Things That Are Awesome
It may seem weird for me to write something like this--something not directly related to me, that is, on a page which I have mostly used for personal shit. Sure, whatev. But this is my space, I do what I want.
Anyway, this story is just way too cool for me to avoid sharing it, because I think you should know it.
Basically, this is the story of a volcano in Iceland. Eldfell is it's name (and you can consider that link to Wikipedia my prime source on this story). Iceland is a crazy place, and they handle volcanoes much in the same way L.A. handles earthquakes and bad traffic--just a shitty thing that occasionally kills people, but hey, what are you going to do?
So, this island of Heimaey is chugging along, doing their thing. Their thing is fishing. They handle about a quarter of the fishing done in Iceland, so it is big business for them. Their harbor is to Iceland what San Francisco's harbor is for California.
And then, holy shit, a volcano essentially sprouts in the center of the island and starts shooting out lava.
Crazy shit, right? Real fire and brimstone.
Heimaey decides it doens't want to become Pompeii v2.0, and evacuates. Most of the people are in their fishing boats, anyway, so that's pretty easy to do. Only a couple of people need to be flown off--invalids, the elderly, etc. They manage to get away with only one person dying (an idiot who decides that a volcano erupting is a good opportunity to steal drugs from a drug store, and is overcome by toxic fumes).
Lava bombs destroy a bunch of houses (lava bombs are superhot chunks of cooled lava, shot out of volcano that crush things and then set them on fire). Other houses are crushed by getting covered in so much ash that they collapse (which is something that would occasionally happen to houses in the Midwest after heavy snowfalls).
So. Heimaey is pretty much fucked, right? Except that Iceland decided that it wouldn't be a good idea if they were to lose a quarter of their fishing income, and so they decided to fight back.
With fire hoses. A system was rigged up where they started spraying ocean water onto the leading edge of the lava flow. This proved quite effective. If my memory of this (from John McPhee's The Control of Nature, a truly awesome book) is correct, it was so effective that the crews were able to walk across the cooled lava and combat other edges of it (this process destroyed your boots--fresh pairs of boots were needed every couple of days for those doing this) without serious harm to the lavafighters.
They had some problems, and had to deal with seriously threatening giant boulders borne by the lavaflows that could have blocked the harbor, but they managed to stop the flow of lava from destroying their town and their harbor.
So. They beat the volcano, more or less. The volcano destroyed some of their infrastructure, though. Which sucked.
So they set up plants in the town to extract geothermal energy from the slowly cooling lava layers to generate power and hot water for the island. And then they used some of the cooled volcano fragments to extend the runways of their airport and expand the island, kind of like what NYC did with Battery Park City, except with a volcano rather than trash.
Iceland is awesome.
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