People can be so nice and so inventive in a crisis - I think this is what most recall about the Blitz

Volcanic ash from a massive plume drifting over Europe may be headed all the way to Newfoundland and that has caused many flights out of St. John's to be cancelled for Monday morning.

That means musicians and other revellers in St. John's for the Juno Awards over the weekend could have a difficult time leaving the Rock after a night of celebrating Canadian music.

An erupting volcano in Iceland has been pumping a massive cloud of ash into the sky for days, forcing the closure of airspace over much of Europe.

Transport Canada and Nav Canada have advised St. John's International Airport that there's a chance the ash spewing from the Eyjafjallajokull volcano will reach St. John's airspace Monday morning, said a spokeswoman for the airport.

Oh Oh - I am off to St Louis today - when will I get home?

In a time of international crisis, the Internet failed almost utterly. At least in my limited experience.

Here are the things that I could not do over the Internet when, just as we were about to go through passport control for our trip to New York, the Barcelona Airport closed:

We could not find information about the closing posted on the Web when we needed it at the airport.

Email notifications from American Airlines about the flight delay and then cancellation came about an hour after the news was spread in the airport.

It was not possible rebook a flight using the American Airlines web site. That required a two-hour phone call to AA.

The Spanish train service’s site would not take orders for tickets. It contained no information about how to proceed, or about the multi-hour wait-times at the Barcelona station where tickets are sold.

There was no updated information about ticket availability for various trains. Nor was that information accessible at the train station except by waiting on a three hour line.

There was no obvious way to get information about the availability of rental cars, buses, cabs, or people willing to drive you to Madrid in their own car.

As far as I can tell, only three online services actually helped the stranded traveler: Twitter (see the #ashtag hashtag), Skype, and good old email.

This was not the Internet’s fault. It was moving bits faster than Icelandic volcanoes move ash. But the services built on the Net were tested by a non-lethal international crisis and crapped out. Oh, I’m sure there are cool and useful sites ‘n’ services, but I’m a fairly sophisticated Net user, and I didn’t find them, and what I did find seems not to have been built to work during times of crisis.

Makes you wonder about the implications for national security…

[THE NEXT DAY:] Given the level of Twitter activity, I’d probably upgrade the Internet to 0.2. Maybe even a tenth higher. It’s great to have a tool that’s being used bottom up for ad hoc (jeez, there’s a word I haven’t used in a while … it got eaten by “bottom up” and “grassroots”) group-forming and community support. Check the comments for some hashtags to follow.

But imagine an incident far more disruptive and deadly when we really needed to move masses of people quickly. The major transportation and travel institutions that would do the mass movement of people seem to be woefully unprepared and unable to scale up quickly. Twitter would help, but not being able to find out which buses and trains are running, etc., would magnify the disaster. We shouldn’t have to rely on Twitter for the sort of information that could come directly and immediately from the sources themselves. Not to mention that we need to be able to communicate with those sources directly so we can book travel. Twitter’s great, but having Twitter access is not the same thing as being prepared at a national level for crises.

My sense is that the key websites are all built on 1.0 ideas - they have no capacity to be interactive or to allow scaling in an emergency.

All the airlines and train sites failed. As did most of the media. Now Channel 4 has out up the #ashtag stream which is the best source for news.

When Twitter is the only source that works - what does that say about your web site?

HELSINKI - Finnish fighter jets which flew through the volcanic dust covering much of Europe suffered damage and the air force warned Friday the cloud could have a significant impact on planes.

The air force F-18 Hornet jets were on training flights in northern Finland on Thursday morning, when airspace was still open, and the engines were later found to contain fine, volcanic ash dust.

"Based on the pictures, it was discovered that even short flights in ash dust may cause significant damage to an airplane's engine," the Finnish Defence Forces said in a statement.

Images taken inside one Hornet engine with a fibroscope camera indicated that the heat of the engine - around 1,000 degrees Celcius - had melted the ash inside the engine, blocking ventilation channels. "Blockages of ventilation channels caused by melting ash lead engine components to overheat and material to weaken," it said, adding this could fracture rotating engine parts.

In the worst case, the weakening of component materials could cause "parts to detach and the engine to be destroyed," it said.

