Transcript

7.24.26 · History Hour

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Speaker 1: Welcome. This is Radioized History Show, and I'm your reader
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Speaker 1: and hosts this week, Joseph Bolt. I'm so happy to
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Speaker 1: be with you for this time, and we need to
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Speaker 1: remind you as always that RADIOI is a listener driven
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Speaker 1: and so we welcome any of your comments and even
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Speaker 1: listeners out there that have any suggestions, please call us
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Speaker 1: and let us know what you're thinking at eight five
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Speaker 1: nine four two two six three nine zero. RADIOI, as
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Speaker 1: you know, is a reading service intended for people who
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Speaker 1: are blind or have other disabilities and make it difficult
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Speaker 1: to read printed material. I'll cite the sources as we
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Speaker 1: go along today, and so today I thought we would
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Speaker 1: talk a little history about volcanoes, and in particular the
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Speaker 1: first one, Mount Saint Hellens. Those of us that have
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Speaker 1: been around for a little while remember that in our lifetime.
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Speaker 1: So let's get the reading. After rumbling all spring, Mount
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Speaker 1: Saint Helens finally erupted at eight thirty two on Sunday morning,
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Speaker 1: May eighteenth, nineteen eighty. When President Jimmy Carter flew over
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Speaker 1: the area. A few days later, he called the destruction
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Speaker 1: quote formidable end quote. What followed the response in the
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Speaker 1: Ecosystem's recovery also proved impressive. The earthquake that signaled the
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Speaker 1: start was quick, not everyone nearby even melt it, but
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Speaker 1: after five or six seconds, the initial small ash plume
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Speaker 1: grew so large that observers could no longer see the mountain.
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Speaker 1: Mount Saint Helens is a composite volcano, which means that
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Speaker 1: it is conical with a concave shape that is steeper
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Speaker 1: at the top. Mount Saint Helens is within the Cascade
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Speaker 1: Range and now in what rather it is now southern Washington,
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Speaker 1: approximately fifty miles northwest of Portland, Oregon. Though Mount Saint
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Speaker 1: Helens is approximately forty thousand years old, it's considered a
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Speaker 1: relatively young active volcano. Native Americans living in the area
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Speaker 1: have long known that this was not an ordinary mountain,
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Speaker 1: but one that had fiery potential. Even the name Lulla
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Speaker 1: Cluff a Native American name for the volcano, which means
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Speaker 1: smoking mountain. The volcano was first discovered by Europeans when
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Speaker 1: British commander George Vancouver of the h M S Discovery
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Speaker 1: spotted Mount Saint Helen's from the deck of his ship
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Speaker 1: while he was exploring the Northern Pacific from seventeen ninety
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Speaker 1: two to seventeen ninety four, Commander Vancouver named the mountain
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Speaker 1: after his fellow countrymen, Aileen Fitzherbert, the Baron Saint Helen's,
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Speaker 1: who at the time was serving as the British ambassador
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Speaker 1: to Spain. Piecing together eye witnessed descriptions and geologic evidence,
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Speaker 1: it's believed that Mount Saint Helens erupted somewhere between sixteen
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Speaker 1: hundred and seventeen hundred, again in eighteen hundred, and then
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Speaker 1: quite frequently during a twenty six year span of eighteen
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Speaker 1: thirty one to eighteen fifty seven. After eighteen fifty seven,
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Speaker 1: the volcano grew quiet. Most people who viewed the nine thousand,
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Speaker 1: six hundred and seventy seven foot tall mountain during the
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Speaker 1: twentieth century saw a picturesque backdrop rather than a potentially
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Speaker 1: deadly volcano. Thus not fearing an eruption, many people built
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Speaker 1: houses around the base of the volcano. However, there were
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Speaker 1: warning signs beginning a few months before March thirtieth, nineteen eighty,
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Speaker 1: when a four point one magnitude magnitude earthquake struck underneath
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Speaker 1: Mount Saint Helen's. This was the first warning sign that
