No Yellowstone Evacuation Warning Issued
by U.S. Geological Survey
January 7, 2009
The USGS is not affiliated with a web site that recommends evacuation of Yellowstone National Park and bears the USGS logo. The USGS is not recommending the evacuation of the Park.
Officials at the USGS are working through the appropriate legal channels to have both the warning and logo removed from the web site.
Earlier today, the USGS issued a press release announcing that the swarm of earthquakes has stopped for now and may have ceased entirely.
"Changes in the alert level are announced through the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory website", reports YVO Scientist-in-Charge, Dr. Jake Lowenstern. "If an evacuation order were necessary, it would be handled through Yellowstone National Park and neighboring communities."
YVO is a cooperative project of USGS, the University of Utah, and Yellowstone National Park. Under the Stafford Act, the USGS has the Federal responsibility to issue warnings of potential volcanic disasters.
For a podcast interview with USGS scientists on the recent earthquakes at Yellowstone National Park, listen to Episode 80 of CoreCast at http://www.usgs.gov/corecast.
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Editor’s Note: The above media release appears to have been issued in response to a text and video posting on January 1st by a man, claiming to be a geologist, advising of a potential state of emergency due to the increase in earthquake activity in Yellowstone National Park and recommending a 200-mile radius evacuation around the Yellowstone volcano caldera. The alert postings have been bouncing all over blogs and discussion boards on the internet since it came out. For those who want to dig deeper on this and figure out who is sounding this warning, a quick Google search on "Yellowstone evacuation warning" will yield the name and follow the trail from there to the relevant pages that discuss the merits of this alarm.
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