Steam rose from the top vent in the summit crater of Alaska’s Mount Redoubt on March 21, the day before it started erupting.President Obama’s stimulus package might be creating a sandstorm in some states, but in Alaska, it was nearly volcanic.
Literally.
All last weekend, the Mount Redoubt volcano rumbled, and then blew early Monday, spewing ash more than nine miles into the air. It last blew in 1989 and 1990, and eruptions continued for four months.
The volcano, 103 miles southwest of Anchorage, west of the Cook inlet, is in a fairly remote location, with the nearest town of any size 50 miles away, and so the biggest concern is the ash spewing into the atmosphere, where it can clog airplane engines. Indeed, Alaska Airlines canceled 19 flights in and out of Anchorage on Monday. And that stranded several legislators in Anchorage, preventing them from reaching the capitol in Juneau, where a debate is brewing over the federal stimulus package.
Governor Sarah Palin, a Republican, had declared last week that she was turning down 31 percent of the estimated $930 million in stimulus money headed to Alaska. Like some other Republican governors who were rejecting at least some of the money, she said it came with strings.
Her decision provoked outrage throughout the state. Democrats quickly accused Ms. Palin, the 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee, of playing to conservative distrust of the stimulus and trying to gain an advantage in the 2012 presidential primaries. Even some fellow Republicans thought she might have made a misstep and prepared a resolution that would position the state to be able to accept all the stimulus money
There was considerable confusion, in Alaska and elsewhere, over the process for acquiring the money and the deadlines by which legislatures needed to act. In Alaska, State Senator Bert Stedman, a Republican and co-chairman of the finance committee, filed the resolution on Friday and prepared it for a vote on Monday because he believed that the legislature had to act by
At the same time, Ms. Palin’s office was backtracking on her earlier statements, saying she had not actually rejected the federal money, but had simply wanted a full airing on the consequences of accepting it
By the end of the day Friday, Mr. Stedman’s office said a review of federal guidelines determined that the legislature did not need to act by Monday. But whether the state will get all of its stimulus money is still up in the air. While an immediate confrontation with the governor was averted, another could lie ahead. And if the legislature votes to take all the stimulus money, the governor could veto part of that plan. It is not clear yet what Ms. Palin will do.
“We still have plenty of time to work through any differences between the Palin Administration and the legislature,” said Miles Baker, chief of staff to Senator Stedman, in an e-mail message. He said the resolution remains on the Senate secretary’s desk “for the time being.”
As the political volcano appeared to be simmering down, the physical one did too, at least for the moment
As we noted here on The Lede, when Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana suggested that the stimulus package was wasteful, he cited “$140 million for something called volcano monitoring.” But on Monday, a television station in Alaska posted an article on its Web site noting that “volcano monitoring became a political football last month but Alaska’s system worked well when Mount Redoubt erupted” this week.
Ryan Bierma, a volcanologist with the Alaska Volcano Observatory, said that after the eruptions Monday morning, there had been earthquake tremors as well as “vibrating and unrest,” but no further eruptions.
“We’re still watching pretty closely,” he said. “It could ramp up pretty rapidly again. It’s tough to make any predictions.”
The eruption of a volcano in Alaska is fairly common, Mr. Bierma said. “We have over 40 active volcanoes in the state right now, and we have at least one significant ash-expelling eruption every year,” he said.
Just as there’s no predicting whether Redoubt might blow again, there is no predicting whether the matter of the stimulus money will erupt again either
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