Little did they know the eruption that would eventually follow. Vesuvius then erupted days later, causing a loud clatter of thunder sound, and blasted a huge cloud of volcanic smoke around 19 kilometres high.
After this, large pyroclastic waves of gas, ash, and rock speed down towards Pompeii at speeds of kilometres per hour. This was the main stage that killed the citizens, as those consumed in this wave were burnt alive with temperatures gathered up to degrees Celsius.
The entire eruption time lasted a full 24 hours, where it slowly buried the city in the thick layer of ash and rock. It was a bad time for an eruption, with the locals already suffering dictatorial rule, invasion, and bombings.
At the time of the eruption, the United States Army Air Forces th Bombardment Group was based at Pompeii, only a few kilometres from the base of the volcano. Although no military fatalities occurred, 26 Italian civilians were killed and nearly 12, were displaced. Scientists have estimated its time period between eruptions and have gathered it is due for another eruption soon. However, due to modern technology, monitoring the volcano and its activity is much easier.
With scientists researching its gas emissions, movements and other indicators which will give them warning whenever civilians or nearby wildlife are in danger. An evacuation has already been implemented in case of any eruptions. He was unaware of the Castel Nuovo deposit until I mentioned it to him. Pierre was destroyed by eight inches of that stuff, and everyone died.
There would be no survivors in that part of Naples. Scientists know from geologic records that Vesuvius has unleashed catastrophic plinian eruptions with a ragged but disquieting rhythm over recent geologic time. Since an eruption 25, years ago, major eruptions have occurred 22, years ago, 17, years ago, 15, years ago, 11, years ago, 8, years ago, then Avellino 3, years ago, and then the A.
Based on an interval of about 2, years between these larger eruptions, Sheridan and Mastrolorenzo have calculated that there is a greater than 50 percent chance of a major eruption each year now, the odds rising incrementally as the time since the last big plinian event grows longer year by year. When Mastrolorenzo, Petrone, Pappalardo, and Sheridan published their research report on the Avellino eruption in March , it sparked controversy with its blunt prediction that Vesuvius was due for a major eruption that could be powerful enough to threaten metropolitan Naples.
Naples isn't even part of the current planning. The Italian emergency plan, introduced in and last revised in , is based on a smaller, sub-plinian eruption and calls for the priority evacuation of the residents living in the immediate vicinity of Vesuvius—the , people who live in the so-called Zona Rossa, or Red Zone, defined by the boundaries of 18 municipalities on the slopes of the volcano.
The Vesuvius emergency plan has not been significantly updated in more than five years. When the PNAS paper came out last year, laying out a much more dire scenario for Naples, the president of Italy's National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology, Enzo Boschi, denounced Sheridan's risk analysis as "alarmist and irresponsible," and flatly declared "the evacuation plans will not be changed.
Predicting an impending eruption is an imprecise science at best. Although Mount St. Helens gave signs of increasing restlessness preceding the eruption, according to a U. Geological Survey account, it "showed no change from the pattern of the preceding month," and monitors on the morning of May 18, , "revealed no unusual changes that could be taken as warning signs for the catastrophe that would strike about an hour and a half later.
If Vesuvius showed signs of rousing itself again, volcanologists believe they could predict that it was about to erupt in breve tempo , soon. When I asked Mastrolorenzo what exactly "soon" means, he replied: "This is the problem.
We don't know—not in the way you can predict when a hurricane is likely to arrive. It's not nice to needlessly scare people, but it's much less nice to contemplate what happens when lots of scared people try to do the same thing in a big hurry at the same time.
This thought occurred to me one afternoon as I sat, motionless, in a huge traffic jam on the Tangenziale, the expressway that threads around downtown Naples and leads to the main autostrada that heads north toward Rome. What would happen if Vesuvius suddenly gave signs of becoming seriously restless? There would be, as there always is with probabilistic predictions, confusion and uncertainty. There simply is no modern precedent for an urban evacuation of this magnitude.
On the Tangenziale, cars inched along at a crawl; four lanes of cars jockeyed to squeeze into two northbound lanes. It took me about an hour to traverse a mile, and the most urgent thing on anyone's agenda that day was getting to the beach. Traffic like this makes any emergency evacuation plan seem hopelessly optimistic. Indeed, during a Red Zone evacuation drill in October , traffic on the nearby Napoli-Pompeii autostrada ground to a halt; an overnight thunderstorm seriously complicated the exodus; and one of the 18 towns, Portici, participated under protest.
Government officials pronounced themselves pleased with the results; news accounts described "delays and chaos. In any event, a massive evacuation would have to be well under way prior to an Avellino-size eruption.
Once the event began, once the volcano disgorged possibly billions of cubic feet of ash, rock, and debris into the air and sent it raining to the ground, all forms of transportation would become useless.
Airplanes could not fly. Trains could not run. Neither cars nor buses nor scooters could function in even four or five inches of gritty ash. In fact, the only likely means of escape would be. Four thousand years after Avellino, the inhabitants of Campania would be reduced to leaving their footprints in the ash.
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