SYMHC Classics: The Eruption at Heimaey

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Speaker 1: Happy Saturday. Fifty years ago today, a lava flow broke through the base of the Elfel volcano in the Westman Islands in Iceland. The volcano had been erupting for weeks, but this was a new development that threatened to harbor that was critical to the islands survival, so people started trying to slow the flow with water. So I love this whole story in their episode on this volcano and this effort to save the town and the harbor from destruction originally came out on June first. It is Today's Saturday Classic, so enjoy. Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracie Wilson. I'm Holly Frying. I went to Iceland. I know it was for fun and not for work, which that's why you did not hear any Iceland episodes before I went to there. I also did not take any notes for the podcast while I was there. But what I did do is get immersed in a lot of Icelandic history, because it's just about impossible to go to Iceland and not do that, Like you would literally have to go into a hotel and not leave or talk to anyone. Uh. There are lots of museums in Iceland and lots of historical sites that are very easy to get to and visibly marked from the road, so you kind of would would have to work. It's the same little symbol as a command key on a mac is this sort of point of interest sign in Iceland and a lot of other sort of Northern European countries, So it's very easy to find things to learn about. And then sometimes you just take a walk to give your camera battery a little bit more time to recharge, and then you stumble across a consecrated pool that's tied to both Iceland's Saga Age and historical events during the Reformation. It's just everywhere. That one pool is just everywhere lurking. That one pool was behind a guesthouse that we stayed at, and we literally had no idea there was anything interesting back there, and then there. It was one of the events that I learned about that fascinated me the most, though, was from Iceland's much more recent history than that particular serendipitous fond uh. And it's really on the cusp of how recent we normally get on the podcast, it is a massive and prolonged volcanic eruption on the island of haym heads up that every piece of non Icelandic video footage I have seen about this eruption pronounces it in some other way, like him or heymi or hay Me, But Hayma's closest to how I've heard people actually pronouncing it while I was in Iceland. Hay May is a small island off of Iceland's southern coast, and it's part of the vestman Are Archipelago, which is also known in English as the Westman Islands. And this eruption is what we are going to talk about today. Iceland is located on the mid Atlantic Ridge, basically a long, mostly underwater volcanic mountain range that runs all the way from the Arctic down towards the southern tip of Africa. And this ridge exists because of the divergence of tectonic plates. As the plates slowly move apart, magma rises up and lava fills that gap that's created gradually and sometimes suddenly, forming mountains. And most of this happens under water, but in some places the resulting mountains are tall enough to break through the surface of the ocean, and this is the case with Iceland, which lies along the North American and Eurasian plates. Iceland itself is a relatively young island, and in the grand scheme of things, that really hasn't been inhabited for very long. The first permanent settlement there was established in the ninth century. The first written record of a volcanic eruption on Iceland is from the tenth century, and volcanoes have been an ongoing part of life in Iceland for all of the centuries since then. Iceland is home to well over a hundred volcanoes and there are about thirty active volcanic systems. Thirteen volcanoes have erupted since Iceland was settled, with the links of the eruptions ranging from hours to months, and a lot of people like to make the average one eruption every five years. This brings us to the Westman Islands. This is a group of fifteen Ish islands. It depends on how you classify them where that number exactly lands along with lots of smaller islets, including some of the youngest islands on Earth. One of these is the island of Ceartcy, which was formed through volcanic activity in nineteen sixty three, so very young certacy has been protected since it was originally formed, allowing scientists to study the way species make their way to a new environment. Hey May is the largest island in the West Bend Islands and it's home to those islands only town, which is also called vestment Are. They're are a couple of summer homes on other islands in this archipelago, but hay May is the only one that's inhabited year round by an actual established community. Although it's the biggest island in the Westman Islands, Hammy is still quite small. It's about five square miles or thirteen square kilometers. And there's a teen CNN article that describes Hamy as quote a baron chunk of volcanic rock. That is not an apt description. It is volcanic, it is rocky, but it is plenty green and there are birds everywhere, and in the summer months, it's actually home to one of the biggest puffin populations in all of Iceland, so it is also adorable. I was just gonna say we should have a moment to pause so everyone can go, oh the puffins. I got the hold of puffin while I was there. It was not a wild puffin. It was a rescued puffin. I did not go pick up a puffin on a cliff. That would be bad Hamas Coast is largely formed of tall cliffs with basalt stacks extending out into the ocean in the middle. It's flatter, and before nineteen three it's most prominent feature in its relatively flat interior was the volcanic cone known as Halgafell. I'm going to take a moment and mentioned that in Icelandic, an L at the end of the word makes a sound that's classified as a voiceless lateral fricative. This is not a sound that exists in English, and then two l's in a row haven't even slightly different non English phony. Trying to replicate the sound throughout the podcast