The Mount Pinatubo story

Flipping through the Bangkok Post this morning we found two items that gave us a terrific idea for a quick lesson. First there is the page 6 story and picture about the work on draining water from the lake at the top of the volcano, Mount Pinatubo in The Philippines. It’s an interesting story in itself.

Then we found the colour picture on the back page of the front section. Let’s look again at the story, we thought and see if we can make an interesting lesson.

We've done the work for you this week as a suggestion. Every day there are possibilities like this, for teachers who are alert to them.

FILLED TO THE BRIM
Workers began to drain water from the crater lake of Mount Pinatubo volcano in the Philippines yesterday. Villagers fear the lake could overflow, collapse the crater, and flood the region, 80km northeast of Manila. Engineers dug a small canal to drain the lake from the crater arm shown in the lower right of the photo. — AP

Volcano drained to avert deluge

Precautionary work rules out flash floods

Botolan, Philippines, AP

A stream of muddy water trickled out of Mount Pinatubo on Thursday as workers finished a narrow canal to drain a rising crater lake and avert flash floods. Thousands of nearby residents were evacuated from their homes as a precaution.

But volcanologists said the flow was too slow and engineers told workers to dig a steeper slope with jets of water, picks and shovel.

The canal is meant to drain about 25 percent of the lake's 7 trillion cubic feet of water into the nearby Bucao River and prevent rising water pressure from collapsing volcano walls.

A crew of 25 workers — including U.S. Geological Survey volcanologist Chris Newhall — rushed Thursday to steepen the incline of the canal that leads to the lake atop the 4,740-foot volcano. The army also said it will send at least 15 soldiers to help the crew.

"Instead of having a good slope so that water can flow out vigorously, it was so gentle that you have a very sluggish flow," said Raymundo Punongbayan, director of the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology.

Building vocabulary

What’s the word for people who study volcanoes? What is the study of volcanoes called?
The headline, the deck and the lead (first) paragraph of a news story usually give the main idea of the story in different words. That can help you guess meanings. Look for words and phrases in the deck and the lead mean the same as "deluge".
Does "avert" mean "to prevent something bad from happening" or "to take water out of something"?
Find the word "trickle" in the lead paragraph. Read the rest of the story and decide if a "trickle" is a fast or a slow movement of water. What words or phrases in the story helped you decide that?
What does "sluggish" in the final paragraph mean?

Follow up

If you have access to the Internet you could find more information about this story. For example, what is happening for people who live near the volcano? You will be able to come up with other ideas too.

Follow this story in your Bangkok Post and on TV during the next week to see how it turns out. Talk about it with your friends or classmates.

Putting the lesson together

Here’s what we did to put this lesson together. You need a connection with the Internet and an eye for possibilities.

Get the picture: I went to the Internet and using a search engine (I used www.google.com) I typed in "AP Mount Pinatubo because the picture comes from Associated Press news service (AP). When I clicked up came the picture from the back page. I thought the caption from the Bankgok Post was more helpful so I just typed that in.

Get the story without retyping: Back to the search engine and I added the word "story" to my first search. The first listing was The Philippines Post, I clicked on that.
When the page cam up, the second story down began with the words:
"A stream of muddy water trickled out of Mount Pinatubo on Thursday as workers finished a narrow canal to drain a rising crater lake and avert…"

Those are almost the exact words of the Bangkok Post story, so I clicked the link and got the whole story. The headline and the deck (the paragraph in special type) are different, but that’s because those are written by our own Bangkok Post staff. So I had to type those – that didn’t take long at all.

Building vocabulary: We decided to select only the first five paragraphs of the story and see what vocabulary students could learn.

Then we simply had to write a few vocabulary questions with enough clues to help students find the answers. Here are a few notes to help you.

The headline has two words that may not be known, "avert" and "deluge". Here are the clues your students should fine: "overflow" and "flood" in the caption; "flash flood" in the deck. They should guess that a deluge is a lot of water, a flood.

To help your students guess the meaning of "avert" you might ask them: What were the villagers afraid of? What did the engineers do and why? Then help them to think about the meaning of "precautionary". They will know that "pre" means before and "caution" to take care. Then they should be able to guess that "avert" means to prevent some bad result.

To guess the meaning of "trickle" students should find that the "the flow was too slow" and the slope was "so gentle that you have a very sluggish (very slow) flow".

•This lesson was prepared by the staff of the Educational Services Department at the Bangkok Post.

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