The Hornets exposed to the dust from the eruption of a volcano in Iceland would be checked thoroughly, with "at least some" of the engines detached and sent for further studies and repair.

A growing question is "Are we over reacting - this suggests not. What would you do? Would you fly?

HT Ton Z

Consumers were warned that shops could start running low on supplies of fresh vegetables and fruit, and analysts said economic costs could spiral. Howard Archer, chief European economist at IHS Global Insight, said "the longer that the problem does persist, the more serious will be the economic repercussions". British and Irish scheduled airlines are losing up to £28m a day, with the total bill to European carriers hitting $200m, according to the International Air Transport Association.

One of the UK's biggest fresh fruit importers said business had ground to a halt. Anthony Pile, chairman of Blue Skies, said the company was losing £100,000 a day.

More than three-quarters of flights were lost yesterday across Europe, with barely 5,000 taking off or landing, the Eurocontrol air traffic agency said. This compares with 22,000 on a typical Saturday. Among the flights that did make it were three British Airways planes from New York which scraped into Glasgow and Prestwick airports in Scotland.

Around Europe, 73 transatlantic flights landed yesterday morning, less than a third of the 300 that would normally arrive. The situation deteriorated from Friday, when 10,400 flights out made it out of the normal 28,000.

Met Office forecasters said it would take a prolonged change of wind direction for the situation to improve. "The UK and much of Europe is under the influence of high pressure, which means winds are relatively light and the dispersal of cloud is slow. We don't expect a great deal of change over the next few days," Mr Leith said.

Several airlines are challenging the ban - KLM, Air France and Lufthansa are running tests - is the ban too restrictive?

With airports closed until Monday, the pressure is building for a work around.

Iceland volcano eruption causes more air travel headaches but trains move the stranded travelers in Europe in another example of how a viable passenger rail service can provide transportation in a natural disaster.

The Eurostar trains quickly sold out when the volcano closed European airspace this week, but the secondary trains were able to help keep passengers moving towards their destinations.

The extensive network of intercity trains in Europe were able to step up and help when airlines were grounded. Do we have this capability in most of the United States? No, unfortunately most of the US is not covered by adequate train transportation to be helpful.

The exceptions in the Northeast Corridor (NEC) and California not withstanding many locations with Amtrak service only see one train in each direction a day. This of course, would not be enough to replace the thousands of daily short and mid-distance flights.

After 9/11/01, Amtrak was able to help move stranded passengers, but to do this it has to have trains scheduled and available.

Now is the time to expand AMTRAK so that it can help when it is needed in a Natural or other disaster.

We have all our eggs in the flight bucket - it would also be great to invest in rail to help the economy too

Now what the picture is concerned about is that generally when Eyjaflallajokull erupts so does Kalta, which is right next door. But Katla is a larger system and the eruption is generally much more severe.

Unfortunately what has also to be considered is that there are a whole line of craters, not shown on this map, between Katla and Vatnajokull, which are also a worry. Laki, an even greater threat than Katla, lies along this line.

Iceland's Laki volcano erupted in 1783, freeing gases that turned into smog. The smog floated across the Jet Stream, changing weather patterns. Many died from gas poisoning in the British Isles. Crop production fell in western Europe. Famine spread. . . . . . .

The winter of 1784 was also one of the longest and coldest on record in North America. New England reported a record stretch of below-zero temperatures and New Jersey reported record snow accumulation. The Mississippi River also reportedly froze in New Orleans.

It is at the orange flag in this picture.

(Google Earth)
There is a line of eruption calderas from Katla up to Laki, which is up around Skaftareldar.

The 3.5 earthquake I wrote about on Bit Tooth Energy lies beyond Laki on the line from Eyjaflallajokull, and was centered further north in the Vatnajokull. Some have blamed the weather created by the eight-month eruption of Laki as a possible contributory cause to the French Revolution.

An eruption of that length, ejecting as much material as it may into the atmosphere, would have consequences that go beyond just the ability to survive the noxious gaseous clouds.

At the moment the threat is to air travel and parts of life connected to that - but there is a major volcanic system involved here. If Laki goes - it's a new world for Europe.

My point is not to be a doomsayer - but to make this point - our global economy ias based on the assumptions of our just in time system working perfectly - it can't and will not. Time to plan for more local resiliency and for more diversity.