Page 40 of Eruption
“We’re thinking about ways to control the volcano,” Mac said. “But we can’t.”
“Right,” Morton said. “We don’t have the explosive power to open a vent, and we can’t generate enough energy to do it.”
“But the volcano itself has plenty of energy,” Mac said.
He felt them all staring at him.
“What if we can make the volcano do the work for us?” Mac asked.
Briggs said, “Wait…what?”
Mac said, “How far down can you place explosives?”
“That depends on the thickness of the basalt and the presence of thermal effects,” Morton said. “But that doesn’t alter the basic—”
Mac ignored him and addressed Briggs. “Those helicopters you have carrying the bulldozers—”
“Chinooks,” Briggs said.
“Can they also carry water?”
Rick Ozaki dropped his head. He was sure he knew what his boss would say next. Quietly he murmured, “Please, God, no,” to his boots.
Jenny Kimura was shaking her head. “John MacGregor,” she said.
It was never good when she used his full name. But she also knew where he was headed with this.
Briggs said, “Yes, they can carry water. They’ve occasionally been used for firefighting.”
“Howmuchwater?” Mac said.
“I’d have to check. Water’s heavy. But I’m guessing three thousand gallons each.”
“How many helicopters can you get?”
“I’d have to check that too. I think we’ve got five at Barking Sands on Kaua‘i. There’s probably fifteen or twenty on all the islands. Why?”
“This summit—this whole mountain—is dotted with lava tubes and air chambers,” Mac said. “Most of them are sealed over by the eruption that created them, and some of them are very large. We knew they were there, but we didn’t know exactly where until we started mapping using high-resolution magnetometry. Anyway, you could break into the underground pockets and place your explosives, then you could fill them with water and seal them.”
“Which would do what, exactly?” one of the army engineers finally asked.
“Keep the detonation wave under high pressure. Restore the explosive capacity. Instead of moving magma up, you’d just have to move water down to contact the magma.”
“Where it makes steam and hisses out for a few hours,” the engineer said.
“Only if the contact is slow. But if you make a sudden contact…” Mac said.
“I hear you!” another one of the AOC men said. He turned to the others on his team. “You could use quad arrays in multiples.”
“We’d need a lot of on-site calculations…”
“I know,” the AOC man said, “but I believe itispossible.”
“And how would you get the arrays to communicate?” another man asked Mac.
“You don’t,” Mac said. “You make them autonomous.”
The AOC team huddled together. Mac could hear them talking excitedly, although they kept their voices low. One of them picked up a chunk of lava. Someone said something about porosity and sealant pressures.