The Gory Details (Gross)

Gory Detail #27: "Et tu Vesuvi?"

August 24th 79 AD; what a great day. It was sunny. The Romans were ruling the world. I was awaiting execution for something. It was good times just in general but there's something special about the 24th. Anyone remember? Midmorning?

August 24th 79 AD is the day that Mount Vesuvius woke up unexpectedly and blasted the holy hell out of Pompeii and a bunch of other pissant roman towns. Talk about power. First it's day. Then its night. First you're breathing air then your breathing fire. Under pretense of being able to write better fire and brimstone driven stories, let's look at what happened.

The first thing you need to know in order to understand Pompeii is that the eruption, while quite sudden, was not pyroclastic. That's a big word that means no streams of molten lava. The city got dumped with tons and tons of hot ash. This is good for us who want to look back. Cities burned under lava can be boringly overcooked.

This also gives us the chance to study hot ash, its composition and the fun things it did to those uppity Romans on its way by.

We'll also take a look at the "Pompeii Mummies," a very very cool class of mummy I've never seen anywhere else. First, ash.

When a volcano blows a big cloud of ash in the air as Vesuvius did and like you've seen on TV, what it is really doing is blowing off hot gas that just happens to take ash up with it. In small eruptions, the gas is often water that has run down onto the magma dome and boiled itself off. In a larger eruption, the gas can be whatever is eeking out of the lava; carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, sulfurous fumes, you name it. Right from the start you can start chocking characters with evil vapors, but don't stop there.

One of the weird things that happens when ash gets blown up into the air is a big static charge gets build up and lightening starts blasting down. Got to be tough for a young Roman; running from Vulcan only to get tagged by Zeus.

In addition to electricity, there are a number of other important properties of volcanic ash that you should keep in mind, the big two are heat and weight.

It's a no brainer that ash from a volcano is hot so we'll only focus on this details; moving as a big hot mass, ash can carry heat many miles away from the eruption. One of these clouds can be hundreds of degrees, instantly boiling the skin of the victim even though the cloud has moved miles from the eruption. It could easily be hot enough to ignite hair, not that anyone would ever see that; at least not see it and live to tell.

More important is that air, full of ash, can be way heavier than the air around it. At the same time that there are plumes of hot ash rising in the air, there are often "flows" running along the ground. The ash flows around Mt St. Helens were so thick that they stripped the trees and knocked down the trunks in the pattern of the wind flow over the hills. Even keeping track of where a victim has gotten off to in a fracas like this would be difficult. If it can knock down a tree, it can and will send Augustus flying.

To a person, one of these flows is swiftly, certainly deadly. Knocked down, chocked, hair on fire, the average citizen of Pompeii got snuffed pure and certain.

The victims in Pompeii were found everywhere of course; hiding in stables, under tables, everywhere you'd expect desperate people to hide. My favorite though, are those caught out in the open. They were buried, of course, but, due to some strange properties of the ash as it compressed, it did not collapse in on the bodies as they rotted.

When the explorers began to unearth Pompeii fifteen hundred years after the eruption, they found bone filled openings in the ash. Someone filled one of these with plaster and, Poof! a positive casting of one of the victims of Pompeii at the moment of death. I love these guys. Some of their backs are arched. Some hold their hands over their faces. Others clutch children. You can feel the terror. A real "mummy" of the moment of death. I need one of these for my living room.

Archeologist, scientist and historians go ga-ga for Pompeii of course, a whole town preserved at a single moment in times. I think it can be invaluable to horror writers as well. Here we have absolute proof of how thousands of individuals dealt with the ultimate moment of terror. Ships launched into the harbor. Rich women ducked into warehouses to hide with the slaves. At one home, the entire family was found lying in a row against a garden wall. Why? What did they say to each other before they set out into the dark?

Now get out there and write.

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