Montreal Weather: Feeling Strange This Week? Try to Stop Lava

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If you haven’t installed your winter tires yet, the only thing you might have trouble parking in Montreal on Friday is your car.you canDaytime highs are expected to be 2°C, with some clear skies and clouds, and nighttime lows of 3°C with some rain.

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Moderate rain is expected over the weekend, with a chance of light showers by Sunday. If that’s not enough, come join us in Hawaii. Here you can see Mauna Loa, the world’s largest active volcano, erupting again, lava slowly approaching the boulevard that connects the east and west sides of the Big Island. And again, people are asking if anything can be done to stop or divert the flow.

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prayer. bomb. wall. For decades, people have tried all of that to stop lava from flowing from Hawaii’s volcanoes onto roads, homes, and infrastructure.

“With each eruption, lava is pushing toward residential areas and highways,” says Scott Rowland, a geologist at the University of Hawaii. , Some say, “No!”

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Humans have rarely succeeded in stopping lava, and despite the world’s technological advances, stopping lava remains difficult and relies on flow forces and terrain. People also question the wisdom of interfering with nature and Pele, the Hawaiian god of volcanoes and fire.

Attempts to deflect lava have a long history in Hawaii.

In 1881, the governor of the Big Island of Hawaii proclaimed a day of prayer to stop lava from Mauna Loa heading for Hilo. Lava continued to flow.

According to the U.S. Geological Survey, Regent Princess Liliuokalani and her department head went to Hilo to consider ways to save the town. They planned to build barriers to divert the flow and place dynamite along the lava tube to drain the supply of lava.

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Princess Ruth Keerikolani approached the flow, offered brandy and a red scarf, chanted, and asked Pele to stop the flow and go home.

More than 50 years later, Thomas A. Jagger, founder of the Hawaii Volcano Observatory, asked the U.S. Army Air Service to send a plane to bomb the crater of Mauna Loa and destroy the lava passageway.

Lieutenant Colonel George S. Patton, who later became famous as a general in Europe during World War II, ordered the plane to drop twenty 600-pound (272-kg) demolition bombs. According to a National Park Service campaign report. Each bomb he was loaded with 355 pounds (161 kilograms) of TNT. The plane also dropped 20 of his small bombs, loaded only with black powder.

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Jaguar said the bombing helped “hasten the end of the stream,” but Howard Stearns, a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey who was on board the last bombing run, doubted. In his 1983 autobiography, , he wrote:

Geologists today also suspect the bombing stopped the lava flow, according to the Park Service. Instead, the flow weakened over the next few days and did not change its path.

Rowland said authorities could use bulldozers to pile up a large bank of crushed rock in front of the Daniel K. Inouye Highway. If the terrain is flat, lava will pile up behind walls. But lava can flow over it, as it did in 1960 when a similar attempt was made in the town of Kapoho.

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Fast-moving lava flows like those from Kilauea volcano in 2018 will be more difficult to stop, he said.

“It would have been really difficult to build a wall fast enough for them. It will be a legal mess,” he said.

He believes most people in Hawaii wouldn’t want to build a wall to protect the highway because it would “ruin Pele.”

Rowland said if lava crossed the highway, authorities could rebuild that section of the road like the various routes were covered in 2018.

Hawaii County Civil Defense Director Talmadge Magno said Wednesday that the county has no current plans to try to turn the tide, but has had several discussions about it.

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Hawaii Governor David Ige, who served as governor during the 2018 Kilauea eruption, told reporters his experience showed that nature and Pele cannot be overcome.

The idea that lava should be physically diverted is a Western idea rooted in the idea that humans must control everything, said Kealoha Pisiotta, a Native Hawaiian culture practitioner. She says people need to adapt to lava, not the other way around.

“We are not cut off from nature,” she said. “We are part of nature.”

Associated Press writers Jennifer Shinko Kelleher of Honolulu and Mark Thiessen of Anchorage, Alaska contributed to this report.