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Speaker 1: the volcano had reawakened, scientists flocked to the area. On
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Speaker 1: March twenty seventh, a small explosion blew a two hundred
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Speaker 1: and fifty foot hole in the mountain and released a
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Speaker 1: plume of ash. This caused fear of injuries of rocks
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Speaker 1: from rockslides rather so the entire area was evacuated. Similar
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Speaker 1: eruptions to the one on March twenty seven continued for
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Speaker 1: the next month. Though some pressure was being released, large
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Speaker 1: amounts were still building. In April, a large bulge was
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Speaker 1: noticed on the north face of the volcano. The bulge
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Speaker 1: grew quickly, pushing outward about five feet per day, though
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Speaker 1: the bulge had reached a mile in length by the
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Speaker 1: end of April. The plentiful plumes of smoke and seismic
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Speaker 1: activity had begun to dissipate. As April drew to a close,
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Speaker 1: officials were finding it increasingly difficult to maintain the evacuation
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Speaker 1: orders in road closures due to pressures from homeowners and
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Speaker 1: the media, as well as from stretched budget issues. So
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Speaker 1: at eight thirty two a m on May eighteenth, nineteen eighty,
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Speaker 1: a five point one magnitude earthquake struck underneath Mount Saint Helen's.
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Speaker 1: Within ten seconds, the bulge and the surrounding area fell
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Speaker 1: away in a gigantic rock avalanche. The avalanche created a
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Speaker 1: gap in the mountain, allowing the release of pent up
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Speaker 1: pressure that erupted laterally in a huge blast of pumice
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Speaker 1: and ash. The noise from the blast was heard as
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Speaker 1: far away as Montana and California. However, those close to
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Speaker 1: Saint Helen's reported hearing nothing. The avalanche, huge to begin with,
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Speaker 1: quickly grew in size as it crashed down the mountain,
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Speaker 1: traveling around seventy to one hundred and fifty miles per
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Speaker 1: hour and destroying everything in its path. The blast of
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Speaker 1: pummus and ash traveled northward at three hundred miles per
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Speaker 1: hour and was raging hot six hundred and sixty degrees fahrenheit.
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Speaker 1: One party that was fourteen miles away watched the cloud
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Speaker 1: quote rolling over everything like a track on a Caterpillar
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Speaker 1: tractor end quote. Another observer compared the ash cloud to
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Speaker 1: a quote big black, inky waterfall and boiling oil as
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Speaker 1: he sped one hundred miles per hour out racing it.
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Speaker 1: The blast killed everything in a two hundred square mile
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Speaker 1: area within ten minutes. The plume of ash had reached
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Speaker 1: ten miles high. The eruption lasted nine hours. That Sunday morning,
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Speaker 1: Jim Zaymansky and three other loggers were cutting timber when
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Speaker 1: over the whining chainsaws, he heard a horrible crashing, crunching
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Speaker 1: and grinding sound. Then darkness came, followed by intense heat.
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Speaker 1: Gasping for breath, the men's mouths and throats burned. Zamanski
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Speaker 1: had been knocked down. When he came to, he felt
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Speaker 1: a searing, painful heat. Ferns covered over more than half
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Speaker 1: of his body. None of his companions had survived. At
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Speaker 1: a campsite thirteen miles away, when preceded the ash by
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Speaker 1: ten to fifteen seconds and blew a woman's braided hair horizontally.
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Speaker 1: When the cloud arrived, the campers heard their hair sizzle.
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Speaker 1: The sky ahead of the wall of ash was green, tinged,
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Speaker 1: with cedar trees and limbs hanging in the air. Thirty
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Speaker 1: miles away, on a ridge near Mount Atoms, a witness
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Speaker 1: saw hundreds of branches dropping, some of them more than
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Speaker 1: a foot long and nearly an inch thick. Singed by
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Speaker 1: the heat. Where trees stood still, pitch boiled out of them.
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Speaker 1: Amid the sky's ashy chaos, lightning struck and ignited fires.
