The 1 million people who dwell at the base of Mt. Vesuvius don’t need to be reminded of the terrors that another eruption of the infamous volcano would bring – they know all too well. Pompeii, completely destroyed in the year 79 B.C.E., is just minutes from the swarming city of Naples, Italy. Again, an eruption killed 4,000 people in 1631, while another 1944 took the lives of 26. Vesuvius is now supposedly Italy’s “biggest public safety problem”, though no one can predict when it awaken. Luckily, the chance of another Pompeii-sized eruption is only around 1 percent.
Mount Vesuvius, a volcano near the Bay of Naples in Italy, is hundreds of thousands of years old and has erupted over 50 times. Its most famous eruption took place in 79 A.D., when the volcano buried the ancient Roman city of Pompeii under a thick carpet of volcanic ash. The dust swept across the land like a flood, one witness wrote, “and cover the city in a darkness…like the black of closed and unlighted rooms.” When a group of explorers rediscovered the site in 1748, they were surprised to find that, underneath a thick layer of dust and debris, Pompeii was mostly intact. The buildings, artifacts and skeletons left behind in the buried city have taught us a great deal about everyday life in the ancient world.…show more content… Experts believe that another Plinian eruption is due any day--an almost obscure catastrophe, since almost 3 million people live within 20 miles of the volcano’s crater. By the time the Vesuvius eruption sputtered to an end the next day, Pompeii was buried under millions of tons of volcanic ash. About 2,000 people were dead. Some people drifted back to town in search of lost relatives or belongings, but there was not much left to find. Pompeii, along with the smaller neighboring towns of Stabiae and Herculaneum, was abandoned for