Vulcan's Fury: Man Against the Volcano

When it comes to volcanoes, as we say in the islands, lucky we live Hawaii. Hawaii's massive "shield volcanoes" are slow to anger. Explosions big enough to kill people are very rare, although volcano-related earthquakes have caused tsunami that killed people on the Big Island within the last generation. (And sightseers die from time to time, but human foolishness, not Kilauea, is responsible for that.) In the rest of the world, the duel between man and volcano is "an unequal contest," according to Alwyn Scarth, a retired Scottish geographer and author of the text of the "Savage Earth" television series. He suggests that by understanding the different ways people have reacted to volcanic crises, we can do a better job of managing them. Some eruptions kill people by the tens of thousands, as at Nevada del Ruiz in Columbia in 1985, partly because of bad decisions made years before and partly because public officials who should have been concerned about safety were playing politics. Other volcanic events are huge and last for years but kill no one, as happened during the six-year eruption of Lanzarote in the Canary Islands between 1730-36. Earthquakes kill many more people. "The real fascination of volcanic eruptions . . . lies not primarily in their macabre role as death-dealers and headline-makers, but in their great variety and in the enthralling human reactions that they have always inspired as these crises unfolded," writes Scarth. For that reason, he has gone back to contemporary reports, some translated into English and published here for the first time, as he seeks to recreate "how powerless and isolated" people often feel when a volcano takes over the neighborhood. Scarth devotes a chapter each to 15 eruptions, each one an example of a general category -- either of how the geology works, or how people react. Some famous eruptions are retold here: Vesuvius in 79, Krakatau in 1883 and Mt. St. Helens in 1980. And some famous ones are not in the book, such as Tambora in 1815 or Santorini around 1400 BC. The least known of the 15 examples was Coseguina in Nicaragua in 1835. At the time, it was reported to be one of the biggest eruptions in human history, or even all time. It wasn't, but the history of Coseguina provides a useful lesson about how people interpret an eruption. Hawaiian volcanoes get scarcely a mention in "Vulcan's Fury," because they seldom kill. They do, however, damage property. The repeated threats to Hilo from Mauna Loa are well known. In the 1930s, the Army tried bombing lava flows. More recently, there have been proposals to use some kind of diking system to direct lava flows. "Vulcan's Fury" relates an obscure precedent that arose from Etna's eruptions on Sicily in 1669. Diego Pappalardo, priest of a village that had already been destroyed, determined to divert the lava flows. He gathered a hundred brave and determined peasants, and with no tools more elaborate than crowbars, hammers and hooks Father Pappalardo was more suc

Alwyn Scarth, former Professor of Geography at the University of Dundee also wrote "La Catastrophe" which is the best treatment I've read of Mount Pelée and the destruction of Saint-Pierre by a nuée ardente (pyroclastic flow). "Vulcan's Fury" is a more general treatment of 'Man Against the Volcano' and the score in this book, at least is Volcanoes: 15 - Man: 0, although Parícutin had to make its kills by lightning and death by homesickness in 1943. As the author says in his preface, "This book is about an unequal contest." The eruptions covered in this book are Stromboli (multiple), Vesuvius (AD 79), Monte Nuovo (1538), Etna (1669), Õraefajökull (1727), Lanzarote (1730 - 1736), Laki (1783), Cosegüina (1835), Krakatau (1883), Mount Pelée (1902), Parícutin (1943), Mount St. Helens (1980), Nevado del Ruiz (1985), Lake Nyos (1986), and Pinatubo (1991). The most controversial inclusion in this book is the Lake Nyos carbon dioxide eruption that asphyxiated about 1,742 people. Professor Scarth is in the minority among volcanologists in his belief that the trigger for this disaster was an eruption of carbon dioxide from the throat of the volcano beneath the lake. Most people believe the trigger was a landslide. If the lake bottom's carbon dioxide build-up is slow, rather than eruptive, then it can be piped to the surface and dissipated in a controlled manner. In fact, this is currently being done. If the author is correct, there about thirty similar lakes in this region of Africa that could explode at any time--as if this continent didn't already have enough problems! Hardly anyone ever dies in an actual lava flow except in Hollywood. In his conclusion, Professor Scarth categorizes the different ways to perish by volcanic eruptions, including the indirect ones--mudflows, tsunamis, fires, famines and social disruptions. Krakatau took its biggest toll via tsunamis. Nevado del Ruiz killed 23,000 people by melting its glacier and triggering mudslides. Pinatubo claimed most of its casualties by combining with Typhoon Yunya to collapse roofs under a mess of drenched ash. Laki killed its victims through the 'Haze Famine'--an acrid, blue haze of sulphur dioxide and fluorine that withered the crops and killed the farm animals. "Vulcan's Fury" is a good general read, and could also serve as a manual for disaster management. Pinatubo was a much more violent eruption than Nevado del Ruiz, but its casualty list was miniscule compared to the latter because of "surveillance, political will, [and] evacuation of the threatened population." It is very likely that most of the 23,000 casualties in the river valleys of Nevado del Ruiz could have been averted through similar measures.

Alwyn Scarth's book is ideal for anyone interested in volcanoes and their eruptions. His writing style is lively and keeps the reader turning the pages. I would class this, together with Peter Francis' "Volcanoes", as the best reference book on volcanoes available at present.