April 5, 2009

Volcanoes are good for skiing. Today I skied at Alyeska. The temperatures were approaching spring skiing temperatures, but were just a little cold. The mountain was still a brick when I arrived in the early afternoon. After hunting around for that wonderful spring slushiness, I discovered that the ash covered snow absorbed more of the wonderful sunshine and softened up quicker. I aimed for a steep stretch of South Face that was looking downright black. I dropped off the lip and landed on smooth creamy snow, albeit a bit off color. No one else had hit this face yet, but I knew I was on to something. Probably on to a volcanic ash base grind, but I don’t care about my skis that much.

Volcanoes are bad for work. While I don’t have any direct responsibility for the Drift River Terminal, I am quite familiar with it from work I did at the state and some assistance I have provided to our midstream coworkers since arriving at Chevron. Chevron breaks its businesses down by function. Oil production is considered the upstream function. That is where I work. Refining is considered downstream. Movements from upstream to downstream, like pipelines and terminals, are sort of midstream.

The Drift River Terminal receives oil from our platforms and onshore processing facilities via pipeline. Given the remote location on the west side of Cook Inlet, the designers of the system in the 1960’s looked for a location that was safe from ice and the brutal tidal currents while providing adequate water for large boats to dock and load. The fact that they chose to put the terminal at the outlet of a river with its origins in a glacier set high on an active volcano might seem in hindsight to be foolishness. Perhaps they didn’t know what happened when a volcano spews hot rocks into a glacier. Perhaps they figured the volcanic activity would play out in geologic time, a time scale much longer than any realistic oil field would be expected to continue producing. So here we are 40 years later with massive flash floods heading down the Drift River valley toward our only way of transporting oil from the platforms to the Tesoro refinery across the inlet.

The terminal was upgraded, more like fortified, after the last eruption of Redoubt in the 1980’s. The concrete and earth barriers are massive and have withstood the three significant lahars, the term used for the mud, water, and debris flows caused by the volcano. The first two succeeded in blocking the Drift River outlet into Cook Inlet, forcing the normal water flow to route through a slough on the other side of the terminal. In short, the terminal used to be on the south side of the river and now sits on the north side. Of course Alaskan rivers often change course. Even my little Campbell Creek has changed in the short time we have lived here.

Since the volcano erupted, the terminal has been shut down, unable to accept oil from the pipeline and unable to load boats. The question has come up of what to do with the oil in the tanks with many people thinking the best course of action would be to get it out of the way of the volcano. The secondary question has come up about what to do about the oil platforms upstream. Two have already shut down and the tanks upstream have been filling up. The threat of having to shut down all oil production in Cook Inlet is looming. While this is likely to be just a small blip in time given the already 40 plus year history of operations, the threat is twofold. First, the loss of revenue for both a significant employer and for the state couldn’t come at a worse time in economic terms. Second, and probably more concerning to all involved, is that when you shut in an oil well, you might not ever return to the same levels of production. These potentially significant local economic impacts, which would amount to only a minor blip for a company like Chevron, of course pale in comparison to the unlikely scenario of a major volcanic event causing a loss of containment of millions of gallons of oil.

After a week of careful consideration, the state, the coast guard, and the pipeline company came up with a plan to load a boat. While loading, the plan provided for moving some oil down the pipeline to the terminal to allow continued operation of the platforms. Unfortunately, yesterday morning as the boat moved toward the terminal to dock, the volcano erupted again after almost a week of relative silence. The tanker was sent away and the planning efforts were returned to nearly square one. The clock keeps ticking. If things really shut down, I could find myself with some time off. It is not an uncertainty that causes me stress. I wouldn’t be financially hurt by time off. The local economy, though, could be hurt. It is a strange situation to see the potential effects of nature on man’s orderly world. The likeliest result is that we will move some oil and that the volcano will settle down soon, but no one really knows for sure.

The weather pattern finally changed. This latest eruption dumped significant ash on Homer, but the winds kept Anchorage in the clear. While we have had a beautiful sunny weekend, a heavy haze has settled into Cook Inlet, blocking any real view of the volcano. Most of the haze is the fault of the volcano. Yesterday morning I could make out the volcano with a steam plume rising thousands of feet into the air above it, but even with my best lens and my best software manipulation, the photographic image is a vague gray representation of the event. It will take a significant change in the weather to change my view.

Kris has continued to suffer from back pain. She informed me that she would not be skiing this weekend. Undeterred, I took advantage of the lack of weekday operations at Arctic Valley and their reports of several inches of fresh snow. I headed out early because I wanted to see if the visibility was good enough to see the volcano as I climbed the 2600’ up the road to the ski area. I arrived before the lifts opened, which cost me an additional $38 in tee-shirts with the Arctic Valley logo, one short sleeve and one long sleeve. It is for a good cause and I don’t mind wearing some advertising for this odd little ski area.

As I waited for the lifts to open, my friends Sean and Jen showed up. I was thrilled to have some company. The ski conditions were initially typical Arctic Valley windblown crust. The crust was tolerable, almost like skiing powder with an occasional reminder that you weren’t going to tighten up those turns. Jen was suffering a bit from the conditions and her recent entry into the sport(?) of roller derby, so she dropped out mid morning. Sean and I made lap after lap on the crusty stuff, looking for the nicest snow and the biggest jumps that two old men would dare to attempt. When they announced that they would be opening the other chair lift in the afternoon, I decided to stick around for awhile and we went in a grabbed some lunch.

The first run on the other chairlift put us in a gully full of nice soft snow, although it was on top of an older crusty layer that included the ash fall. We used our knowledge of the area to sneak up through a rock field and kept traversing across the wind scoured face until we could feel the snow conditions change underfoot. We dropped and found ourselves on quite tolerable powdery snow that got a little weird down lower. We were able to inspect our tracks on the way back up the lift and we both had some trouble keeping the turns tight and rhythmic in the weird sections.

By our second run, the gully was completely skied up so we decided to take the upper traverse through the rocks to see what we could find. We worked our way all the way around and dropped into a gully that quickly turned to deep, nice, powder. As we exited the gully, we found a wide face covered in untracked powder. Few others were following the traverse that far. We skied the run four times before calling it a day due to the work involved in traversing all the way over there. I had told Kris I expected to just ski a short time and ended up skiing all day long.

Today I went to Alyeska by myself. I enjoy skiing by myself occasionally. While the snow was a bit firm and chunky to start, the sun really began baking it to spring conditions as the day wore on. I again skied much longer than I had anticipated, but I was enjoying the long sliding slushy turns on the steeps and the wicked grippy linked u-turns that I was laying down on the groomed runs.