Lögberg-Heimskringla - 06.05.1994, Síða 21

Lögberg-Heimskringla • Föstudagur 6. maí 1994 • 21
lceland town remembers the day the volcano blew
from their homes or were carried out
by neighbors. But the citizens of
Heimaey just off the south coast of
Iceland, were destined to be luckier
than the residents of Pompei.
The eruption buried one third of
this town under a million tons of lava
cmd coated the rest half a meter thick
in volcanic ash, but through a miracle
of organization and good fortune only
one person died (from inhaling the
poisonous fumes).
Their first piece of luck was the fact
that the cataclysmic blast tore through
the east side of Eldfell away from the
town, sending most of the 30 milllon
tons of lava from the eruptions toward
the sea. So much lava, in fact, that the
island grew by 15 percent.
Their second was the fact that the
50 to 100 metre high waves of molten
material that burned and buried so
much of Heimaey only reached a tem-
perature of 1,100 C. If the lava had
heated up just another 100 degrees it
would have flowed like water and
wiped out the community before any-
one could flee.
A third bit of luck was the presence
of the entire fishing fleet in harbour
that night and still another the close
proximity of the NATO base at
Keflavík on the nearby mainland.
Using its aircraft and the town’s boats,
most of the population was evacuated
to Iceland proper in just over four
hours, an incredible feat considering
the circumstance.
Some 300 citizens stayed behind to
carry out vital services and try to fight
the encroaching lava, their major
problem being to stop the flow that
was threatening to cut off the harbor
entrance, a death sentence for a com-
munity that lived on fishing.
And they weré lucky. Physicist Þor-
bjöm Sigurgeirsson suggested some-
thing that had never been done: hos-
ing cold seawater on to the lava to
slow it. The U.S. Navy at Keflavík lent
them 42 giant pumps for the experi-
ment. And it worked.
It worked so well, in fact, that the
lava flow stopped 175 metres short of
closing the gap and the new breakwa-
ter improves the old harbor immense-
iy-
It took five months for the erup-
tions to end and life to get back to a
semblance of normalcy, though it will
never be as it was. Not when 21 years
later school children still work sum-
mer holidays cleaning up ash. Not
when a sooty wall of black lava
sprawls over the town’s outskirts with
half-demolished houses projecting
from its face. Not when the ground is
still too hot to stand on half a mile
from the town’s centre.
All these things, of course, are grim
reminders of a frightening experience
for locals but they’re fascinations for
visitors to Heimaey, the largest and
only inhabited island of the 15 in the
Westmen group, named for five Irish
slaves who murdered their Icelandic
master, Hjörleifur, and fled to the
uninhabited isles sometime before the
year 1000. (In Scandinavia the Irish
were lcnown as Westmen.)
Heimaey has had a turbulent histo-
ry. Down the centuries it and the other
islands were easy targets for rogues,
raiders and privateers of every ilk and
hue.
And always there was the threat of
volcanic activity rumbling away in the
background. That threat became a
reality in 1783 when a major eruption
on the mainland poisoned the seas
and killed all the fish around the
Westmen islands, in 1963 when a new
island of lava, Surtsey, thrust itself out
of the ocean southwest of here and in
1973 when peaceful Eldfell blew sky
high.
And now the cod have disappeared.
Indeed, this is not a land of milk
and honey.
But if life has dealt harshly with
islanders, it’s not reflected in their
demeanor. They’re a cheerful lot with
an optimistic outlook and a practical
bent, an attitude perhaps best exempli-
fied by the fact they now use their
friendly neighborhood volcano to heat
their water and their homes.
And up there on the volcano in the
midst of the desolation and devasta-
tion is another tribute to the human
spirit, a terraced garden of iris, prim-
rose, phlox, roses, poppies, marigolds,
lobelia, lupins and daisies, a bright
wonderland of color against the black,
scenting the air between the whiffs of
smoke.
It was cut out of the lava by a
Heimaey couple in their 60s who
began their painstaking toil in 1988,
clearing the site by hand, carrying up
eveiy seed, watering and nurturing and
feeding until this miracle evolved.
Heimaey has another claim to fame:
10 million puffins, the world’s biggest
colony, inhabit these islands and the
clown-faced birds with the overgrown
red-tipped bills can be spotted on
Cont’d pg. 22
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by George Bryant
HEIMAEY, Iceland — At 2
a.m. on Jan. 23, 1973, the
5,000 residents of this island
community were jerked from their
sleep by an alarm they couldn’t
ignore, one that lacked any kind of
snooze control.
With a roar like a jumbo jet, “a
smell like the bowels of hell” and
flames that lit a nightmare world, the
innocent hill with which they had
lived cheek by jowl for 1,000 years
blew sky high propelling smoke and
ash 9 km (5.5 miles) into the air and
spewing rivers of molten lava toward
the town.
A new volcano, Eldfell, had come
violently into being.
It seemed the end of the world as
they staggered, dazed and dismayed,