Volcanic Ash Continues to Ground European Flights; Living the Battle in Afghanistan; Building Homes for Returning U.S. Veterans
ALINA CHO, CNN ANCHOR: Good morning, everybody. It's Friday. It feels like a Friday, April 16th. Welcome to AMERICAN MORNING. I'm Alina Cho. Kiran Chetry has the morning off.</s>JOHN ROBERTS, CNN ANCHOR: Good morning. I'm John Roberts. Thanks so much for being with us as we get to ready to start the weekend. Here are the big stories we'll be telling you about in the next 15 minutes. One of the biggest travel nightmares ever, volcanic ash from a spectacular eruption in Iceland. The Eyjafjallajokull Volcano is making it too dangerous to fly to and from Europe. Tens of thousands of travelers are stranded there maybe for days. So, they'll be spending their weekend cooling their heels in an airport somewhere.</s>CHO: Hopefully, they are taking it in stride as we say. A big step forward meanwhile for same-sex couples. President Obama extending hospital visitation rights to the partners of gays and lesbians. It affects any hospital getting Medicare or Medicaid funding. We're going to look at the politics behind the decision.</s>ROBERTS: And President Obama canceling NASA's plan to send another manned mission to the moon, saying there are more important things to explore in space, like Mars. The president is announcing that he's going to add $6 billion to the agency's budget over the next five years, and try to find out more about the red planet.</s>BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I believe we can send humans to orbit Mars and return them safely to earth. And the landing on Mars will follow. And I expect to be around to see it.</s>ROBERTS: It's still not going to happen for a while. Former NASA astronauts Mae Jemison and Robert Springer will be joining us live at 8:30 Eastern. We're going to ask them what they think of the president's vision for the space agency and how realistic it is for him to expect to see us land on Mars sometime in the next 25 years. And, of course, the amFIX blog is up and running, as it is every day. Join the live conversation going on right now. We'd like to hear from you about what's in the news this morning and what's on your own. Just go to CNN.com/amFIX. And we'll read some of your comments throughout the morning.</s>CHO: But, first, what is being called the biggest travel disruption since 9/11. The cause: a monstrous cloud of volcanic ash coming from the middle of the Atlantic under a glacier in Iceland. Look at those pictures. They're just incredible. That eruption is sending ice chunks as big as homes into the ocean and a plume of ash and smoke upwards, floating miles above the clouds. That is causing global flight delays this morning as it moves east across Europe and the travel chaos could last for days. Gary Tuchman is on the ground. He joins now live on the phone from Iceland this morning. Gary, what is the situation there like?</s>GARY TUCHMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (via telephone): Well, not only am I on the ground, Alina, I am now at the foot of the volcano. And this is the most remarkable part of the story. You're showing these amazing pictures, these plumes of ash that are going hundreds of miles to the east disrupting entire nation's flights. And we're standing right next to the mountain, right next to the volcano, and we don't see any ash whatsoever, because we are on the safe side of the volcano. The west side -- the winds are blowing to the east. Now, I would not want to be standing where I'm standing when the winds shift and start heading to the east. Fortunately, we're going to listen to the meteorologist, make sure that doesn't happen. What we do see here, though, however, on the west side are immense floods -- because this volcano is under a glacier, we don't have lava flowing out. What we do is rushing glacial floodwaters flooding out. And it looks kind of like the Mississippi River flooding or the Red River of the North flooding in North Dakota. All around us, we see lands that were farm lands that are now lakes, with waves running through them. And see debris and rocks that came out of the volcano. But the good news so far here in Iceland, no fatalities, no casualties of any kind, and limited flooding to property because this is not a populated area. While the airports in Europe and the airports in Scandinavia are closing down and tens of thousands of flights being cancelled, here in Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland, and three other international airports in this country -- the airports are open and flights are going everywhere. Life is pretty normal right now in Iceland despite the fact that the volcano that's causing so many problems elsewhere is still erupting, as we speak, as we stand right next to it -- Alina.</s>CHO: Just incredible. Gary Tuchman live for us on the ground in Iceland this morning -- Gary, thank you.</s>ROBERTS: Well, it doesn't matter whether it's for business or for pleasure, first class or coach -- you're probably not getting in or out of Europe any time soon.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We just wait. We're pawns. We are nature's pawns. There is nothing anyone can do. So, it doesn't make any sense to get angry with anyone, and that everyone just accepts that this is an act of God and there's nothing that we can do about it. And we should just sit back and relax.</s>ROBERTS: Pawns of nature. So sit back and relax. The volcanic cloud has forced at least six countries to entirely close their air space. Well, the 200 transatlantic flights have been grounded from the United States. The U.K. has grounded most nonessential flights until 8:00 p.m. Eastern Time. And nine German airports, including two in Berlin, are closed today. Let's turn to Rob Marciano now in the weather center. He's tracking the plume of volcanic ash as it makes its way across the north Atlantic and into the Europe and the U.K. Rob, what's it's looking like today? And how long is it going to last as this wind pattern?