Death is the great leveler

 

To walk up through the ash is hard work but it is possible to hire sticks to give help as the way is difficult to the summit of Mount Vesuvius in Italy.  It is worth the climb as one gazes into the crater of the volcano where steam or smoke is emitted and one simply hopes that it will not erupt while standing on the rim.  It did erupt, of course, on 24th August 79AD.  It exploded with great intensity and sent ash and clouds upward into the sky and the nearby cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii were buried under the debris. Thousands lost their lives. The cities were excavated by archeologists hundreds of years later and it is a sobering experience to walk amongst those streets and into houses which were once thriving but now only reveal the rocklike bodies of people who died under the ash and poison gases.  

One young man of seventeen years of age named Pliny saw it happen and described what he experienced.  He wrote that you could hear the shrieks of women, the wailing of infants and the shouting of men; some were calling for parents, others for children or wives, trying to recognise them by their voices.  For many of the people it seemed that the universe had been plunged into eternal darkness for evermore.  Thankfully a good number did escape by reaching the harbour and getting on boats indeed many thousands were saved in this way. 

Oil disaster strikes unexpectedly

All photos courtesy of Unsplash 

Disasters can be due to many factors.  Some we call natural disasters such as earthquake, fire, storm, tornadoes, volcanoes or wave/tsunami damage and they can lead to many deaths and terrible destruction of property. Some disasters are man made and are the result of lack of knowledge, failure to gain information or simply stupidity.  

Some oil workers were employed by the Texaco Oil Company to drill for oil in a lake in Louisiana. The place was Lake Peigneur and so they went with the latest sophisticated equipment and started to drill.  This all took place in November 1980.  Apparently their calculations informed them that there was an abundance of oil in the area and that it would soon gush to the surface. They drilled for several hours and then they decided to sit back and wait for the expected upsurge of oil from below.  Their expectations were to be sadly dashed and a dreadful disaster took place that day.

Instead of oil gushing upwards a whirlpool formed and all the water in the entire 1,300 acre lake was sucked down below.  Also five houses on the shoreline were sucked in to the whirlpool as well as eleven barges, some tug boats, two oil rigs and a mobile home.  That was not all as the nearby botanical garden was also destroyed and Jefferson Island lost ten percent of its land surface.  The end result was a half-mile crater. One local fisherman said that he thought the world was coming to an end. It was a dramatic conclusion to an attempt to find oil.