would be extremely distracting because it's it's like you put your tongue at the top of your mouth and then kind of exhale a little bit. It sounds very sibilant and kind of tiskey, and it would be really distracting to hear two people that don't speak Icelandic try to do that for all of these volcano names. So We're just going to say it the way it is spelled, which is more like Helga fell. So Helga fell, and the rest of the island of Hami is or I was believed to be a stinked or at least dormant by both the residents of the island and scientists. There had been plenty of offshore eruptions of other volcanoes, including that one that created the island of Surtsey a decade before this story happened. There had also been plenty of eruptions on the mainland of Iceland, but Helgafel had undergone no known eruptions. Since the settlement of Iceland, everybody thought where they were living was a pretty safe spot to be. On January one, three, a series of small seismic tremors rattled through southern Iceland, with about two hundred seismic events over about fourteen hours. Another shallower series of earthquakes started on the twenty second, at around ten pm, and some of them could be felt on the island of Hamay, but all were small, with the largest having a magnitude of about three. If this had happened today, these earthquakes would have basically been a thirty hour heads up to the residents of Hamy that something big was about to happen and they should probably evact you eight. But at the time, the field of seismology and Iceland seismic network, we're a lot less advanced than they are today. Seismologist didn't have a way of pinpointing the epicenter of these little earthquakes, and those that did think the sem seismic activity was a warning of something that was going to be in the form of an eruption. We're more focused on Katla, which is a volcano on the mainland, which is known to be active and has in fact erupted more than twenty times since Iceland was settled. But what this seismic activity was really foreshadowing was a massive eruption on Hamy itself, which we were going to talk about. But first we're going to pause for a word from one of our fantastic sponsors. When shaking and noise started on the island of Hamy at about two o'clock in the morning on January nineteen seventy three, the residents who know just it and had also felt the earlier earthquakes, thought this was just another one. They're kind of like here we go again. What was really happening, though, was that a fissure was opening up along the eastern side of Hamany, just over a thousand yards from the center of town, in about two hundred yards from the edge of town. That's roughly nine hundred meters and a hundred and eighty meters for those who are in the world of metric measurements. The fissure quickly spread. It ran roughly southwest to northeast, stretching all the way from Hamy southern to its northern coasts and beyond, with submarine volcanic activity going on at either end. At the beginning of the eruption, a curtain made up of about forty fountains of molten lava launched out of this fissure, which was incredibly dramatic, but not at least for a first the first few hours, all that damaging a natural slope of land kind of directed the falling lava away from the town, and then favorable wind also at first kept most of the tefra, which is sort of a catch all term for a volcanic material that was launched into the air, kept most of the tefra from coming toward the town, and this meant that even though the residents of Haima had been taken completely by surprise by the sudden appearance of a huge fissure and a curtain of lava right next to their town on an island believed to be volcanically inactive, they had time to evacuate before things became really dangerous. Volcanoes were aknown hazard, and Hamy and the mainland both had evacuation plans in place. The evacuation itself was also aided by another stroke of incredibly good fortune that there were people that even described as being providential. A storm had moved to the region on the twenty second, so Hammy's fishing fleet was all safely docked at the harbor, along with some boats that really worked from the mainland but had taken refuge in Haimy when the gale blew in. In other words, the island had a ready made evacuation fleet that was already there in the harbor, which was at that point not being threatened by the erupting volcano thanks to the lay of the land and the prevailing winds. The town's fire department and police used horns and sirens to wake residents and inform them of the danger. Residents took what they could carry. They crowded into fishing boats to be taken to the mainland port of Thorlock Sutton and then on too Reikiavik, which is Iceland's capital, by bus. This was a trip that, while not necessarily comfortable, was made safely by all who were evacuated. Although the storm had passed, the water was still choppy, so seasickness was a problem. It also took a lot longer than it takes to get to the mainland by boat today. Now there's a ferry terminal at Landia Hutton that's much closer to the island. People who were ill or elderly were mostly airlifted from Hamany's airport to the Reikyovik and Keflavik airports on the mainland, which are about forty five minutes apart by car. The evacuation flights used planes and helicas from the U. S Manned Iceland Defense Force and Iceland Air The evacuation was completely successful, with about five thousand, three hundred people safely taken to the mainland, where they all met up in Reikiavik. And this was a really calm and efficient affair. In five or six hours, anyone who could leave the island had left the island, and from the boats people could see this curtain of fire along the edge of the town as well as under the water as they passed by. This makes me think of the contrast of how sometimes these things happened, and there's always that person that holds out and says they're not going to leave. But everyone left in a very order. There were a very few people who stayed behind to basically fight the volcano, but there was. It was a very calm