Straight from the God don't like ugly department: Alaska's Mount Redoubt erupted last Sunday, a mere 26 days after Gov. Bobby Jindal made a proposed volcano monitoring system a joke and mocked it as just one more stupid extravagance in a stimulus bill he and his party philosophically opposed.
In his nationally televised Feb. 24 rebuttal to President Barack Obama, Jindal said the president's stimulus bill "includes...$140 million for something called volcano monitoring." The use of the word "something" was meant to convey that it's really nothing significant.
Then came the kicker: "Instead of monitoring volcanoes," Jindal said, "what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington, D.C."
To put fiscal conservatism in opposition with public safety isn't a smart thing to do generally because it suggests that the dollar is more important than people's lives and well-being.
But putting the two things in opposition of one another is especially ill-advised for a Louisiana governor who should be trying to persuade fiscally conservative lawmakers to help his state recover from a recent barrage of hurricanes.
But the single-most reason Gov. Jindal's volcano crack was ill-advised was his timing. He made it after Mount Redoubt had rumbled back to life. He made it after Alaskans had begun casting wary glances at the volcano in the fear that it was about to erupt.
Volcanic eruptions aren't common. Between 1881 and 1989 Mount Redoubt erupted only five times. Perhaps Jindal believed the rarity of such eruptions made it safe for him to make his dismissive remarks without fear of comeuppance.
But if he'd only checked, he'd have seen that warm gases were already escaping from the volcano and that scientists were reporting the smell of sulfur. The chance that the line would come back to haunt him was high. Imagine what our reaction would have been if on Aug. 27, 2005, we'd heard a politician decrying money that had been allocated for hurricane forecasting equipment. Probably the same reaction Americans who live near Mount Redoubt actually had when they heard Jindal on television.
On Sunday, Jan. 25, the Alaska Volcano Observatory reported that seismic activity around Mount Redoubt had sharply increased. The observatory changed the aviation color code from yellow to red, which means an eruption is imminent.
When Redoubt erupted in 1989, it almost brought down a jumbo jet with 245 people on board. KLM Royal Dutch Airlines Flight 867, en route from Amsterdam to Tokyo, plummeted almost 12,000 feet when the plane flew through the volcano's ash and all four of its engines temporarily shut down. Pilots told the Federal Aviation Administration that they hadn't seen the volcano cloud, that it didn't show up on radar. An FAA official who inspected the plane after it landed safely in Anchorage said, "It looked like it had been sandblasted."
Now, if I'm on a plane as often as Jindal is, I want somebody monitoring volcanic activity, so pilots can know what's out there, and I can keep on working hard for Louisiana.
And if I'm Jindal himself, I'm apologizing to the people of Alaska for reducing their very real fears to a punch line. I'm not letting my spokesperson send some tired e-mail about how my Feb. 24 address was meant to criticize a "package that seemed to just spend for the sake of spending."
I'm remembering that I'm the governor of Louisiana, and I've never objected to Congress spending money to keep my people safe.
Jarvis DeBerry is an editorial writer. He can be reached at 504.826.3355 or at firstname.lastname@example.org.