RadioFreeLiberal.com

I'm still in awe of Mother Pele showing everyone who's boss. It's a tragedy that people are displaced, livelihoods are disrupted, and valued resources are gone. It's also a reminder that we really do live on a planet. People forget that.

This guy made a video, or more accurately an audio, of what it really sounds like. They've been saying all along that it's like standing near a jet airport runway with constant takeoffs, but the cell phone cameras haven't really picked up any bottom. They're not optimized for that. They're phones, not field recording devices.

This one will definitely test your subwoofers. Don't crank it unless you have awfully good equipment. You have been warned.



It's flat all the way down to ~4 Hz. The whole bottom 2 octaves don't get reproduced. You hear what sounds like a freight train, but were it all turned back into acoustic energy, it would sound like the rumble of doom. You'd need to stand on a shaker table to do it justice.

And people in the area live with this 24/7.

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We used to hang our traitors. Now we elect them to lead us.

Yeah!

What you need for a mic is what I used to put along with a mic on a base drum when I was doing sound. A seismic jug, a thing used by geophysical crews looking for oil underground. I had some of them, and I had 16 channels, I would hook one up and tape it to the rim of the drum as well as a mic. Band members like what it picked up. 2hz to about 260hz was their response range.

It would also pick up and amplify the lead singer's foot work when he danced.


It's volcano time here. We're having our first fire of the fire season. We got a pre-evacuation call yesterday. We shouldn't have gotten it the fire was about four or five miles away from my house, not heading our way, nor will it be heading our way.

It started a half mile from some rental property we own but it's even moving away from it.


I got my mowing done. I mowed way beyond the required distance. Mowed all of the 5 acre place. About 7 acres of the 20 acre place. i should be safe this year.

Yeah, miking the bass drum. Getting a good pressure wave to make rock sound like rock. Always a challenge. I found miking drum sets to be a black art in general.

Volcanoes are intense.

Here's one from this morning of a high speed lava flow. This is going on right now. It has a lot of "immediacy" aka shitty tech work, but you can really see how fast this damn lava is going. This is more of a lava rapid than a lava river. Don't try to raft it though..............



At the very end of the video, it tilts down a bit and you see where the road ends. It didn't end there 3 weeks ago, but it does now. It's a highway to hell.

This lava goes for miles and finally enters the sea where Vacationland used to be. It's making a new black sand beach, with a nice shallow bottom for surfing. There might be an embryonic point break (think Sunset Beach on Oahu north shore), but then again the thing might collapse first.

Scott's videos are even more "immediate" as he tries to do commercial grade footage without the equipment for same. I think the one today is cell phone and GoPro, on a monopod. It gets really good about 4 minutes in. Keep in mind that this was a street a month ago. It had houses and cars and dogs (lots of dogs) and all that. Now it has a volcano, with a cone and lava and wild pigs that get very mean if you piss them off. You will want to leave Pele a bouquet of flowers after this one.

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We used to hang our traitors. Now we elect them to lead us.

In some of these videos you might notice that it's raining even more than usual in that part of the Big Island. For a while it was raining pretty much all the time.

I was wondering if any of this was volcanic rain. Turns out, that's a yes. Most of it is, in fact. I was wondering if this would be acid rain, giving what happens to SO2 and H2S when it combines with atmospheric moisture. Turns out, that's also a yes. The vegetation on that whole part of the island is brown and not in good shape, and it's from the gas and the acid rain.

Puts L.A.'s traffic and constant construction back into perspective.

_________________
We used to hang our traitors. Now we elect them to lead us.

Scott has become reluctant to go past the barricades after a talking-to from the cops. I think they've beefed up security, probably to prevent looting. Problem is that a lot of areas that are perfectly safe to enter are still in the no-go zone and off limits to everybody. People can't go back to places to get their stuff and leave again. These places are in no immediate danger from the volcanoes, or the gas, or the lava, or the falling rocks, or the pieces of glass that ruin your lungs, or the acid rain, or anything. The other side of the street is the same, but it's OK to live on it, let alone enter.

