Arriving back to the house late I realize something is under the lanai. A loud rustling of leaves and a jingle betrays something bigger than one of the neighborhood stray cats.
Neighborhood fireworks signal the arrival of 2015I pull the flashlight from my pocket to start looking about when a dog emerges. A very friendly shepherd mix appears in the flashlight beam. Deb reminds me that this is the Fourth of July, and that this dog may be panicked by the fireworks that are still crackling through the neighborhood.
Fortunately this dog has good tags, one tag includes an address just a few blocks away. Deb gets me a leash while I hold the collar, scratch between the ears, and make friends.
A nice evening for a stroll. This stray dog is very well behaved, walking alongside me up the street. A few fireworks are still going off and I worry about the dog bolting again. My guess is that some human accompaniment is all that was needed.
As I arrive in the cul-de-sac indicated on Google maps I see five houses, which one? I did not need to pull out the flashlight to check the addresses, the dog tugs me straight for one particular front door. Sure enough, the same address that is on the tag.
The last month has been a bit… exciting… here on the island. With lava flows and explosive eruptions spawned by our neighborhood volcano.
Yet another eruption status message arrives on my phone.Along with the ongoing eruption in the lower east rift zone, there are the events at the summit caldera of Kilauea. The withdrawal of magma from the summit storage chamber has resulted in the ongoing collapse of the Haelmaʻumaʻu crater area. Magnitude five point something earthquakes are now a daily occurrence as this collapse continues.
The result? Over the last month we have been bombarded by far too many messages on eruption conditions, vog conditions, earthquakes, and non-tsunami alerts. It is wearing a little thin. And frankly I am ignoring much of it, when I probably should not.
The Waikoloa Village Association has been looking for ways to arrange activities for the community lately. The Waikoloa Stables are a good facility for community events, a fair amount of parking, bathrooms, and a large lawn to accommodate a crowd.
Our star party last fall was successful enough. While the crowd for the star party was good, it was nowhere near the crowd attending the recent night markets.
Strolling through the vendors at the Waikoloa Night MarketThis last Friday was the second of the night market events, and it was simply jammed. No surprise, all of the area food vendors were there. Good food plus more than a few booths of arts, crafts, plenty to come for.
I came in for dinner on the way home from work. Deb had let me know she would be in Kona for a while and I was on my own.
This phone call had a number I knew all too well, even without the caller ID showing the name… K1 Remote Operations. A this time of night it would be a problem, a serious problem. This particular problem would have me on the road back to the summit an hour later.
Looking towards the Keck 2 dome on a moonlit night
Midnight runs to the summit are not common, but they do occur in my life. Usually we can work remotely, the night attendant serving as our remote eyes and hands. Just press the right button, flip the correct switch, done. Not this time. We tried, for over an hour we tried.
I really did not want to head back up. I had just gotten down a few hours ago, having spent the day on the summit working on the usual long list of things that need to get done. Days on the summit, in the thin air of nearly 14,000ft elevation are physically draining.
The irony of this malfunction is that I had seen it before. The dome had tripped out inexplicably on previous occasions. The problem would occur then disappear. Once it vanished you could not troubleshoot it. Unlike most of our other systems there are no logs from the shutter drive, nothing records what was going wrong.
The Friday before this it had happened to me again. But this time was different, I had a maintenance computer attached to the PLC serial port. This time I saw the error, something in the code labeled speed mismatch. No idea what this was, or how it worked. Again the error disappeared, and I could not troubleshoot further as the weather was getting worse. No opening the shutters again.
I needed a chance to figure out what this fault was… Later that day I read through the code, figured out this feature was a speed check to insure that both sides of the shutter are driven evenly. A check to compare the right and left sides of the shutter and to fault if the difference is too large. Two words of memory were compared, if the difference was too large it faulted the shutter drive.
