volcanoes schmalcanoes!

For those of you who caught Obama's address to the nation last night and Gov. Bobby Jindal's rebuttal, did you catch this bit by Jindal?

While some of the projects in the [stimulus] bill make sense, their legislation is larded with wasteful spending. It includes ... $140 million for something called 'volcano monitoring.' Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington, DC.

It's like you could see him through the radio, making those little quotation marks with his fingers.  This is from the governor of LA, a state that suffered horribly from a natural disaster in the recent past.  

Volcano monitoring saves lives.  We here in Anchorage are hearing near daily updates on Redoubt through the Alaska Volcano Observatory.  Yes, most of Alaska's volcanoes are in the Aleutians, but it's still very important to understand what's happening there.  You see, the AVO estimates ~30,000 people per day are in aircraft downwind from Aleutian volcanoes, and if a plane flies through an ash cloud its engines can fail.  That happened in 1989 - a 747 flying through Redoubt's ash cloud experienced engine failure, dropping over 3,000 meters before the crew could get the engines started again.  That's falling 1.8 miles through the sky - yikes!

Our nation also has military installations throughout the world.  In the early 1990s, Pinatubo (in the Phillipines) blew.  The USGS worked with Phillipinne volcanologists to monitor Pinatubo, and evacuations began before the eruption that are believed to have saved thousands of lives, including 18,000 US military personnel.

Here's a link to a volcanology grad student's response.  She's pretty heated up, but I though it was a good response.  

Or you can check out this popular mechanics article about Redoubt and airplanes.  

Anyways, point is that volcano monitoring (like hurricane monitoring!) is money well spent and Bobby Jindal should do his homework before addressing the nation.