Mount Okmok erupts as 10 flee storm of ash

Monica Southworth

July 14, 2008 at 1:58PM AKST

Before Tom Hardman first left his home in Prescott, Ariz., to work as a ranch hand on Fort Glenn, a private cattle ranch six miles from a 3,500-foot volcano in the Aleutians, he did his research on the Ring of Fire.

He asked his future boss, ranch manager Lonnie Kennedy, about living on Umnak Island, part of a string of active volcanoes. Saying what most residents of Aleutians would probably say, Kennedy told Hardman that there was the occasional earthquake but hardly ever an eruption.

That changed on Saturday, July 12. Like any other morning, the ranch residents woke up to a full day of work. Hardman recalls he was struggling to chop up a thick piece of wood with a faulty axe head when he heard Okmok Caldera start to rumble.

At first, he thought it was thunder in the distance, but the constant sound led him to believe that it was the volcano.

“I never heard a volcano erupting before, but it sounded like an avalanche. When I looked up, there wasn’t enough snow to have an avalanche that big. I said, ‘No, that’s the volcano,’” said Hardman.

After the volcano started to rumble, there was a pause. It began to rumble a second time, with another pause, and it began to rumble a third time. This was around noon.
“It was amazing to listen to,” Hardman said.

The rumbling had caught Kennedy’s attention as well, he said when he looked up at the mountain the cloud ceiling was about 600 feet — they were unable to see the top of Mount Okmok.

“When the mountain started rumbling, you could hear the cattle running around making lots of noise,” Kennedy said. “I knew the volcano was doing something, and we needed to get out.”

“We called the Coast Guard, and I went to start up the helicopter,” said Kennedy, whose family lives on the ranch. Altogether Fort Glenn is home to seven adults and three children. The helicopter could carry only two people at a time.

Kennedy said that as he walked into the building that houses the ranch’s small helicopter, he could hear rocks hitting the roof. Kennedy’s first trip was to bring his daughter-in-law Shurery with her 6-month-old daughter, Baily, to a small tin cabin on the southern end of Unalaska Island. Next it was Kennedy’s two youngest children, Amy, 9, and Parker, 4.

“I began to see ash, and I told everyone on the island to load up and head to the beach,” Kennedy said.

As the group still on Umnak Island got in the truck and headed toward the beach, the sky began to darken, turning black in about an hour and a half.

On the third trip between the ranch and the cabin on Unalaska, Kennedy said he overloaded the helicopter with his wife, Susan, and 16-year-old daughter, Lily, but didn’t encounter any problems. Kennedy made it back for Darren Krukoff, a resident of Nikolski, and a load of supplies.

As each group departed for the safety of Unalaska Island, just six miles away, Hardman found himself lingering behind. He said he felt reluctant to miss the chance to see the volcano in action.

“I told (Kennedy’s son) Ross that he needed to go before me because he had a child, and I told Darren that because he’s 16 he needed to go as well,” Hardman said. “I was just so fascinated with the volcano, I wanted to stay and watch.”

The wind changed around 1 p.m. and turned the area around the ranch into a total blackout. The weather was damp, with a lot of thunder and lightning.

When Kennedy looked back to Umnak, he decided he couldn’t risk another trip because of the density of the ash. If he were to fly back he would risk crashing the helicopter were ash to congest the engine.

He would not be able to return for Ross Kennedy and Hardman, the last two left behind.

Kennedy had made radio contact with the fishing vessel Tara Gail and asked them to pick up Ross and Hardman on the beach. Kennedy had contacted the Coast Guard, but he thought they wouldn’t have a chance of getting out there and were unlikely to fly.

Hardman and Kennedy began a two-mile walk to the beach, carrying their dog Soup, who was too terrified to get out of their truck. They were about halfway to the beach to meet the Tara Gail when the world turned black.

Because it was the middle of the day, Hardman and Kennedy hadn’t thought to grab flashlights and were left walking through the ash, unable to raise their heads without getting an eyeful of ash.

As they were walking, there was an electrical storm above their heads. Hardman said some of the lighting was grounded, while other was horizontal, and some flashes were large wheels or balls of light in the sky.

Near-blinded and carrying Soup, a few supplies and personal belongings, the pair stumbled down an old road, then finally made it to the beach.

When they finally reached the dock, Hardman said they could make out the vessel in the bay and fired a shot in the air to get the attention of the crew. Hardman and Kennedy boarded the Tara Gail and headed back to Unalaska to pick up everyone at the cabin and transport them to the Dutch Harbor.

“We’d lost contact with them (Ross and Hardman) on the handheld, maybe because of the thick ash, but we were getting worried,” Lonnie Kennedy said, who added a bolt of lightning had struck the cabin where the eight evacuees were anxiously waiting.

“We were still waiting for the Coast Guard, and the Tara Gail was our only hope of going anywhere. They had already done so much, but they came and picked us up as well.”

As the Tara Gail approached the southern end of Unalaska Island, it was still dark, and its occupants had trouble seeing the shore.

Kennedy left the cabin to use the radio on the helicopter to make contact with the boat but had trouble finding the helicopter on the shore because of the thick ash. About 100 yards out, the boat anchored and used a rubber life raft to bring people on the shore onboard to proceed to Dutch Harbor.

Once aboard the Tara Gail, the crew on the vessel made radio contact with a C130 aircraft that was circling in the air above the island. The plane crew reported a large plume of ash.

Kennedy said when the wind changed direction it only took about 45 minutes for the sky to become light again.

The boat arrived at the city of Unalaska at 3 a.m. Sunday morning. The Kennedy family and the ranch assistants will be staying in Unalaska until it is safe to return to the ranch. In the meantime, Kennedy says he is not worried about the approximate 3,000 head of cattle that were left on the island.

“Animals seem to always fair better than humans in natural disasters,” Kennedy said.
Kennedy said that the ash didn’t seem like the refined toxic kind, but was much grainier.

At worst, he believes that the cattle will be a little bit dirty, but ultimately, he’ll have to wait to return to the island to gauge the damage. Kennedy said it is possible for the cattle to digest the ash from eating grass that is covered in it.

While seismologists at the Alaska Volcano Center began detecting a series of small tremors hours before the eruption, Hardman and Kennedy said that there might have been indications that something unusual was going to happen days earlier.
Kennedy is in the process of building a wind generator, and has the base structure set up. The structure is bolted to the ground, and has a long piece lying on the ground to keep it stable.

Hardman and Kennedy recalled that two days before the eruption, on July 10, the top of the pole was shaking. Both men were baffled because none of the other antennas were shaking. The pole continued to shake for most of the day and stopped by the next morning.

Because of the generator's more extensive contact with the ground, Hardman and Kennedy suspect that it may have been a precursor to the eruption.
Kennedy said that while everything turned out all right, living through an eruption was an extremely stressful experience.

“A lot of things go through your mind. Nothing was really bad, we just got a little dirty,” Kennedy said. “But when you think about the psychological effect of it, I had four of my kids over there. If I had known everything was going to turn out alright, it would’ve been much easier, but you never know for sure.”

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