The city of West Yellowstone, Montana
23:30 the day of
The IFDEC control room was in total, albeit controlled, chaos. Every phone on every desk was ringing, and each string of “hold” lights blinked incessantly.
Joyce paid no attention to the fact that her shift had ended two hours ago, as she and her counterparts continued to answer a continuous stream of telephone calls and coordinate the growing list of first- and second-tier emergency responders. At the same time, her IFDEC supervisor began executing the steps laid out in the Idaho section of the Bureau of Homeland Security’s Emergency Action Plan, EAP.
Much of the emergency effort was directed toward US Route 20, the one and only paved road leading out of West Yellowstone. Utter pandemonium covered every inch of it. Traffic was headlight to taillight heading west out of the city toward the Idaho state line, twenty miles away.
The official resident population of West Yellowstone fluctuated around fourteen hundred. This time of year, another five or six hundred tourists were staying in the hotels and private RV parks. There was a daily pilgrimage into the park every morning after breakfast, a lull from ten until three, and then a returning stream in the late afternoon. The local sheriff estimated there were around five hundred vehicles, between the locals and visitors, in and around the city at any given time.
Tonight, every civilian car, truck, and motorcycle that would run was westbound. Virtually no one was planning to ride this thing out. It would be years before they found the bodies of those who tried.
Thanks to almost zero visibility and insane driving, the wrecks started before the fleeing caravan could even get past the city limits. All north- and southbound streets intersected with 20 as it snaked east and west through the center of town, forcing traffic to merge into a single artery. Even in the middle of the day, it would have been challenging to get so many vehicles on to a sole road, heading in the same direction, without pileups. At midnight, with ash-induced blackout conditions and panic-crazed drivers, it was literally impossible.
To compound the problem, the combination of violent earthquakes and red-hot boulders falling out of the sky had disrupted all electrical power within a thirty-mile, and growing, radius around the caldera. The city’s gas main had also ruptured, igniting its spewing vapor into a raging tower of blue flame in the center of, ironically, Firehole Avenue.
Everyone in Northwest Montana knew about the sleeping giant that lay beneath the Yellowstone Caldera. Everyone knew there was always the chance that one day the reputed supervolcano could erupt on an unimaginable scale—but no one actually believed it would. After all, it had been over six hundred thousand years, according to people who were supposed to know those things, since its last major eruption. That was well over four hundred thousand years before the first Homo sapiens made his appearance somewhere in East Africa.
People had simply learned to live with this remote possibility of disaster, even laugh and joke about it. They wouldn’t be joking about it any longer. Not the survivors.
Rescue ambulances were called first and dispatched, followed by the various fire departments her computer flashed on its monitor.
Joyce started with the units situated north and east along the US 20 corridor. Unfortunately, there weren’t many. One inside the Caribou-Targhee National Forest and one in St. Anthony. All the rest were located nearby in Idaho Falls. Each time she connected with a station’s emergency operator, she had to explain why they needed to dispatch their units, all of their units, to a location, in Idaho Falls’s case, ninety miles away. She keyed her mic, mentally forcing herself to remain calm and directive as she reached out to stations closer to the caldera. “Hebgen Mobile, Canyon Village, anyone, come in!”
Nothing.
The Hebgen Basin Fire District rescue vehicle driver had pleaded for her to dispatch all units within a fifty-mile radius. But there just weren’t any. It was no exaggeration to say that West Yellowstone lay smack dab in the middle of nowhere. For that reason, it would be hours before National Guard units from Bozeman or Idaho Falls would begin to make their way to West Yellowstone or the northern entrance at Gardiner.
But there was another option. A section of the EAP was dedicated to the eventuality of a volcanic eruption, specifically with the Yellowstone supervolcano.
Joyce stood up and looked over the top of her cubical wall toward her supervisor. “Russell, when you can get free for a sec,” she shouted while motioning with her hand.
The supervisor glanced in her direction, said something to the operator he had been talking to, then dashed over to Joyce’s cubicle.
“What’ya got, Joyce?”
“I can’t raise any responders north of Big Springs, not even the volunteer FDs. I think it’s time to activate section two of the EAP. Worse case, we piss off your boss and send the snow removal boys on a wild goose chase. I’m not seeing a best-case right now.”
“I agree! Keep doing what you’re doing, and I’ll activate the next phase.”
Someone on the planning committee had had the foresight to stipulate that second-wave responders include snow removal teams that were already organized within every city and county in the three-state region. These teams were to arm themselves with the snowplow equipment that usually sat idle from April through October. This strategy, initially labeled as ridiculous during the summer months, would save more lives and prove to be more useful than any other single initiative.
The regional director of the Idaho DHS arrived at the makeshift command post at around 01:15 on what would unofficially become known as “the day after the day of.”
