Pompeii - disaster history in danger

A week ago I was looking at paintings of the destruction of Pompeii. Today I’m reading bad news about the bits Vesuvius spared in AD79.

It seems that yesterday morning the Schola Armaturarum, the building that was used for training gladiators, was found in ruins. Italy’s president said it was an occasion for national shame, while the president of the country’s National Association of Archaeologists called the collapse "an irreparable wound to the world's most important archaeological site".

More than two years ago, the Italian government declared a state of emergency over the condition of the site. In many ways, it had been an archaeologist’s dream as the pumice and ash from the volcano preserved much of the town in miraculous detail.

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Volcanic ash

Iceland’s second major volcanic explosion in less than a month (see also my blog of March 21) has led to the cancellation of all flights across the UK for the second day running. Ireland, the Scandinavian countries, Belgium and the Netherlands also closed their airspace yesterday, while France and Germany suffered severe disruption.

It is a reminder of how the ash flung out from a volcano can be even more devastating than the eruption itself. The eruption of Laki on Iceland in June, 1783 produced a cloud that spread as far as Moscow and Baghdad. In England, it turned the weather bleak and foggy while in Alaska, the Kauwerak tribe dubbed 1783 “the year summer did not come.” There followed one of the worst winters in 250 years in Europe and America. According to some estimates, the eruption indirectly caused up to 200,000 deaths.

The effects of Laki were probably exacerbated by the eruption of another volcano two months later – Mount Asama in Japan. It lowered temperatures, causing crop failure and famine, with harvests not recovering for a decade.

Indonesia’s Tambora went up in smoke in 1815, producing another year without a summer. Snow fell in Canada and New England in June, and in England in July. The famine and disease of the aftermath were deadly enough to kill perhaps 80,000 in Indonesia and 200,000 in Europe. Alarming, but not as deadly as the prehistoric eruption at Toba (also in Indonesia). The volcanic winter that followed is reckoned to have wiped out 99% of the humans then walking the earth.

Icelandic eruptions

An Icelandic volcano that had been dormant for two centuries has erupted, sending lava 300 feet into the air. About 500 people have been evacuated from the sparsely populated area about 75 miles east of Reykjavik.

Iceland is a mysterious country of volcanoes, geysers, bubbling, spitting mud and lunar landscapes, and there are fears that the eruption could cause flooding, or spark off the much more dangerous nearby Katla volcano.

Iceland’s deadliest ever eruption, and one of the deadliest in human history, came in 1783 when the Laki volcano threw the equivalent of Mont Blanc into the air. Burning lava overwhelmed 20 villages, blocked rivers burst their banks, and many also died from toxic fumes.

As with so many disasters, though, the real damage came in the aftermath (see my blog of March 17). In Iceland itself, crops failed, livestock starved, fish disappeared, and about 10,000 people – a quarter of the island’s population – died. Much of the Western hemisphere was enveloped in a volcanic winter, and some estimates say that this climate change caused more than 200,000 deaths. For the full story, see A Disastrous History of the World.

Caribbean catastrophe

On this day....107 years ago, the volcano Montagne Pelée erupted above the town of St Pierre on the Caribbean island of Martinique. Apart from a minor eruption in 1851, there hadn’t been a peep out of the mountain for a long time, but in April 1902, it started to grumble, and on the bright sunny morning of May 8, 1902, it went berserk.

As people gathered in the churches of St Pierre - the “Paris of the West Indies” – for eight o’ clock mass, smoke blotted out the sun, and boiling lava poured down the hill into the town killing everyone in its wake. More than a dozen ships were destroyed in the harbour; one having its masts and funnel sheared off “as if they had been cut by a knife.”

Of St Pierre’s 26,000 inhabitants, only a handful survived. One was a convicted murderer awaiting execution who was saved thanks to the thick walls and tiny windows of his prison. He was reprieved, and began a new career with Barnum & Bailey’s circus – sitting in a replica of his cell as the “lone” survivor of the “Silent City of Death”.

St Pierre would be partially rebuilt, only to be hit by another eruption in 1929, and would never again recover its colourful and rather racy reputation. For the full story, see A Disastrous History of the World.

World's biggest volcanic eruptions

This week the Indonesian island of Sulawesi was rocked by an earthquake. No great surprise there – Indonesia is the most seismically active country on earth, and was close to the epicentre of the undersea quake that sparked the great Christmas tsunami of 2004. This time there were no reports of any casualties.

How different from the great volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa 194 years ago today. The Europeans who had started to settle in the islands in the sixteenth century believed the volcano was extinct. On April 5, 1815, it proved them wrong, generating the biggest eruption in recorded history – four times as powerful as the more famous Krakatoa.

The immediate death toll on the island was about 12,000, but as so often happens with volcanoes, the worst would come later, as the debris spat out into the atmosphere made the world dramatically colder. In the months that followed, up to 80,000 are thought to have died on Sumbawa and Lombok, while it is estimated that the chill weather and resulting poor harvests may have cost another 200,000 lives in Europe alone.

An even fiercer eruption rocked the Indonesian island of Sumatra in about 72,000 BC, and the volcanic winter it generated may have killed 99 per cent of the earth’s human population at that time. The full story of all these eruptions is in A Disastrous History of the World.

A new blog

Invasions, earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, bird flu – the world seems to get more dangerous by the day. Or does it? In this blog, I am going to be examining disasters in their historical context, and recalling some of the major disasters of the past. The first posts will begin this week.

I am the author of three histories of disasters – “The Disastrous History of London” (which appeared in hardback as “Capital Disasters”), “A Disastrous History of Britain”, and “A Disastrous History of the World” – the latest, which appeared in November. They provide a comprehensive account of the worst disasters to have afflicted mankind whether natural, like volcanic eruptions, hurricanes or disease; accidental such as fires or shipwrecks; or deliberately inflicted like wars, massacres or terrorism.

For further details, see my website http://www.disasterhistorian.com/index.html.