Alaska's Mt. Redoubt Has Erupted

alaskana98 writes "Alaska's Mt. Redoubt volcano has erupted 3 times, with the first event starting at 10:38 PM Alaska standard time. The ash cloud is estimated to be higher than 50,000 feet. So far, only light ash fall is predicted for areas north of Anchorage."

Comments

Meanwhile

[Alzheimers]

Meanwhile, in Louisiana, Governor Bobby Jindal mutters something about all this wasteful government spending.

The Devil Comes for Republicans

[Doc Ruby]

When Republican governor of Louisiana Bobby Jindal took to TV immediately after President Obama's address to the Joint Session of Congress last month, he whined that the government funded volcano monitoring is "wasteful spending". Of course he was lying, since he said "$140M for volcano monitoring", when that money is for USGS "facilities and equipment, including stream gages, seismic and volcano monitoring systems and national map activities", all kinds of important stuff for running and protecting our country.

Then Jindal went into some kind of weird story about his standing for sanity during Hurricane Katrina (which he was lying about, too - and it was a story about the lone Democrat getting things done, surrounded by Republicans including Jindal doing nothing but flapping their lips). Reminding us what happens when the government doesn't monitor predictable local natural disasters that kill thousands and destroy cities.

This was the official Republican response. Maybe they just want to keep secret their main competition for spewing filthy hot air that kills Americans.

Re:The Devil Comes for Republicans

[nedlohs]

It's spending money, right?

To pay people's wages? That sounds exactly like stimulus.

To buy equipment? That sounds exactly like stimulus too.

Sure less multiplier effects than say building roads and bridges to connect industries to transport hubs/people, but you can't say it "does nothing to STIMULATE the economy", since clearly it does.

Of course stimulating the economy by borrowing/printing money is retarded anyway, but that's beside the point.

Re:The Devil Comes for Republicans

[darkmeridian]

So you are okay with Bobby Jindal having no morals and lying as long as everyone else is lying? Two or three wrongs make a right? Or are you suggesting that every time you note someone is lying you have to find someone on the other side that lied in the last ten years (on matters that are irrelevant to the current discussion) to be "fair"?

Bullshit. Katrina wiped a ton of Americans out because the government didn't monitor the situation. Jindal says we should not monitor volcanoes. He lied about his experience. Why do you insist on changing the subject? Because you are a partisan hack yourself.

Re:It's not Russia, but...

[necro81]

This was a point of contention that came out during the campaign. Although the official governor's office is in Juneau, a lot of state business is conducted in Anchorage (by far the largest city), and Gov. Palin spent a lot of time conducting state business from her home in Wasilla. The point of contention was that, while working from her home, she charged the state per diem for travel because she was working away from Juneau. I don't remember if she later paid it back.

Re:The Devil Comes for Republicans tsarkon

[DavidTC]

First of all, you can't predict earthquakes, except in the case of aftershocks. We aren't 'monitoring' earthquakes to predict them, we're simply studying them to see if we can predict them, and to predict tsunamis and volcanoes.

Secondly, tsunami predictions have saved quite a lot of lives. The last disastrous tsunami, in fact, was predicted in plenty of time to help people, except that there wasn't a unified warning system for the area and that the various countries hit are still mostly third world and had no way to notify their people.

Tsunamis in general are incredibly easy to predict. You just wait for an largeish earthquake, which can easily see on semographs, and then look for swelling of the ocean at that place. It is sheer stupidity we don't have some sort of global monitoring for them. Two hours after the quake that caused the last one, four hours before it hit anywhere, radar satellites picked the damn thing up. We could easily just tie together existing systems and have fair warning of these things.

And, of course, the monitoring of Mount Pinatubo saved 10-20 thousand lives when it erupted in 1991. In total, the entire monitoring of that volcano, in the decade the US had done it, came to about 15 million dollars. (Or about the cost of having one guy from AIG work for them that entire time.)