This is a lahar emergency

My workplace erupted last night. It's always a possibility when you work on a volcano, but you never REALLY expect it to happen.

And what's it like? Well, this wasn't a huge explosive fireworks display - although some pretty big rocks were thrown around (one crushing a mountaineer's leg, and so that rock now dominates most of the news reports) and 2 fairly mean lahars (volcanic mudslides) came down the mountain. One of the lahars went through our ski area and missed a snow groomer by metres. But when Bex yelled out for me to 'get up, get up, get up' at 10.30pm, the news told us the mountain had gone up, but, well, that was about it. You couldn't see, hear or feel anything, so we just went back to bed.

In the morning it was a bit more obvious - a large area on the top of the mountain is black with ash and the lahar forms a horrible black gash through the far west of our ski area. There are even white ski tracks through the ash where some keen (or crazy?) skier made his mark early in the morning. There's still snow on the mountain, so at night it looks really weird, as though someone's eaten a chunk out of the top of it.

All the staff gathered this morning to be told by our Operations Manager we were closed for the day, not to speak to the media, and to come back up in the evening for an eruption barbeque party (very appropriate). The media is everywhere, along with the usual hordes of rubberneckers. We all cheered on the news report at the party earlier this evening and we've been told tomorrow we'll be back to business as usual.

Oh, and what did I do with the extra day off? Well, myself and 10 pals decided we wanted a different perspective on our newly erupted home, and figured the appropriate response was to strap ourselves to a stranger and throw ourselves out of a plane at 15,000ft. Skydiving. Wicked!