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Speaker 1: A pilot south of the mountain saw strange lightning like
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Speaker 1: a ball quote streaking toward the ground, connected neither with
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Speaker 1: the cloud nor with the ground end quote at the
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Speaker 1: other end of the elemental spectrum. Ice then mud balls
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Speaker 1: dropped on the fleeing people in cars. The eruption melted
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Speaker 1: snow and glaciers to produce forty seven billion gallons of water,
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Speaker 1: mixing with one point four billion cubic yards of ash
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Speaker 1: and rocks in huge mud flows. On the south fork
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Speaker 1: Tula River. The stream turned into a mass of water, mud,
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Speaker 1: and trees. A railroad trestle broke loose and caused a
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Speaker 1: huge log jam. Waiting in the muck was like moving
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Speaker 1: through warm concrete. According to one witness, mud and logs
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Speaker 1: swept along a car before the passengers finally escaped, jumping
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Speaker 1: log to log and wading through mud before reaching safety.
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Speaker 1: President Carter visited within days to observe the devastation from above.
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Speaker 1: Somebody said it looked like a moonscape, But the moon
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Speaker 1: looks like a golf course compared to what's up here,
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Speaker 1: Carter told the press Carter would have seen some of
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Speaker 1: the damage, which includes to the north fork Tula River
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Speaker 1: buried more than a dozen miles, lake beds raised by
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Speaker 1: almost two hundred feet, nearly five billion board feet of
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Speaker 1: timber downed. That amount of timber destroyed was enough to
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Speaker 1: build about three hundred thousand two bedroom homes, more than
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Speaker 1: twenty bridges were washed away, and property damage of more
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Speaker 1: than one billion dollars. Fifty seven people were killed. It
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Speaker 1: is also estimated that about seven thousand large animals such
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Speaker 1: as deer, elk, and bears, were killed, and thousands, if
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Speaker 1: not hundreds of thousands of small all animals died from
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Speaker 1: the volcanic eruption. Although Carter emphasized devastation, the power of
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Speaker 1: nature and what might come next also captured his attention.
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Speaker 1: He told reporters that scientists and tourists would visit the
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Speaker 1: landscape someday once it was made safe. Carter was right.
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Speaker 1: In June three, federal scientists helicopter into the blast zone,
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Speaker 1: steam still rising from the crater. After landing, Jerry Franklin,
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Speaker 1: an ecologist with the United States Forest Service, climbed out.
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Speaker 1: As writer Eric Wagner later described it, a flash of
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Speaker 1: green caught Franklin's eye. Already fireweed was reclaiming its spot
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Speaker 1: in the ecosystem. Franklin and his colleagues had expected life
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Speaker 1: to take much longer to return. Mount Saint Helen's repeatedly
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Speaker 1: humbled scientists whose predictions regularly underestimated what nature would do.
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Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty two, Congress established the Mount Saint Helen's
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Speaker 1: National Volcanic Monument to protect resources and to allow geologic
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Speaker 1: forces and ecological succession to continue substantially unimpeded, allowing scientists
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Speaker 1: to study a landscape of the evolution in an unprecedented way.
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Speaker 1: Three decades later, the once gray landscape had greened up.
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Speaker 1: While the Forest Service stepped back, private timber interest stepped up.
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Speaker 1: The Wierhauser Company owned sixty eight thousand acres affected by
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Speaker 1: the eruption. It responded with economic interests, salvaging as much
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Speaker 1: down timber as possible. According to the company, it employed
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Speaker 1: more than one thousand people, removed up to six hundred
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Speaker 1: truckloads of logs daily, worked for almost two years, and
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Speaker 1: rescued enough timber for eighty five thousand homes. Next, the
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Speaker 1: company planted seedlings, eighteen million of them across some forty
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Speaker 1: five thousand acres to start its next commercial forest. The
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Speaker 1: company's chief forester at its Saint Helen's Tree Farm, dick Ford,
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Speaker 1: told The New York Times, quote we had no idea
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Speaker 1: if anything would even grow there, because there was simply
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Speaker 1: no precedent for something like this end quote. But it worked.
