Page 7 of Eruption
“Okay. And satellite images?”
“Just MODIS.”
“It’s on poster board.”
They came out of the changing room, crossed a hall, went down a corridor. Through the windows, Mac saw the other buildings of the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, all connected by tin walkways. The HVO was built on the rim of the Kilauea caldera, and even though no lava was flowing in the crater these days, there were always lots of tourists walking around, pointing down at the steam vents.
A fleet of TV trucks, most of them white with satellite dishes mounted on top, were in the parking lot. MacGregor sighed. It wasn’t a happy sound.
“It’ll be fine,” Jenny said. “Just remember to smile. You have a very nice smile.”
“Says who?”
“Says me, handsome.”
“Are you flirting with me?”
She smiled. “Sure, go with that.”
They walked through the data room, where computer techs were hunched over keyboards. He glanced up at the monitors suspended from the ceiling that showed views of various parts of the volcano. Sure enough, there was now steam coming out of the summit crater of Mauna Loa, proof that he’d been right, that he wasn’t being alarmist—the eruption was only days away. He felt as if a ticking clock had begun its countdown.
As they went through the room, a chorus of voices wished him luck. Rick Ozaki’s voice cut through the others: “Nice shoes,ya!”
Now Mac managed a real smile; he reached behind his back and flipped off his friend.
They went through another door and down the main hallway. In the room at the far end, he saw the podium and the mapmounted on the easel. He heard the murmur of the waiting reporters.
“How many are there?” Mac asked just before they walked in.
“Everyone we expected,” Jenny said. “Now go be your best self.”
“I don’thavea best self,” he said.
Jenny moved to one side, and Mac stepped forward and felt the eyes of everyone in the room focus on him.
Tako Takayama had told him that when Mauna Loa erupted in December of 1935, George Patton, then a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Air Corps, had been part of the effort to divert the lava flow. At this moment Mac felt like that kind of heat was rushing toward him.
Yeah,he told himself,that’s me, Old Blood and Guts MacGregor.
CHAPTER 5
John MacGregor knew who he was and what his strengths were. Public speaking was not one of them. He cleared his throat and nervously tapped the microphone.
“Good afternoon. I’m John MacGregor, scientist in charge of the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory. Thank you all for coming today.”
He turned to the map. “As you know, this observatory monitors six volcanoes—the undersea volcano Kama‘ehuakanaloa, formerly Lo‘ihi; Haleakala, on Maui; plus four on the Big Island of Hawai‘i, including the two active volcanoes, Kilauea, a relatively small volcano that has been continuously active for over forty years, and Mauna Loa, the largest volcano in the world, which erupted in 2022 but has not had a major eruption since 1984.”
On the map, Kilauea was a small crater alongside the laboratory building. Mauna Loa looked like a huge dome; its flanks occupied half the island.
Mac took a deep breath and exhaled. The microphone picked up the sound.
“Today,” MacGregor said, “I am announcing an imminent eruption of Mauna Loa.”
The photographers’ strobe lights were like flashes of lightning. MacGregor blinked away the white spots in front of his eyes, cleared his throat again, and kept going. He’d probably only imagined that the television lights had just gotten brighter.
“We expect this to be a fairly large eruption,” he said, “and we expect that it will come within the next two weeks, perhaps much sooner than that.”
He held up a hand to quiet the suddenly elevated noise level from the audience and pivoted toward Jenny, who put up the seismic data on an easel to his left. The image, which plotted the epicenters of all the earthquakes on the island during the last year, showed dark clusters around the summit.