Idaho Falls, Idaho
22:46 the day of
Joyce King was a little more than an hour away from the end of her shift as a 9-1-1 operator. She worked for the Idaho Falls Department of Emergency Communications, or IFDEC as it was proudly and prominently stitched on the breast-pocket patch of her blue uniform shirt.
The IFDEC was a multijurisdictional agency that served dozens of geographically dispersed communities in western Wyoming and eastern Idaho. None of the cities in its service area could afford their own 9-1-1 services, even Jackson Hole, with its collection of out-of-state millionaires. For this reason, fifteen years ago, the Idaho Falls City Council established the IFDEC as a public service coalition. It was funded by a combination of federal grants and dues from surrounding municipalities.
“Sir, are you still there?” Joyce spoke into her microphone-earpiece assembly, her husky voice tired and drawn from a long shift. She had been with the IFDEC for just over a year and was the most junior of the three operators on her shift. Like the others, she loved her job and thrived on the near-constant adrenaline she got dealing with the “front end” of an emergency. There was no such thing as a dull day at the IFDEC.
She focused intently on the four computer monitors on her new New World Enterprise Computer-Aided Dispatch, or CAD, workstation.
The monitor on her left showed a map that automatically zoomed in on an electronic pin indicating the caller’s location. Thanks to a government-funded program that had added powerful, advanced cell towers in hundreds of previously underserved areas nationwide, and new satellite communication interfaces, cell phones could now be used and traced in virtually every square mile of North America. The CAD system used triangulated signal information to calculate incredibly accurate, real-time caller locations. This particular call had originated northwest of Shoshone Lake, more or less in the middle of Yellowstone National Park.
Joyce moved the wheel on her mouse and zoomed in. Another pin appeared indicating the location of the Yellowstone Caldera. “Sir, can you hear me?” she repeated. She shifted her focus to another monitor, which reflected first-responder locations and information corresponding to the caller’s physical location. There was no answer. Joyce tried once more. “Sir, if you can hear me, please tell me about your situation.”
No reply.
The first-responder monitor indicated there was a fire station at the National Park Service headquarters next to West Thumb Lake, about six miles from the caldera location. Joyce clicked the link on the screen, which automatically dialed the station’s landline. Seconds later, an automated message blared from her computer speaker: “The number you have dialed cannot be reached. Please hang up and try again.” Joyce clicked end call on the screen and tried again. After getting the same results, she scrolled over the map until another fire station appeared on the screen: the Hebgen Basin Fire District located outside the park entrance in West Yellowstone. She clicked on its number and was rewarded with a ringing sound. No answer.
Ten rings later, Joyce clicked on the emergency radio reference icon and scrolled down a list of repeater locations until she found the Yellowstone West Net, frequency 166.8750. As the phone continued to ring, she keyed her radio mic. “Hebgen Basin Fire Station, this is IFDEC, over.”
Two other station operators hummed in the background: “Nine One One, what’s your emergency?”
While holding the radio mic, Joyce stood up to peer over the sound-dampening walls, which created the operators’ cubicles. The man in the cubicle next to hers pounded furiously on his keyboard. His monitor was zoomed in on the same area as Joyce’s.
Joyce raised her mic to her mouth. “Hebgen Fire Station, can you read me? Come in. Over.”
Nothing but static—and then a surge of background noise. Wailing sirens and the roar of engines from fire trucks and ambulances. And screams.
“IFDEC, this is Hebgen Mobile,” a response crackled, barely audible over the background chaos. “All hell’s breaking loose. There was an eight point six earthquake. Then the volcano blew. Either that or the Ruskies missed and planted a nuke in the park. There was a terrible explosion. About half of the people that were outside are deaf. We’re scrambling all units and heading for the west entrance, Highway One Niner One, over.”
“Roger, Hebgen Mobile. How can we help? Over.”
“We need every first responder within a fifty-mile radius. And while you’re at it, the National Guard. And they better bring body bags. Fucking boulders are falling everywhere. There’s an enormous cloud of smoke and ash moving up into the sky and, from what I can see, in all directions. It’s starting to blot out what little sunlight is left. It’s almost dark now. I can barely see the taillights on the unit in front of—” Silence.
“Hebgen Mobile, come in, over. Hebgen Mobile, can you hear me?” Joyce frowned. The radio was dead. That meant whatever had happened was bad, but Joyce had no idea how bad—or how historically significant the eruption would be for its intensity and its capacity for destruction.
Glancing from one monitor to another, hands alternating between clicking her mouse and dancing across the keyboard, Joyce somehow tuned out the nonessential noise and commotion that was all around her.
Then, out of nowhere, she recalled reading an article in National Geographic during a lull in a late-night shift. The story was about the dormant Yellowstone volcano, but as a lead-in, the author recounted in horrifying detail the destruction that thing was capable of dishing out.
Approximately seventy-five thousand years earlier, the Toba supervolcano in Sumatra, Indonesia, exploded in what scientists considered to be the single most massive eruption on Earth, thousands of times more powerful than any before or since. Vulcanologists estimated that the Toba eruption had a volcanic explosivity index of 8.
Some theories postulated that the ash cloud created by the Toba eruption settled over the globe like snow, causing a “volcanic winter” that lasted over six years and resulted in a global cooling period of nearly one thousand years. Researchers estimated that the amount of material in the ash cloud greatly exceeded 2,500 cubic kilometers. Reviews of mitochondrial DNA pointed to a link between the Toba eruption and a bottleneck in the evolution of Homo sapiens.
Scientists believed the event came dangerously close to causing the extinction of human life.
On Sunday afternoon, August 26, 1883, a semi-active volcano situated on the Indonesian island of Krakatoa erupted and then collapsed into the bubbling caldera that still exists today. It was the largest, deadliest, and most destructive volcanic event in recorded history. More than thirty-six thousand people died as a result of heat from the blast and from the tsunamis caused by the collapse of the volcano below sea level.
The Krakatoa explosion was estimated to have generated a blast whose sound exceeded three hundred decibels, loud enough to be heard over three thousand miles away and to rupture the eardrums of sailors on the decks of ships forty miles from the island. Just two hundred decibels generated enough energy to vibrate the human body apart; three hundred would cause it to explode.
Krakatoa, with an estimated VEI of 6, wasn’t classified as a supervolcano; Yellowstone was—even if Joyce didn’t realize it yet.
Suddenly the room—the entire building—shook violently. Coffee sloshed out of the cup on Joyce’s workstation, and every picture on every wall crashed to the floor. Joyce staggered and grabbed the side of her desk to keep from falling.
“Whoa, Nelly,” she blurted above the ruckus. “That might explain why we lost the Hebgen Mobile connection.”
By now, icons and warning lights flashed from every monitor on every operator’s workstation in the EFDEC control room. Despite the apparent chaos, Joyce and her associates had things more or less under control. The EMS supervisor had joined the fray, and everyone was following the emergency action protocols that had been developed over the years and refined with every quarterly drill. There actually was an evacuation-and-response plan specific to earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. However, no one had imagined the scope of the disaster that was at that very moment unfolding ninety miles away. It was literally unimaginable.
Physically and mentally exhausted, Joyce collapsed in her chair and stared at the explosion of activity on her monitors. She had dealt with traffic accidents, fires, and the occasional domestic dispute. Although rare in Idaho Falls, she had even responded to a couple of murders over the years. But nothing, absolutely nothing, came close to the sense of overwhelming fear and helplessness that washed over her now.
For the first time in her career, she felt sick to her stomach with pure, unadulterated fear.