Volcano experts on the go

Imagine thousands of people living on the pumice plain below Mount St. Helens, close enough to feel the ground tremble from the ongoing eruption.

Now, rather than watching the new lava dome build within the relatively safe confines of St. Helens’ bowl-like crater, think about a massive mound of extremely hot lava teetering on the edge of the conical peak that existed before 1980.

Only then do you have an idea of the hazard experienced by Indonesians near Mount Merapi.

“It’s in this really precarious position,” said John Pallister, a Vancouver-based U.S. Geological Survey geologist who returned from Indonesia last week. “At Merapi, this is more of a liquid magma than what we’ve got at St. Helens. It’s now a cowpie-shaped mess 200 meters in diameter at the summit, 60 to 70 meters high, and the edges are collapsing.”

The mountain shook violently Monday, sending searing gas clouds and burning rocks down its scorched flanks and threatening villagers who refused to leave.

Pallister and three other colleagues based at the Cascades Volcano Observatory in Vancouver recently spent three weeks helping Indonesian scientists and public officials dealing with the most hazardous of 129 active volcanoes in Indonesia. Pallister leads the Volcano Disaster Assistance Program, a federal initiative jointly funded by the USGS and State Department.

Although Pallister noted that Indonesian volcanologists are among the best in the world, the 20-year-old VDAP team is intended to lend American expertise and equipment to countries dealing with hazardous volcanoes.

Pallister, along with geologist and computer specialist Jeff Marso, geophycisist Andy Lochhart and geologist and GPS specialist Julie Griswold, had been scheduled to help put together a volcano observatory in another part of Indonesia. After they arrived on April 20, the U.S. Embassy asked the four scientists to head to Mount Merapi on the Indonesian island of Java. They were joined by Chris Newhall, a veteran team member who led the American response to the Mount Pinatubo eruption in 1991 and now lives in the Philippines.

“This is a pretty good illustration of what we do,” Pallister said.

Scientists say the team is a good deal for taxpayers, with the USGS paying the scientists’ salaries and the State Department chipping in between $1 million and $1.5 million annually.

U.S. officials calculate the savings in aircraft and equipment at Clark Air Base near Mount Pinatubo $200 million worth of American aircraft and equipment, along with tens of thousands of nearby residents and military personnel, were evacuated before crushing volcanic ash cascaded from the sky easily covers the VDAP team’s budget. Plus, the team collects invaluable experience with live volcanoes.

“It allows our people to see more volcanoes in eruption, and that information is brought back and used to understand our volcanoes,” said Jim Quick, coordinator of the USGS volcano hazards program in Reston, Va.

As the relatively new science of volcanology spreads across the globe, VDAP team members defer to their scientific colleagues and public officials spearheading local response to volcano hazards. During their three weeks in Indonesia, Vancouver-based team members helped to install an advanced data processing system, provided digital cameras, consulted with experts about the degree of hazard and provided high-resolution satellite data to precisely track the growth of Merapi’s lava dome.

The team worked out of Yogyjakarta, a city of about 1 million people 20 miles away from the volcano.

Pallister alluded to the difficulty Indonesian officials have had in convincing people to evacuate the hazardous area, despite the volcano’s notorious 20th century history. Merapi sent out a cloud of superheated gas that incinerated 60 people in 1994, and about 1,300 people died in a 1930 eruption.

“They’re doing an incredible job in a very tense and difficult situation,” Pallister said. “People can’t afford to leave their homes and villages for very long, so they have to wait much longer to evacuate. They have a shorter window of tolerance for evacuations.”

Widi Sutikno, the official coordinating the Indonesian government’s emergency operation, commended those who recognized the danger and left Monday.

“I guess they didn’t want to die after all,” he said.

Yet about 200 villagers living within the danger zone refused to budge.

Merapi even has its own version of Harry Truman, the curmudgeonly lodge owner who refused to leave his home along Spirit Lake before a gas-charged reservoir of magma flattened the Southwest Washington landscape around Mount St. Helens on May 18, 1980.

In Indonesia, an 80-year-old man appointed by the nearby royal court as the volcano’s spiritual guardian said he was not leaving, even though his house is within the mandatory evacuation zone. He said he believed the spirits that watch over the volcano would let him know if he was in danger.

“There is no risk,” the man, known only as Maridjan, said outside his home four miles from the crater. “I am still waiting here.”

Some 18,000 people on the mountain’s lowest slopes have not been ordered to leave, but could be in coming days.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.