evacuation. I think the fact that a lot of the adults on the island had been able to see the formation of certaincy to the south of them from the island, uh and like that had not endangered them, probably helped people stay calm. I mean, people in Iceland seemed pretty pragmatic about volcanoes in a lot of ways, uh, from my experience in ten days of being there. Later the government of Iceland sent workers to remove cultural and historical artifacts from the island. Four hundred head of livestock were also evacuated from the island because this was deep in the Icelandic winter. Kivik had a lot of hotel rooms available, so after being received, fed and temporarily sheltered at schools, Heym's residents who didn't have family on the mainland were mostly housed in vacant hotel rooms. Most of the residents did have family that they could stay with, though, so the housing needs that that needed to be provided by the government of the Government of Iceland turned out to be pretty minimal. At the same time, though, you can just sort of imagine how a close knit community of only a little more than five thousand people all living together on a little island it is it was. Splitting people up, even if they were staying with family was still pretty traumatic for the community itself. The Government of Iceland created and funded an emergency relief fund for people who had been displaced by the volcano. They requested prefabricated housing from Sweden, Canada and Norway in order to build temporary housing on the coast so the people from Hamy who had made their living in fishing could continue to work and hopefully lower the impact on Iceland's economy by the disruption in Hamy's fishing industry. For the next few months, the only people on Hamy would be the very few people who couldn't leave because of something related to their jobs, like say that, people who kept really critical things running uh and the people who were trying to save the town, as well as scientists, some of whom were from Iceland and somewhere from elsewhere, who came in to study the eruption in progress. Not long after this very well organized evacuation was complete, lava stopped erupting from most of the fissure, concentrating itself primarily in one roughly central portion of it. Cinders and debris from this eruption started to form a cone, which would eventually be named eld Fell or Fire Mountain. Within a couple of days, eld Felt grew to one ten yards or one ds tall. However, the narrowing of the eruption from a curtain too more like a cone, did not mean it was any less destructive. It was actually the opposite that was true. The favorable wind that had kept the volcanic debris mostly away from the town during the evacuation shifted, which sent Tefra burning cinders and lava bombs toward homes and other buildings. Some of these buildings immediately caught fire. Others were buried and crushed and falling tefra. Some were just crushed under the weight of volcanic material, even if they were spared from catching fire. Emergency crews cleared debris off of roofs to try to keep them from collapsing and propped them up from the inside. They put corrugated iron over window is on the volcanic side of the buildings to try to keep volcanic bombs from shattering them and setting houses on fire from the inside, and they erected barriers along one side of the lava field in the hope of slowing its progression. Moving into February of ninety three, the cone continued to grow. It roughly doubled in height by the middle of the month, A very steep rim started to form on one side of Eldfell thanks to a combination of wind and falling tephra. A lake of lava started to form in the middle of the cone also, and soon pressure from the lava lake combined with the wind and caused this increasingly steep rim to collapse. The collapsing wall in the mountain rolled across the eastern side of the town and buried a number of houses. At about this time, the volcano also started to emit increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. Air around the volcano became progressively more dangerous to breathe. Birds and other animals began to die as the build up of gases in the air became poisonous. According to the museum now located on the site of the eruption, poisonous gases were the cause of the soul human fatality directly tied to this eruption. At about at the same time as Eldfell's rim collapsed and buried more of the town, the lava flow from the volcano shifted directions as well. A submarine lava flow broke a cable and a pipeline, which were responsible for carrying electricity and drinking water from the mainland to the island. On top of that, lava started to threaten the islands. Port Hayman had a natural harbor that was sheltered on one side by a cliff, and this harbor was critically important to both the islands and Iceland's economy. If the volcano filled in or blocked the harbor, it would become vastly harder to get people and supplies on and off the island for the remediation and cleanup efforts as well. This meant that Haymany needed a way to fight back against this volcano, and we're going to talk about that, but first we will pause for another sponsor break. As we alluded to before the break, Haymy was home to a protected harbor that was critically important to the little island's survival. Was one of two ways to get on and off the island, the other being Hami's airport. On top of that, fishing was one of Hammy's most important industries, and Hammy's fishing industry was also extremely important to Iceland's fishing industry as a whole. Twenty of Iceland's fish processing plants were located on the island, So without a working port, the island of Hammy would be far less habitable and far less economically sustainable once the eruption eruption was over, and really if if Hamy's fishing industry was destroyed, that was going to be a huge problem for Iceland's economy as well. Real threats to the port began February eleventh, when a huge flow of lava broke through Eldfell's base. It was about twenty meters wide and twenty meters tall, and it threatened to fill in the harbor. At this