Vulcan's Fury: Man Against the Volcano [Hardcover]

Dr. Alwyn Scarth (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 10, 1999

Volcanic eruptions are the most spectacular displays in the natural world. They also present humanity with devastating environmental disasters. This enthralling book describes fifteen of the most remarkable volcanic eruptions across the centuries and, using rare firsthand accounts, analyzes their impact on the people in their paths.

In 79 A.D. Vesuvius produced the most violent eruption recorded in European history. The eruption of Etna in 1669 marked the first known attempt to divert a lava-flow. In 1783, the eruption of Laki indirectly killed a fifth of the Icelandic population and sent a blue haze over Europe. The eruption of Krakatau in 1883 drowned most of its victims and destroyed much of the island as well. In 1980 Mount St. Helens produced a new type of eruption and scythed down a majestic forest. Alwyn Scarth explores these and other eruptions, reconstructing the physical experience of the disaster, its origins, explosion, and aftermath, and interpreting (in many cases for the first time in English) eyewitness accounts that bring their own vividness to the unfolding drama. The accounts tell of fear, panic, miscalculation, and inefficiency as well as emergency organization, self-sacrifice, religious fervor, and heroism, revealing how each affected population handled -- or mishandled -- its crisis. Scarth's riveting survey shows that technology and volcanic surveillance have made enormous strides during the present century. But volcanoes remain indomitable: no one has yet learned how an eruption can be stopped.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

When Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines erupted in 1991, it could have annihilated the half-million people living within range of its lava and ash; instead, it killed barely a thousand, because volcanologists and local authorities knew what would happen and evacuated the area. What eruptions taught them what they knew? In a neatly interdisciplinary (if at times sensational) work, Scarth (Savage Earth) describes 15 volcanic eruptions important to earth science or to human history, from Italy's Stromboli and Vesuvius (A.D. 79) to Mount St. Helens, Pinatubo, and Nevado del Ruiz, in Colombia (1985), whose eruption melted a mountain's ice cap, creating horrific floods. Scarth weaves together geology, sociology, folklore, politics and history. Sometimes he simply traces the consequences of an eruption, describing, for example, the "sulphuric aerosol" released by Krakatau (1883), which changed the color of sunsets the world over. Sometimes Scarth's book becomes a history of disaster relief and evacuation policy. After Mount Pel?e, in Martinique, erupted in 1902, the French colonial administration offered every displaced person 1.25 francs per day. This sum far exceeded a day's earnings for a nondisplaced Martinican laborer: the resulting social disruption led the new French governor to reduce relief for the displaced poor and increase it for the displaced rich. Scarth's readers will learn what authorities now know about how to predict and prepare for big eruptions, and the riveting accounts he provides of each calamity, eyewitness and secondhand, display the fascination that leads so many scientists to risk their lives to study volcanoes. 70 b&w, 30 color photos. (Sept.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Scarth takes a different view of volcanoes than Haraldur Sigardsson in Melting the Earth (LJ 5/1/99). Sigardsson includes more of the legends affiliated with volcanic activity, but like Heiken Fisher in Volcanoes: Crucibles of Change (Princeton Univ., 1997), Scarth adds more of the human dimension plus an occasional touch of wry humor. As the author of the textbook Volcanoes: An Introduction, he provides the facts, but he also describes the periods leading up to and following volcanic activity and how people were affected. His chronologically arranged chapters (from Vesuvius in 79 A.D. to Pinatubo in 1991) reveal what we have and have not learned from earlier eruptions; it is certainly clear that not all volcanoes are alike. Sometimes the volcano itself is not even the chief cause of death, but Scarth reminds us that "the volcano always wins." His readable style makes this relatively accessible to an interested reader. The only drawback for U.S. readers is the use of metric measurements. For academic and larger public libraries.AJean E. Crampon, Science & Engineering Lib., Univ. of Southern California, Los Angeles
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 312 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (September 10, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300075413
• ISBN-13: 978-0300075410
• Product Dimensions: 10.2 x 7.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,842,112 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Vulcan's Fury: Man Against the Volcano, April 4, 2000

By 

Dr. Rosaly Lopes-Gautier (Pasadena, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Vulcan's Fury: Man Against the Volcano (Hardcover)

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.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Exploding lakes and erupting volcanoes, August 17, 2004

By 

E. A. Lovitt "starmoth" (Gladwin, MI USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Vulcan's Fury: Man Against the Volcano (Hardcover)

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), Őraefajökull (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.

5.0 out of 5 stars Dangerous territory, September 28, 2008

By 

Harry Eagar (Maui) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Vulcan's Fury: Man Against the Volcano (Paperback)

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 successful in redirecting the lava than the Army Air Corps was. (Imagine working the face of a 1,000-degree lava front with a crowbar!)

But the result was unfortunate. The flow's new line of advance threatened another village, and a posse from that place chased Pappalardo's workers away.

Messing with volcanoes is dangerous business. Several of the contemporary vulcanologists quoted by Scarth have been killed by their mountains in recent years.

Although we understand more about volcanoes than our ancestors did, it does not follow that we deal with them more wisely. Scarth gives high marks to the Filipinos for dealing with Pinatubo in 1991, middling marks to the Americans at Mt. St. Helens and failing grades to the Colombians at Nevada del Ruiz.

"There is always a long chain of events, opinions and value-judgments stretching from a likely volcanic eruption to the true perception of the grave dangers that it presents," he concludes.