Mount Vesuvius Disaster
On August 24th, 79 AD, the city of Pompeii was shocked to discover that the mountain that lived near them was trying to kill them all! The residents of Pompeii woke up on a nice sunny day to see the mountain – Mount Vesuvius – had big clouds of smoke coming out of the top of it. Of course, confusion spread to everyone’s mind as they wondered what it could be. One of the biggest theories at the time was that the gods where giving them a sign. What they didn’t know was that the mountain was actually an old volcano… which was erupting. Years before the famous eruption, there was some alarming seismic activity, but astonishingly, most of the citizens in the city didn’t think much of it. On the morning of august 24th, 79 AD, a very large explosion signaled the beginning of the end for this small Roman paradise. The explosion was a result of the accumulation of lava in the volcano. The explosion was estimated to be about 100,000 times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Tons of flaming rock and
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At first, the magma coming out of the volcano was not quick enough to outrun the people, but after about 12 hours the people of Pompeii who stayed behind realized that things only got worse. Much worse, in fact. The large cloud of super-heated ash and debris that hung in the air above the city soon collapsed from its own weight and engulfed the city in feet of ash and also literally baked the people in the city. Writer Pliny the Younger wrote to his friend Cornelius Tacitus explaining the events that unfolded that fateful day: “Meanwhile on Mount Vesuvius broad sheets of fire and leaping flames blazed at several points, their bright glare emphasized by the darkness of night”. This one of the only first-hand encounters that discovered making it very helpful for