Anyway, he decided a misdemeanor conviction wasn't worth whatever he was getting from home owners to check on their places. I suppose tour operators have to keep their records pretty spotless.

No more walking right up to an active volcano and watching the cone get bigger every day.

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We used to hang our traitors. Now we elect them to lead us.

I'm really tempted to cut together a grabby 24 minute video of this stuff. Thing is that it would take a lot of time to get it just right, and then I couldn't do anything commercial with it. I'd probably just send it to Scott to screen around. Of course since he owns the footage, he could charge for it, if he wanted to make up some income.

_________________
We used to hang our traitors. Now we elect them to lead us.

Current big thing on the Big Island is volcanic thunderstorms. The trade winds died town, allowing vertical updrafts from the volcano, and the pyrocumulus sometimes actually made lightning. The only thing we haven't seen yet is volcanic hail.

Status quo for the eruption. The lava comes up at what used to be someone's back yard off Leilani St., and runs 8 miles to the ocean where it's still making the Big Island bigger. It hisses and rumbles, and sometimes you need a gas mask. The crater at the summit of Kiluea continues to subside at a remarkable rate, and there's no clue when they can re-open Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.

_________________
We used to hang our traitors. Now we elect them to lead us.

The sound from the volcano is said to be awe inspiring, unless of course you're near it and it makes your house shake all night. Recordings don't do it justice. It's said to be somewhere between heavy jets taking off and artillery being fired.

_________________
We used to hang our traitors. Now we elect them to lead us.

The entire Leilani Estates has been declared uninhabitable, despite about 1/3 of it being on relatively high ground and reading zero for gases regardless of the wind direction. This was done by sending property owners a very bogus looking (but authentic) letter from "civil defense." Everyone's lawyering up.

One can say, of course, that it's never wise to build directly above a known lava pipe, but apparently it was cheap. I'll bet it was.

Frankly, the odds are 100% that L.A. will have a catastrophic earthquake which will make Katrina look like a gol darn weenie roast, but people spend outrageous amounts of money to live there. By comparison, Leilani Estates was a bet worth taking. Still, they lost.

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We used to hang our traitors. Now we elect them to lead us.

Better to condemn it now and move them out of there than to do it piece meal later. Make a park of the place if the volcano calms down for a while. If the volcano doesn't calm down then this might have been a sound decision on an immediate basis.

I think this current eruption could go on for years, perhaps decades. Then it might snooze for two hundred years.

In fact the USGS consensus seems to be that Kiluea has completely shifted its lava pathways, and the eruption could last several years. Any sane government would pay to relocate Leilani Estates residents through eminent domain and FEMA aid, then add the area to Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. This would also encourage tourists to come back and watch Pele rumble.

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We used to hang our traitors. Now we elect them to lead us.

While the USGS was predicting a years-long eruption, the volcano stopped. It stopped sinking at the summit, and the lava stopped coming out Fissure 8. People were really happy about that.

Two weeks later, they had a hurricane. That part of HI had the most rain. 5 feet in places.

_________________
We used to hang our traitors. Now we elect them to lead us.

Considering how long it's been spewing lava it sounds like it ran out of material to spew. Time will tell.

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When you vote Left you vote right.

Actually 4.5 feet of rain in places. 5 feet is Harvey last year. I stand corrected.

There's something to the idea that the lava lake at the Kiluea summit drained and ran out. There's probably an endless supply of lava coming up under the volcano somewhere, but apparently this wasn't tapped into it. Time will tell.

Kiluea does this. It's a shield volcano, and there's a huge area where eruptions can just start up for a while. Every few years, some place has a dramatic drop in property values.

_________________
We used to hang our traitors. Now we elect them to lead us.

Volcano remains idle. They took down the barricades in Leilani Estates, and opened most of Volcano National Park back up for tourists. People are walking around on fissure 8 taking pictures. Some of the surviving houses have everything metal in them rusted completely out. Corrosive gases, I suppose.

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We used to hang our traitors. Now we elect them to lead us.