Eldfell

On an Icelandic island in 1973, the earth split open without warning, spewing forth a massive flow of molten lava in the direction of Iceland's premier fishing port. As the lava advanced towards the town, a physicist named Thorbjorn Sigurgeirsson suggested a way to fight against the flowing red rock. What followed was an unprecedented feat of courage and engineering, a truly unique moment in the history of humanity’s struggle against the elements, but one that only stood a chance if the locals were first able to put their fiery squabbles with one another aside...

Actual Events

The Night Before

On January 23, 1973, seismic stations on Iceland picked up something unusual – a simultaneous set of earthquake swarms about 50 miles apart. On a map in Reykjavik, the Civil Defense technicians drew circles around the epicenters and found they overlapped...

The Eruption

Between 2:00 and 2:30 a.m. that night, the townspeople of Vestmannaeyjar on the island of Heimaey ("Home Island”), awoke to a strange thundering noise. A mile-long volcanic fissure had opened in the ground less than a quarter mile from the eastern edge of town in a cow pasture. Soon, the volcano’s initial murmurings became out-and-out explosions, so violent they shook the town. People watching the nascent volcano could see shock waves rumpling its mushroom cloud. Seconds later, they would feel the explosion.

The gaping fissure quickly developed into a lava-spewing crater before forming a new mountain, which was named Eldfell (“Fire Mountain”). It was the beginning of one of the most destructive volcanic eruptions in the history of Iceland – and one of the most ambitious battles in mankind's struggle against the forces of nature.

The Town

Vestmannaeyjar was a prosperous fishing village, as important to Iceland’s economy as New York City is to the U.S., and the Icelandic Civil Defense Organization had a contingency evacuation plan ready. The town’s fishing fleet was put to use in evacuating the majority of the town's 5,000 inhabitants, along with the island's livestock.

Before long, the town was full of empty houses, some with lights in windows, some with front doors open. Few had managed to take anything with them as the remote community confronted the terrifying prospect of its own Pompeii.

As the eruption intensified, massive flows of lava poured out of the mouth of Eldfell and flowed towards the town, threatening to destroy it and seal off the mouth of the harbor. The 300 brave islanders who had opted to stay weren’t ready to abandon their homes without a fight. The question was: how?

The Plan

At first, there was talk of bombing the volcano. In one desperate plan, a U.S. Navy ship would pound the mountain with high-explosive shells. In another, a precision bomber would drop an explosive charge in the crater. There was no way to be sure, though, that the intervention wouldn’t make the monster even angrier. They needed to hit it with something else – something that could steal its power, not add to it. The answer would come to a visiting physicist, Thorbjorn Sigurgeirsson, who realized that the island was surrounded on all sides by the only weapon that might stand a chance… Water.

Thorbjorn theorized that seawater from the harbor could be sprayed onto the lava flow in order to cool it and stop its progress. At first, the cooling effort was confined to the lava front, where temperatures reached 2000°F. Men stood on cold ground before the flowing rock and blasted it with water, dispersing the heat and creating a wall of chilled lava to dam the flow behind.

Thorbjorn and his crew quickly realized that in order to solidify enough lava to stop the flow, they would have to spray an area much larger than first anticipated. That meant they needed more water, which meant more pipes, more pumps, and more trucks to transport everything and everyone to the front lines. Thorbjorn was an academic. His head was in the clouds. He would need someone with his feet planted firmly on the ground. Someone who could put his crazy plan into action.

The Action Man

Thorbjorn’s partner came in the form of the Icelandic fire chief of a nearby American military base, a slender man of deceptively mild aspect, vaguely professorial, appearing like a genie through his own pipe smoke. He sometimes wore a uniform, with stripes that suggested military rank, but he was an Icelander, not a soldier, and, in any case, no width or number of stripes could ever have conveyed the status he acquired on the island. His name was Sveinn Eiriksson, but no one used it. On Heimaey, he was known as “Patton”, the fire chief dispatched from American base at Keflavik. He was the first one who tried to fight back. Before he came, people were just saving furniture. Patton put iron over the windows to protect the homes. As the townspeople would tell it, he was a man of great action – "The man in charge of the pumping.”

Under Patton, the effort would soon expand into the most ambitious program ever attempted by man to minimize the damage caused by a volcanic eruption. What began as the effluent of a few fire hoses would eventually amount to 6 million tons of water pumped on the lava—the equivalent of turning Niagara Falls onto the island for half an hour. But to achieve this, the town would have to come together in a way it never had before, putting their petty differences aside as the daily advance of the volcano forced them into a shrinking crucible of space. It was a task harder that anyone could have imagined. For one, many of the newly homeless were forced to move into the one space large enough to accommodate them – the town aquarium.

Heroes, etc.

Thorbjorn, the archetypical scientist, was full of conceptual alternatives, while Patton preferred ideas to report for duty one at a time. When Patton asked “Does it work?,” Thorbjorn would say “It will do no harm.” The two men butted heads everyday in what came to be known as “battle meetings” due to their ferocity. Also present at these meetings were Magnus Magnusson, the mayor of Vestmannaeyjar; Pall Zophoniasson, the town engineer; Thorleifur Einarsson, a geologist; and Gudmundur Karlsson, managing director of the island’s largest fish factory.

Before long, a strange bevy of outsiders would join their ranks. These included Haroun Tazieff, a French volcanologist of world renown, who gave his opinion that there was no future for Heimaey because he thought another eruption was coming. In particular, Haroun was concerned about hydrogen emissions, which he warned could cause the island to explode.

Despite all the chaos, the natural beauty of the eruption drew admirers of its own. At one point, a high-fashion model landed on the island, was photographed on the black ash against the volcano fires, packed up, and flew away.

