electric costs, which have shot up considerably. Juneau’s financial pain is due to the cost of diesel, from which electricty was being generated:
Juneau got back onto hydroelectric power as of June 4, which is better for their air quality, but the rates are still high to pay for all the oil used. This jump in electricity prices is merely a reflection of the larger, slower disaster that is overtaking us all. (Except the oil companies, of course, which are still showing record profits.) The headlines these days are full of tales of high gasoline and fuel prices, and no one seriously thinks these prices will go down. We’ll all be in Juneau’s boat, sooner or later. Angry people often want to blame somebody for the unpleasant results of catastrophes. The most difficult ones to face, however, are the ones we’ve gotten ourselves into. We don’t need to worry about megavolcanoes or giant meteorites walloping us. We’ve got plenty of smaller, more immediate—and just as pervasive—worries as it is. Fortunately, unlike the massive natural megadisasters on the Disaster Channel, we can at least keep a watch out for the natural ones, and deal with the man-made ones facing us—like our financial servitude to oil—if we have the will to follow through. | ||
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