Curtain Fall: Second Edition, Disaster, Preparedness, Survival, Awakening (The Gatekeeper Book 1) by Kenneth Cary Page A

happened at lunch, it took all his will-power just to sit at his desk for this long.
    He wanted to run from his office and head straight home, but knew he couldn’t. It was important to let the rest of the day play out, to not react to panic and bring more attention to the issue at hand. John sighed, flipped on the TV, and returned to his email.
    After replying to a few priority messages, John glanced up to the TV and was surprised to see six news channels running simultaneously. He studied the remote, and with the push of a few buttons, he managed to drop all but one channel, the one covering the seismic activity at Yellowstone. When John saw that it was a rerun of the previous news report, he ignored it and turned back to his computer monitor.
    While working, John managed to catch a follow-up story on the Caldera, but there was nothing significant about it. It seemed national interest in the story was already drying, and it was getting less and less coverage time.
    Everything was about ratings, even with the news. It didn’t matter that America was facing the single most devastating natural disaster inits more than two-hundred year history. It made John think of his dad, who liked to say, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.”
    People just didn’t want to think about disasters of any kind, let alone a super volcano. It didn’t help that normalcy could exert itself so easily. He assumed popular opinion would be something like, “What’s there to worry about? It’s been dormant for this long, and it will probably stay dormant longer.” Complacency was the norm in the American mindset, thought John.
    People liked to believe that if something didn’t happen before, it won’t happen at all. No matter how much information was available about past Caldera eruptions, he knew people just didn’t want to believe they lived in a time when such a catastrophic natural disaster could happen.
    John’s inner monologue tracked what he believed to be the popular consensus regarding national disaster perceptions. “That’s the stuff of ancient times – biblical times. We live in a modern age. Besides, the government would let us know if we were in any real danger,” said the phantom voice of America.
    That was another thing that bothered John about the earlier news report. He didn’t think the government would say anything to the American people if the Caldera was about to erupt.
    He sat forward in his chair and tapped out a few commands on the keyboard to open the Google search-engine. In the text box, John typed the words, “Yellowstone Caldera.” He received forty-two pages of hits. With about ten hits per page, that was close to about five-hundred hits altogether. John nodded and continued, his mouse clicking away as he searched.
    The top hit was on Wikipedia. But John, uncomfortable with their established monopoly on information, only tended to use them as a source reference. He was more interested in seeing an official government site, so he scanned until he found one.
    John clicked the mouse on the United States Geologic Survey, or USGS, site to open their home-page. He found their link to the “VolcanoHazards Program” and followed it to a new page. He saw that the link offered current and supposedly up to date information on the status of the Yellowstone Caldera.
    John was surprised to see that the “Current Volcano Alert Level” was “Normal,” and that the “Current Aviation Color Code” was “Green.” He understood the relevance of the aviation code being green because nothing was being released into the air, but he was surprised they held the volcano alert level at normal.
    He saw that there were three levels of alert; green, yellow and red, but he couldn’t find anything to explain what the colors represented in terms of activity. Given the recent news, he figured the Caldera activity level should at least be “yellow.” And if “red” meant an eruption was imminent,