06-24-2009, 07:12 AM
Who knows whether there has been an increase in earthquakes around PGV? There certainly is a great deal of quake monitoring going on in lower Puna, and one would hope that any such correlation would be mentioned. However, it took three years for the word to come out that PGV's drillers had hit a pocket of magma in 2005, and then the news came from a scientific conference.
While one could make an argument that PGV might need to keep such information close to its vest (not an argument I would buy, by the way), one would hope that the government and scientific community would not be bridled by any dubious proprietary concerns. However, the Trib article from last December said that scientists at both the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory and UH-Hilo were aware of the incident but didn't reveal it "because analysis was still underway."
That's more than a little disconcerting, and if true suggests scientists' complicity with PGV in withholding information that could affect public safety. According to articles on the magma strike, because of the viscous nature of the magma there supposedly was little chance of it causing an eruption, but no one knows that for sure. As geologists later noted, the drillers making the discovery "recognized immediately that this was something very anomalous."
This is not the kind of behavior that instills confidence in residents of lower Puna, especially those who remember the major blowout of PGV's well KS-8 in June 1991 that resulted in an unabated release of steam for 31 hours, and which forced the company to use the weight of several large bulldozers to stop the wellhead from being driven out of the ground. In addition, an independent analysis of the incident later revealed that the June incident was preceded by a smaller blowout four months earlier which was not revealed to the public.
While one could make an argument that PGV might need to keep such information close to its vest (not an argument I would buy, by the way), one would hope that the government and scientific community would not be bridled by any dubious proprietary concerns. However, the Trib article from last December said that scientists at both the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory and UH-Hilo were aware of the incident but didn't reveal it "because analysis was still underway."
That's more than a little disconcerting, and if true suggests scientists' complicity with PGV in withholding information that could affect public safety. According to articles on the magma strike, because of the viscous nature of the magma there supposedly was little chance of it causing an eruption, but no one knows that for sure. As geologists later noted, the drillers making the discovery "recognized immediately that this was something very anomalous."
This is not the kind of behavior that instills confidence in residents of lower Puna, especially those who remember the major blowout of PGV's well KS-8 in June 1991 that resulted in an unabated release of steam for 31 hours, and which forced the company to use the weight of several large bulldozers to stop the wellhead from being driven out of the ground. In addition, an independent analysis of the incident later revealed that the June incident was preceded by a smaller blowout four months earlier which was not revealed to the public.