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Speaker 1: Another Wierheuser forester boasted, we have done a much better
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Speaker 1: job than nature, and by night rather by two thousand
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Speaker 1: and nine, trees had reportedly reached seventy feet for some
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Speaker 1: of the local population. The recovering Wireheuser forests seemed promised
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Speaker 1: and more important than studying ecological succession. During the debate
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Speaker 1: about managing the national monument, one local resident voiced her
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Speaker 1: frustration and said, you don't need twenty thousand acres to
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Speaker 1: see how vegetation comes back. To her and others, scientific
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Speaker 1: research and monitoring did not count as the highest use
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Speaker 1: of the land and did not justify such restrictive classification.
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Speaker 1: Environmental scientists, however, learn much from studying how biological life returned.
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Speaker 1: They found greater biodiversity where nature was left to grow
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Speaker 1: at its own pace. What ecologists saw in the eruptions
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Speaker 1: aftermath helped them rethink logging practices too. Clear cutting sweeps
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Speaker 1: the land clean. But Franklin noted in a two thousand
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Speaker 1: ten feature in Bioscientists Bioscience that quote, if we're interested
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Speaker 1: in things like biological diversity and other kinds of ecosystem
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Speaker 1: processes besides timber production, maybe we'd better rethink our concepts
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Speaker 1: in quote. President Carter had grasped this early on, noting
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Speaker 1: in May of nineteen eighty quote, My guess is that
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Speaker 1: over a period of time, the Mount Saint Helen's explosion
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Speaker 1: will be one of intense interests through geologists and vulcanologists
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Speaker 1: and others from all over the world, and it will
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Speaker 1: be a scientific curiosity in the finest sense of that
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Speaker 1: word in quote. Beyond geology, the mountain would reveal lessons
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Speaker 1: about nature's resilience for decades to come. Mount Saint Helen's
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Speaker 1: is now only eight thousand, three hundred and sixty three
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Speaker 1: feet tall, one thousand, three hundred and fourteen feet shorter
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Speaker 1: than it was before the explosion. Though this explosion was devastating,
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Speaker 1: it will certainly not be the last eruption from this
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Speaker 1: very active volcano. That reading came from the website history
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Speaker 1: dot Com. Mount Saint Helen's devastating eruption and its surprising rebound,
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Speaker 1: written by Adam Sewards in July twenty twenty five, and
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Speaker 1: from thought dot com. Learn about the Mount Saint Helen's
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Speaker 1: eruption that killed fifty seven people, written by Jennifer Rosenberg
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Speaker 1: in March of two thousand seventeen. The following reading comes
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Speaker 1: from the website history hit dot com. Ten Facts about
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Speaker 1: the Eruption of Krakatoa, written by Sarah Roller in August
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Speaker 1: of twenty twenty one. The eighteen eighty three eruption of
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Speaker 1: Krakatoa was one of the deadliest natural disasters in history.
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Speaker 1: It's thought to have caused the deaths of over thirty
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Speaker 1: six thousand people, cooled the summer temperatures of the northern
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Speaker 1: hemisphere by point three centigrade, and sparked a renewed interest
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Speaker 1: in vulcanology. Eighteen eighty three was not the first time
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Speaker 1: Krakatoa had erupted. Krakatoa had been dormant for over two
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Speaker 1: hundred years when it erupted in eighteen eighty three, but
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Speaker 1: earlier records show that it had been known as the
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Speaker 1: Fire Mountain by Javanese people for centuries, and some have
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Speaker 1: apothesized it erupt catastrophically in the sixth century, causing global
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Speaker 1: climate change as a result. In sixteen eighty, Dutch sailors
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Speaker 1: reported seeing Krakatoa erupting and picking up large pieces of pumice,
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Speaker 1: and evidence of lava flows from this time was found
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Speaker 1: in the nineteenth century. Krakatoa was a volcanic island in
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Speaker 1: the Sundrus Strait between Java and Sumatra in Indiomnesia, part
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Speaker 1: of the Ring of Fire. In May of eighteen eighty three,
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Speaker 1: Krakatoa began erupting ash and steam to a height of
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Speaker 1: six kilometers and generating explosions so loud they were nearly
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Speaker 1: one hundred miles away. In June, further eruptions generated enough
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Speaker 1: ash to create a thick black cloud, which hung over
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Speaker 1: the volcano for several days. Tides started changing and ships
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Speaker 1: reported pumus in the ocean. The climactic or main phase
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Speaker 1: of the eruption began on twenty five August and finished
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Speaker 1: by twenty seven August. Over thirty six thousand people were killed.
