Don's Tuesday Column

THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   9/29/2015

    Quake Lake; comments on issues

Here’s a bit more of the history of “Quake Lake, Montana” (searchable by title or as “Quake Lake” in Wikipedia). It’s worth your time to read about, as I said last week, “the aftermath of one of the greatest natural disasters we had never heard of. In 1959, under a full August moon, a 7.5 magnitude earthquake shook the whole Yellowstone/Hebgen Lake area (located several miles from West Yellowstone). The ground under the lake literally tilted, raising the south and east shores up 12 to 20 feet—leaving a visible bluff, including the shore in front of our site. Only after driving the north shore of Hebgen Lake, on Hwy 287, and reading the numerous informational signs did we put our bluff together with the disastrous earthquake.

While the shores on our end, and the Madison Arm which was the primary source of the reservoir, lifted 20+ feet, the northern shore, including lodges and homes, dropped by 15 to 20 feet. If you fill a shallow pan with water and raise one side ever so slightly, you will see a small-scale effect of such a geological phenomenon.

The water sloshed toward the dam at the northwest end, topped over the dam and washed away several cabins of a beachfront lodge (partly submerged still). The owner/manager of the lodge ran in desperation past her false teeth on a counter to make a leap across the widening gap to the rising hillside. Her Malamute dog likewise found the bank and led the woman, in her nightgown, around crevices and cracks caused by the quake. In all, 28 people died, mostly below the dam in campgrounds and cabins, some in their sleep as boulders crushed them.

One heartbreaking story recounted a woman with her 3 children who watched dad cling to a tree against the 100+mile-an-hour winds created by the downstream landslide. He, as well as 2 of the children, perished in front of the surviving mom and child. 250 campers and cabin residents gathered below the dam on a hilltop while nurses who’d been camping triaged and treated the injured. The full moon and car headlights, instrumental in their immediate predicament, showed that they were cut off; the authorities thought the dam had failed until one of the camper’s notes reached them. Air Force Helicopters dropped smokejumpers for rescue.

Earthquake Lake resulted from a massive landslide several miles downstream, which rushed downhill over 100 miles per hour leaving an earthen dam, behind which a lake built up to a depth of 190 feet. To this day, house-sized boulders balance, long end up, where they came to rest over a hundred feet above the earth and rock dam.

Large earth-moving equipment was quickly organized and brought to the slide and dam to create a spillway allowing the rising waters from the Madison River to dissipate and gradually carry away enough of the debris to remove the threat of structural failure and downstream devastation. We then took in the multimedia informational displays in the visitor center. Having been subjected to intensifying winds throughout the day, we found 50+ mile-an-hour gusts pushing our car doors shut, and forcing us to lean hard to cross the lot. It contributed to the eerie sense of natural vulnerability those survivors must have felt.

I found some news gems while wading through archived stories at Instapundit.com (pjmedia.com/instapundit). One item, sourced to pjmedia.com/tattler, by Debra Heine on July 7, was titled, “New Docs Reveal DOJ, IRS, and FBI Colluding to Prosecute Obama Opponents.” Look up the title or go to DonPolson.blogspot.com, where it posted last Thursday, the 24^th. Obama’s Department of Justice “wanted IRS employees who were going to testify to Congress to turn over documents to the DOJ before giving them to Congress.

“Records also detail how the Obama IRS gave the FBI 21 computer disks containing 1.25 million pages of confidential IRS returns from 113,000 nonprofit social 501(c)(4) welfare groups (nearly every one in the United States) as part of its prosecution effort.” This is such a legal, political and constitutional abomination that, until someone is made to pay with fines and jail, Americans of all ideological leanings are not safe from state-sponsored persecution.

Emperor Obama, never passing up a chance to flout the law and the constitutional separation of powers, grabbed 20 million acres of Alaska. He proclaimed yet another unilaterally-designated wilderness that virtually no one will ever recreate in, but will assure the environmental wackos that he’s on the side of locking up America’s natural resources and against letting America benefit from our own God-given energy reserves.

Reported at Thehill.com on July 7, “GOP lawmaker: Obama saying ‘up yours’ to Congress,” Alaska Republican Don Young condemned Obama’s executive order designating nearly all 20 million acres in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as wilderness to prevent oil and gas drilling, saying “We have a president that says ‘up yours’ to the Congress.”

I find in the entirety of Ben Carson’s comments, on the incompatibility of Islam’s adherents and the Constitution’s oath for higher office, that he was right in every respect—and he did not negate the Article VI “no religious test” rule. “Footnote on Carson and Islam—CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) helps prove Ben Carson’s Point” posted under the “Islam” tab on Wednesday, Sept. 23 at DonPolson.blogspot.com. Read it before criticizing me.

Congrats to the Tehama County Tea Party Patriots on their 6^th anniversary. Bring a salad or desert to complement pizza provided by the Tea Party Patriots tonight at the Westside Grange.

The results of the informal dollar-a-vote Republican primary poll: Bush=4, Carson=31, Christie=3, Cruz=11, Fiorina=17, Huckabee=2, Paul=3, Rubio=10, Trump=59. 21 voted to send Hillary to jail.