He jumped directly into the fray and started working through his section of the EAP by calling the FAA office in Salt Lake City. At 01:35 Yellowstone and Jackson Hole Airports were closed to all traffic. By that time, shutting down departing air traffic was beyond just a precaution. It was a matter of “if you try to take off, you will die.” This didn’t stop a nationally known Alabama lawyer from going berserk when the pilots of his brand-new Citation CJ4 refused to meet him and his girlfriend at the Jackson Hole Airport to fly them back to Birmingham.
Within two hours, the FAA had rerouted all flights within an area of the northwest United States extending east past Casper, Wyoming; south to Provo, Utah; and west to Boise, Idaho. The area would remain off-limits to air traffic for weeks, until late-summer weather fronts disseminated the still-rising column of ash, the prevailing jet streams forcing ash as far east as Philadelphia and along the North Carolina coast.
By the end of the day after the eruption, highways within a twenty-five-mile radius of what had previously been the Yellowstone Caldera, and what in just six days would be sixteen-thousand-foot-tall Mount Shoshone, were buried in almost ten feet of ash and pumice.
Working around the clock for the first three days, snowplow teams were able to keep the three main arteries, US Routes 20, 191, and 14, more or less drivable south past Jackson Hole, east to Wapiti, and north to Big Sky. Driving within that almost sixty-five-mile circle was virtually impossible after the first twenty-four hours following the eruption. And the closer you got to the epicenter, the less likely it was that you would return.
Using a technique learned and refined during the winter months, snowplow drivers cleared the path by pushing the ash to both sides of the road. They were followed by front-end loaders, which would scoop up the sometimes still-smoldering ejecta and load it into an endless stream of dump trucks. The trucks hauled the ash to previously identified ravines and washed-out gullies.
In the months to come, this practice would present its own set of problems and environmental issues. But on a battlefield, every soldier knew you had to “clear the airway, stop the bleeding,” and then “protect the wound.” These units were on the front line and working like madmen to clear the airway and save their patient, metaphorically speaking. They would let someone else worry about cleaning up the mess.
Meanwhile, back at the IFDEC, Joyce and her team were going through their daily shift-turnover routine. Only today wasn’t routine. Not even close. Every member of the next shift had shown up early, and every member of Joyce’s team offered to stay late. However, the regional director would have none of that.
“Wrap up your turnover report and then go home,” he ordered. “It’s a fact that the second day of a disaster is the worst. Everyone comes off their adrenalin high and starts to crash and burn. We can’t have that. I want the current shift to go home, get some rest, and be ready for a fresh start tomorrow. Now, finish up and get out of here!”
…
Martin Driggs sat at his desk at ABC affiliate KIFI polishing copy sheets for the early-morning news. The talking-head newscast team would roll in at four thirty to begin their daily makeup routine and to review the summary of national and local events he had gleaned throughout the night from the Associated Press wire service. They would bitch and whine like two-year-olds if his electronic copy sheets weren’t polished up, double spaced, and available on the iPads on the anchor desk.
Martin was just biding his time at KIFI, waiting for a chance to move up the investigative reporting ladder. Maybe at a larger station in Seattle or Portland or, if he struck newsperson gold, Sacramento or San Francisco. He thought of California as the promised land.
As he assembled what in just a few hours would become the early-morning news, he listened, sort of, to the scanner that occupied one corner of his desk. It continuously squawked with police, fire, and 9-1-1 department radio chatter. One of Martin’s duties was to monitor the scanner and alert KIFI’s standby news team if there was a wreck, a fire, or, if they got fortunate, a murder within their catchment area. He had been doing this for so long that his brain tuned most of the radio traffic out as merely background noise. Not tonight.
As his fingers nursed what he initially thought would be the morning’s headline story from his iMac’s keyboard, he heard the tone of one IFDEC operator’s voice move up a couple of octaves.
Usually, each member of the 9-1-1 team worked diligently to maintain a calm, detached, almost perfunctory radio demeanor. They sometimes sounded bored as they responded to mothers calling to report a missing child, or the wife of a suspected heart attack victim.
This woman was undoubtedly under control, but Martin could detect a not-so-subtle sense of urgency in her voice. Then he heard keywords that caused him to stop what he was doing and pick up his phone.
“Idaho Falls, this is Hebgen Basin Fire District, Mobile One. There has been a major earthquake and an explosion like nothing I’ve ever heard before.”
“Hebgen Fire, Idaho Falls, what’s your twenty?”
“We’re rolling out of West Yellowstone, heading east toward the park entrance. I think the volcano has erupted. It’s like the sky is on fire. It’s lit up as far as I can see.”
“Roger Hebgen Fire, do you require assistance?”
“Hell yes, we need assistance! 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 is 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 . . .”
Then, for a few seconds, until it picked up another radio signal, the scanner was silent.
Martin realized he had overheard what might very well be the beginning of the most earth-shattering disaster—he brushed aside his mental pun—that modern man had ever witnessed. He forgot the half-cobbled news summary on his iMac and barked, “Siri, call the KIFI News Response Team driver.”