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Speaker 1: Rogier Verbique was a Dutch geologist living in Java who
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Speaker 1: had conducted research into the gaology of the region in
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Speaker 1: previous years. Following the eighteen eighty three eruption, he traveled
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Speaker 1: to the affected areas, compiling eyewitness accounts and personally observing
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Speaker 1: the destruction the volcano had reeked. His five hundred and
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Speaker 1: fifty page report was published by the Government of the
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Speaker 1: Dutch East Indies in eighteen eighty five. This helped spark
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Speaker 1: the beginning of modern volcanology. Krakatoa's climactic phase generated the
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Speaker 1: loudest sound in recorded history at ten o two am
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Speaker 1: on August twenty seven. During its final stages of eruption.
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Speaker 1: Explosions shook the volcano and surrounding area. The sound was
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Speaker 1: heard thousands of miles away in Western Australia, and the
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Speaker 1: sound way generated traveled the world seven times over in
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Speaker 1: the following five days. As the volcano erupted, spewing ash
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Speaker 1: and pump us into the sea in the form of
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Speaker 1: a pyroclastic flow, it triggered tsunamis of up to forty
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Speaker 1: meters high and destroyed up to three hundred villages along
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Speaker 1: the Sundra Strait. Waves from the tsunami rock ships as
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Speaker 1: far away as South Africa. The volcano poured millions of
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Speaker 1: cubic meters of gas and ash into the atmosphere, creating
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Speaker 1: a blanket and making average temperatures lower for the next year.
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Speaker 1: It also led to increased rainfall in some parts of
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Speaker 1: the world and delivered amazing fiery sunsets all across the world.
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Speaker 1: Bodies washed up on the shores of Indonesia, India, and
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Speaker 1: Africa for months after the August eruption. The volcano's immensely
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Speaker 1: powerful eruption destroyed almost all of the island of Krakatoa
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Speaker 1: and several of the islands in the surrounding archipelago. The
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Speaker 1: Krakatoa volcano itself collapsed into a caldera, which is a
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Speaker 1: hollow that forms once a magma chamber is empty a knack. Krakatoa,
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Speaker 1: new island emerged from the caldera in nineteen twenty seven
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Speaker 1: and has been growing every since. An underwater collapse generated
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Speaker 1: a deadly tsunami in two thousand eighteen, and it remains
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Speaker 1: of interest to volcanologists as a relatively new volcano. Much
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Speaker 1: of the western part of Java was devastated by the
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Speaker 1: effects of Krakatoa, flattened by the tsunami, covered in ash,
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Speaker 1: and a large proportion of the population dead. As such,
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Speaker 1: much of the surrounding lowland was effectively rewilded, with flora
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Speaker 1: and fauna flourishing in the area. The Ujung Kulon Nature
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Speaker 1: Reserve was officially created in nineteen fifty seven, and to
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Speaker 1: day encompasses twelve hundred kilometers. Well that about does it
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Speaker 1: for to day's Radio eye history. Thank you so much
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Speaker 1: for listening. I'll be with you the next time for
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Speaker 1: another chapter of Radio II history. This is Joseph Bolt
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Speaker 1: and I'll see you then. Happy trails to you.