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The Town That Got Away With Murder and Other Largely Forgotten Historic Events

Khalid Elhassan November 23, 2019 33 min

2. A Dramatic Eruption

‘The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum’ by John Martin, 1821. Wikimedia

Around noon on August 24^th, 79 AD, a cloud appeared atop Vesuvius, and about an hour later, the volcano erupted and ash began to fall on Pompeii, six miles away. By 2 PM, volcanic debris, begin to fall with the ash, and by 5 PM sunlight had been completely blocked and roofs in Pompeii began collapsing under the accumulating weight of pumice and ash. Panicked townspeople rushed to the harbor seeking any ship that would take them away.

Vesuvius’ lava did not reach Pompeii or Herculaneum, but it sent heat waves of more than 550 degrees Fahrenheit into those towns, turning them into ovens and killing any who had not already suffocated from the fine ash.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.