By Elizabeth Rusch
The true story of the volcano crisis team who fly toward the erupting mountain, and have to convince a whole town to leave before it goes.
It starts with the night the science failed. Nevado del Ruiz, Colombia, 1985. The mountain had been rumbling for months, the warnings existed, and at 11:35 at night a wall of mud came down on the sleeping town of Armero and twenty-three thousand people died. Out of that came VDAP, the Volcano Disaster Assistance Program, a small team who get on a plane when a volcano anywhere in the world starts waking up. Rusch follows them to Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991, where they read the mountain right and got tens of thousands of people out before the second-biggest eruption of the century, and to Merapi in Indonesia in 2010, which was harder. It's the real job: instruments in the mud, arguments over data, and the part nobody warns you about, which is having to walk into a village and tell people to leave their homes on the strength of a prediction. Tom Uhlman's photographs are on every spread, and the sidebars carry the actual volcanology.
Every other book in the unit tells a child how volcanoes work. This one tells them what the knowledge is for, and that changes the subject from a topic into a job. It's the title for the strongest reader in the room, dense, eighty pages, real terminology, no hand-holding, and it rewards them with something the picture books can't: genuine moral difficulty. The scientists get it right at Pinatubo and save tens of thousands of lives. At Merapi they're working with worse information and it doesn't go as well. A child who wants to know what the grown-up version of loving volcanoes looks like finds it here, and it's a photograph of somebody standing in a crater with a gas meter.