point, cargo planes had to be requested to transport heavy earth moving equipment onto the island because this flow of lava meant the harbor could no longer accommodate boats large enough to carry them. It was basically making the harbor shallow weer, so the only things that had a shallower draft could really get in and out of there. In an effort to cool the lava and slow it down, crews started spraying it with water, first from the town's fire trucks using the municipal water supply. Then a pumping ship was requested from the United States, which would continue to draw water from the municipal supply. Basically, the municipal water supply was the big volcano fighting power source until the lava we mentioned earlier broke that pipeline that had been carrying the water from the mainland, so the decision was made at that point to try seawater. The government of Iceland requested more pumping equipment from the United States, and in the end were than nineteen miles that's thirty kilometers of pipe and forty three pumps operated by seventy five workers. At the peak of the operation, hurled water at the advancing lava in the hope of cooling it down. Some of this work, and other work associated with trying to salvage as much of the town as possible, was incredibly dangerous due to the proximity to the volcano, as well as the poisonous gases in the air and the decreased visibility due to steam from cooling operations and blowing ash and cinders. Over the next few months, an estimated five point five million tons of seawater were used to try to cool the lava down and divert it away from the harbor and later from the town as well. Basically, the lava heated up the water, making lots and lots of steam and cooling off in the process. As it cooled, the lava hardened, eventually making a wall that molten lava could could creep over but not really breakthrough. So as this creeping lava would sort of top the solid layer, they would spray that part to make this increasingly tall wall of of hardened lava. There are some people who will argue that we can never really know if this worked, because who knows how the lava would have behaved without all of this human intervention. However, the lava flow was stopped one ten yards or a hundred meters short of blocking the harbor, and its progress was slowed through the town as well. However, several of Iceland's fish processing plants were destroyed before the water project could really begin. Yeah, I feel like some of the people who are like, well, the lava could have completely shifted course, we'll never know. I feel like they're just kind of naysayers wanting to say nay about it. The eruption was declared over on July third, nineteen seventy three, and had been slowing down for a while, but that was really five months. It was more than five months after it had started. Water cooling operations stopped on the tenth of July, and schools were reopened that fall. It's estimated that two hundred million tons of ash and lava fell in and around hey May during the eruption. Eldfell grew to a height of six hundred and fifty six feet that's two hundred meters. About a third of the town was destroyed, not all of the five thousand, three hundred people who had evacuated returned. The population today is only four thousand, five hundred, so it is still below its nineteen seventy three pre volcano level. Yeah, there are still houses that are are buried, and a lot of the people who didn't return where people whose houses were under so much, uh, so much volcanic debris that they were like, it's never gonna get dug out, and even if it is dug out, everything that is in there is crushed. Uh. However, all of that lava and tafra did wound up having some favorable impacts on the island. I mean, there was definitely a huge loss of property, fortunately not a loss of human life other than the one person um who was killed because of the poisonous gases. But the lava flow that almost blocked the harbor was made into a breakwater and it now provides more shelter for the harbor from a direction that it had previously been exposed to. This huge increase in volcanic material on the island also provided a much needed source of landfill. Previously, if they had needed to fill land in any way, they would have to sort of have earth shipped in on a boat, which was not very practical UM, and the cooling lava under the surface of the island is now one of the island's primary sources of heat and hot water. In two thousand five, the town council of Vestmaner agreed to excavate some of the houses that were still buried. Lots of comparisons were made to Pompeii under that ash. Some of the homes were still intact, and even the ones that were crushed still contain most of their owner's possessions. A museum, Eldheimar opened in two thousand fourteen, and its centerpiece is one of the homes that was crushed volcanic debris. And all that museum is really cool. We should go you've already been, and I'll just go. Yeah, if you if you are in Iceland, you can get to Hayma from a brief a brief air plane, a little airplane, little airplane. Little airplanes still make me kind of nervous, so I personally like the ferry. The ferry is about half an hour UM and this particular we didn't really plan an itinerary beyond our lodging. We didn't we didn't plot out day by day what we wanted to do, and so we were staying somewhere not far away, and I realized that this volcano or this volcano museum was on the island and said, hey, do you want to take the ferry and check this out? And we did. It's very good, true. So yeah, that's that's how basically, uh people fought a volcano, and mostly one using what feels to me like a child's logic of can't we just spray this with water and cool at all? Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook U r L or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at i heart radio dot com. Our old house stuff works email address no longer works, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History and you can subscribe to our show on Apple Podcasts, Google podcast, the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H