</s>ROB MARCIANO, AMS METEOROLOGIST: Well, we're hopeful the winds of change will begin to disperse this but it gets complicated. Winds slow down, change directions, but what does that do with the ash and how much ash is the volcano going to continue to pump out? I'd show you some couple of pictures that we've been taking from outer space. This is infrared satellite imagery. You can kind of see the ash plume here emanating from the volcano right there, and the black and the red driving down towards the south and east. So, that's continuing. And then, it continues to kind of disperse its way along the United Kingdom and back through parts of Western Europe. This is from the European Space Agency actually tracking the sulfur dioxide and the plume of ash and chemicals that's coming out of that from Iceland back through parts of the U.K. and getting over towards -- over towards Finland where they close that airspace. What we're trying to do is get this thing to be more westerly as opposed to driving down to the south, which it did yesterday. We're starting to see a little bit of that shift in the weather pattern. But generally speaking, everything is going to continue to go from west to east and that means Scandinavia and the U.K. certainly will continue to be affected by this for some days to come. John and Alina, back up to you.</s>ROBERTS: Rob, thanks so much. Right now, troops in Afghanistan are feeling the impact of this volcano. Here to talk about it our Pentagon correspondent, Chris Lawrence.</s>CHO: That's right. He just spent more than a month embedded with the U.S. Marines there. So, Chris, what's going on? How are they affected?</s>CHRIS LAWRENCE, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: Yes, it's -- John and Alina, the air over Afghanistan is just fine. It's the air over Europe where a lot of those cargo flights, supply flights come in at. A lot of the air traffic has been grounded there in Germany. So, what's happening is, a lot of the cargo flights are being halted right there on the ground. And the U.S. military expects that to be the case through the weekend. What that means for the troops is, maybe, mail, supplies -- things that they were expecting may be pushed back four, five, six days.</s>ROBERTS: And, of course, cargo flights for everybody are halted as well. So, there's a lot of goods that normally travel between Europe and the United States that aren't getting through. In terms of you and your time that you spent there, great work you did by, when you were in Afghanistan.</s>LAWRENCE: Thank you.</s>ROBERTS: You're there for just a little bit more than a month in Helmand Province, which, of course, is the central area of this new surge strategy, trying to root out the Taliban. In the overall, how do you think the fight is going?</s>LAWRENCE: Big picture -- you still see the problems. You've seen this sniping back and forth between the U.S. and President Karzai. Still, a lot of Afghans that we spoke with either have no connection to their national government or very little trust in it. But you really get the sense being there on the ground that the U.S. really has no other viable option. Karzai is the man. He is the president. And like it or not, he is who the U.S. is going to have to deal with. On a smaller level, you really see these Marines that we were within Now Zad, you see them making progress. They are so into this counterinsurgency mission. They believe in it. And we would see them in these meetings with the local elders, tribal elders, and hours and hours would go by, sipping tea, small talk, meeting after meeting, and then finally, at the end of the meeting, one of the locals mullahs would say, if you turn off the camera. And then he'd lean in and he'd say, OK, they're planting the IEDs around 6:00 at night and they're using the sheet to disguise it.</s>CHO: What about, though, you talk about the Marines. And we don't hear much about this, but what are the living conditions like right there right now and how did that affect you?</s>LAWRENCE: It really depends on what base you're at. I mean, at a big base like Kandahar, believe it or not, it may surprise a lot of people, but you got TGI Friday's just opened up, you got Burger King, Subway. You got volleyball, basketball, a huge gymnasium.</s>CHO: Yet, and no running water?</s>LAWRENCE: Well, look, that's Kandahar, that's how some troops are living at Kandahar, at the big base. At the base we were at, no toilets, no showers. You're taking showers with bottled water, soap up and then you use the bottled water to rinse soup, baby wipes, things like that. The troops have no hot meals. It is all MREs. But, you know, some of the troops, the Marines especially that we spoke with, that's kind of a point of pride. You know, like we're here on the front line. It's rough out here. And they -- I don't know necessarily that they're, you know, angling to get a Friday's there. I think they like the fact that we are in these rough conditions, we are right out here on the front lines where it's not so easy.</s>ROBERTS: Yes. Again, great work that you did there. And look forward to you going back again to cover the offensive in Kandahar.</s>LAWRENCE: Yes. That's coming up two months from now.</s>CHO: Wow.</s>ROBERTS: Chris Lawrence, thanks so much.</s>LAWRENCE: Yes. You're welcome.</s>ROBERTS: Coming up next on the Most News in the Morning, we want Candy. Candy Crowley joins us coming up to talk about the president's new memo, giving same-sex couples hospital visitation rights, as well as all of the other politics de jure and what's ahead on "STATE OF THE UNION." Stay with us. Ten minutes after the hour.