The eruption—for all its great surprise and early spectacle—had grown slowly, giving the islanders “time to get used to it.” But the never-ending uncertainty began to take its toll. Relationships struggled. One couple, Lynn and Villi, had not known each other very long, and had serious doubts about staying in Iceland, as he wanted her to do. She had, in fact, pretty much decided to leave, and now, in the harrowing cold, she became certain that she wanted to go. Plowing the snow with her feet to make large letters, she began to write “I HATE YOU”. She finished the “I” and was working on the “H” when, feeling ashamed, she knocked the arm and one leg off the “H” and made an “L.” Her completed message said “I LOVE YOU”. The sentiment distracted Villi on the mountain. His vigilance relaxed, and a glowing bomb, much larger than he was, landed beside him with a thud.

As one islander explained, “If your marriage has a crack in it, and then you have an eruption, everything comes out in the open. It’s like in John Steinbeck in The Wayward Bus, when the bus gets stuck out in the country.” In a number of instances, one partner did not wish to leave, while the other did. No one said love was easy, but prenuptial understandings do not typically include a volcano. Especially one on the attack...

The Monster

Eldfell continued to spew molten lava from its crater as it grew to a towering 700 seven hundred feet above the town. That was before the north side of the volcano broke loose, swallowing 30 houses in an avalanche of fire.…

The split in the volcano also unleashed a new tongue of lava 1000 feet wide and 65 feet high, which this time was headed directly toward the town. The flow, known as "City Flow", burrowed under and tossed apart the barrier defenses set up by the islanders, taking out 70 houses in its first day. When the lava moved against the houses, some flared up like ping-pong balls ignited by a match, others were crushed like eggshells, others came off their foundations and were scuffed along through the neighborhood until they broke into pieces and were eaten. The next day, City Flow took out 30 more homes, swallowing the pipes set up by Patton’s pumping brigade. As one local said, “There was much confusion in the battle meetings at this time.” People considered abandoning the island. If they were to succeed, Thorbjorn and Patton would have to put aside their differences.

The Battle

Coming together, Thorbjorn and Patton conducted a review of their operation. They had to up their game at every level. Everyone would have to join in on the front line if they were win the fight…

Bulldozers utilized the piles of volcanic tephra to sculpt barriers positioned to divert the lava from the center of the community. The fire engines, which were actually small vans equipped with pumps and hoses, were kept busy fighting house fires ignited by falling lava bombs. Hoses set on tripods on the roofs of the cabs of bulldozers mimicked the appearance of flame-throwing tanks. When seaweed plugged an intake for the pumps, lobstermen dived into the frigid waters to clear it out. 

The populace was organized into pumping platoons, serving 48 hours at a stretch. Those on the front line were issued water bottles to cool down their smoking shoes and ski goggles to protect their eyes. Helmets were supplied for protection against the falling ash, but more dangerous were the volcanic tephra “bombs” that rained from the sky. Bombs that landed as much as two-thirds of a mile from the crater might weigh as much as sixty pounds. The pumping crews usually worked outside the radius of the big bombs—except when they were on crater watch, in an ironclad hut quite close to the volcano, where forward observers could see into the churning lava, report its current style of eruption, and warn their colleagues in the fog about fresh eruptive flows.

The locals devised ways of their own to avoid the bombs. People walked in pairs—one leading the way with eyes on the ground, the other looking up. Thorbjorn taught recruits his own technique. “When you come to a crater and it starts blasting, don’t run,” he advised them. “Look up in the air for a bomb. If you think one is coming down on you, wait until you are sure it will hit you, then step aside.”  

When the exhausted crews got off the line, they were at times unable to sleep, because, as Hawaiians would put it, they were “hearing Pele”: buildings shook, windows rattled, and the inferno went on grumbling. As one of the fighters described it, “It more felt than sounded. You felt it when you slept, not when you were working. The sound was like thunder.”

Despite their best efforts, the islanders realized they had brought a knife to a gunfight with their existing pumps. To shoot water 30 feet into the air, almost any strong pump will do. If you want five hundred vertical feet, enough to cool a lava flow, you need unusually specialized ordnance. Finally, in the tenth week of the eruption, after some political maneuvering, Patton managed to secure a delivery of 19 "invasion pumps” from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers weighing two and a half tons each. Their aggregate maximum output was 13,000 thirteen thousand gallons a minute. The islanders finally had their gun.

Unleashing a torrent of water, the islanders converted 5 million cubic yards of steaming, molten lava into solid rock, erecting a defensive wall that enabled them to outlast the final throes of the eruption. On July 3, five and a half months after the fissure opened and the fire curtains rose, Thorbjorn went down into the crater of the new volcano and pronounced the eruption dead.

Though many structures were lost, the harbor and the majority of the town were spared thanks to the cooling effort. Not long after, those who had fled returned and began to dig their homes out from under the ash.

The Aftermath

In the effort to rebuild, the islanders were quick to realize that under the craggy surface lay a goldmine of residual energy. Scientists and engineers teamed up with the residents of Heimaey to create a heating system using the thermal energy from the cooling lava. For decades after the eruption, this system would provide free heat to every home on Vestmannaeyjar – and to the hot tubs at the town’s swanky new public pool.

Like its people, Vestmannaeyjar's valuable harbor also ultimately profited from the crisis. Instead of sealing it off completely as many had feared, the lava merely narrowed the harbor's mouth, making it better sheltered and improving it as a fishing port. Vestmannaeyjar’s amazing story has also made the town a popular tourism destination for mainland Icelanders and volcano fans around the world. The Eldheimar Museum (meaning "worlds of fire") is built around a cottage that was engulfed in ash.

Looming above the town, dormant for now, remains Eldfell…