Orting students head for hills in lahar drill

The Associated Press

ORTING — This was no mere fire drill.

When Ptarmigan Ridge Intermediate School students practiced moving to a safe location on Friday, they were pretending to evade the kind of massive mudflow that could come roaring down from Mount Rainier with only 30 to 50 minutes’ notice.

The 460 fourth- and fifth-graders made it to high ground in about 45 minutes.

"It was a leisurely pace," said principal Rex Kerbs. "We could shave five to 10 minutes off the time by quickening the pace. And we could run if necessary."

In the nearby Sumner School District, 71 elementary school students from different schools also walked to safe areas Friday in a drill. They all arrived within 60 minutes — the time they are estimated to have to escape a large flow from the flanks of 14,411-foot Rainier, an active volcano.

"I feel really secure now," said Jackie Tanner, principal of Maple Lawn Elementary School. "We can get the kids out of here and to safety."

Scientists say that in the worst case, a 30-foot high mudflow, or lahar, with the consistency of wet concrete could rumble through Orting at 50 mph if volcanic activity suddenly melted snow and ice on Rainier.

It would be 5 or 10 feet high by the time it reached Sumner.

Administrators at schools that could be in harm’s way want to make sure that smaller children can walk to safety. In the event of a large lahar, officials presume that buses would be trapped in traffic jams and could not be used for evacuations.

More than 1,200 students in the Orting School District’s high school, middle school and primary school drilled Friday. The 450 Ptarmigan students left their school with 50 adults about two minutes after receiving a warning by pager at 10:02 a.m., Kerbs said.

They walked more than two miles to safety, to the Orting Soldiers Home at the base of a hill. Ten disabled students rode in vehicles.

The first walking students reached the area at 10:36 a.m., the last at 10:47 a.m. In a real emergency, the students would climb at least 50 feet up the hill to escape the lahar.

Orting is the town most vulnerable to lahar damage from Mount Rainier, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

The town was on alert in August, after melting glacier water stripped debris from a flank of the volcano, triggering an alarm and sending millions of pounds of rock and mud down Van Trump Creek in Mount Rainier National Park.

Orting was not threatened by the series of slides, which were classed as debris flows, smaller than a lahar. But they reminded residents of the potential dangers of living so near an active volcano.

The last major Mount Rainier lahar, recorded around 500 years ago, occurred when part of the mountain’s west flank collapsed. The resulting flow shot northward through the Puyallup River valley, toppling and burying trees 10 feet in diameter and spilling into Puget Sound at what is now Tacoma.

Orting’s town site would have been fully covered in that lahar, officials at the state Emergency Management Center say.

A series of sensors in river valleys around the mountain will warn of any approaching lahar.

State and local officials have been working to educate the public this year about the dangers of lahars, and lahar evacuation route signs have been posted in the Carbon and Puyallup river valleys. Orting is between the two rivers.

Copyright ©2001 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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