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Unusual Historic Crises and Calamities

Khalid Elhassan April 16, 2020 34 min

15. Turning Towns Into Ovens

Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum, by John Martin. Wikimedia

Mount Vesuvius had experienced tremors for days in August of 79 AD, but they were not unusual. Then, around noon on August 24^th, a cloud appeared atop Vesuvius. About an hour later, the volcano erupted and ash began to fall on Pompeii, 6 miles away. By 2 PM, pumice, or volcanic debris, began to fall with the ash. At 5 PM, sunlight had been completely blocked and roofs in Pompeii began collapsing under the accumulating weight of ash and pumice. Panicked townspeople rushed to the harbor seeking any ship that would take them away.

By midnight, the volcano was spewing a hot deadly column over 20 miles up into the air. Simultaneously, lava flowed down its side in six major surges, as Vesuvius vomited molten rock in a rapid flow that incinerated all that it encountered. The 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 yet escaped or 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.