AVO website crashes as Redoubt heats up

The Alaska Volcano Observatory reports that as news agencies on the East Coast and around the lower 48 connected viewers to their website, their website crashed early Friday morning. Mt. Redoubt is being watched 24 hours a day. As of Friday afternoon, there were no signs of ash emission, but there is significant steaming from a new melt depression at the mouth of the summit crater, near the vent of the 1989 eruption.

News reports of Mount Redoubt’s possible eruption were featured on Yahoo, Google, CNN and other websites, all of which included the link to the Alaska Volcano Observatory website. The agency was expecting internet traffic, since they experienced the same thing with St. Augustine several years ago. The scientists had a low bandwidth version in place for the extra traffic, but the system still crashed.

Basic information is now available on the simplified website, but it doesn’t have the fancy maps, wind trajectories and cameras it had previously. Technicians are working on distributing the higher bandwidth to other servers.