Packard: Vesuvius’ crater explodes, burying two villages
Flame-specked smoke whooshes 5,000 feet in air, covers area for 10 miles around
By Eleanor Packard, United Press staff writer
On the slope of Mount Vesuvius, Italy –
The volcanic crater of Mount Vesuvius exploded with a terrifying roar tonight, blanketing the countryside for 10 miles around under a pall of smoke and burying two mountain villages beneath tons of flowing lava.
At 5:30 p.m. (local time), I saw a huge column of flame-specked smoke whoosh up out of the crater and soar 5,000 feet into the air, where it billowed out, showering the mountainside with rocks and ashes.
The smoke spread as far north as Naples, 10 miles away, halting all traffic in the streets there, and blanketed the ruins of ancient Pompeii, buried in the volcano’s greatest eruption almost 1,900 years ago.
The unexpected flareup indicated that the eruption, which began Friday, was worsening, and Allied military authorities announced that more than 14,000 additional men, women and children were being evacuated hurriedly from the northwestern slopes.
The village of San Sebastian was buried under the 70-foot wall of lava flowing down the mountain, and the neighboring hamlet of Massa di Somma was virtually obliterated.
Italians fleeing rivers of lava
By Edward P. Morgan
Naples, Italy –
The village of San Sebastian on the northwestern slope of Mount Vesuvius was buried today under millions of tons of lava writhing slowly down like a gigantic gray and orange glowworm from the volcano which is in the midst of its most violent eruption in more than half a century.
Some 3,700 villagers in San Sebastian and neighboring Massa di Somma were evacuated before dawn by the Allied Military Government, under the direction of Lt. Col. Robert Kincaid of New York City, commissioner for Naples Province.
A later United Press dispatch said the great stream of lava moved down the northwest slope with inexorable force and by midafternoon had traveled 500 yards beyond San Sebastian to cover three-quarters of Massa di Somma. The force of the flow showed no signs of slackening, although it was cooling rapidly as it spread.
AMG is now evacuating 2,000 inhabitants from the town of Cercola, which is directly in the path of the flow farther down the mountainside and scarcely five miles from Naples itself. The city, however, does not appear to be threatened.
Field kitchens are feeding the refugees whose homes, fields and vineyards have been devoured by the monstrous molten river, now nearly five miles long, which started zigzagging on Saturday from fissures high on the side of the cone.
The Mayor of San Sebastian said the eruption surpassed anything in his memory since 1892. The lava is spilling not only in several forking streams down the side of Vesuvius facing the Bay of Naples, but also in the opposite direction toward Trecase in the general vicinity of Pompeii.
Officials of the Italian Royal Observatory told the United Press the flows of lava had reached the proportion of the 1872 eruption, the worst in modern times, and added that they saw no signs of an early slackening.
When it comes to fiendish force and breath-catching brilliance, nothing the great god Mars or any modern warriors could devise would match nature’s spectacle of Vesuvius at work.
Great folds of smoke
In the daytime the mountain is cloaked in great folds of black-gray smoke. At night, the fiery flow stains the sky the color of blood and paints a panorama directly out of the steaming Halls of Hades.
The peaceful people who live on these slopes grow grapes and make good wine called Lacrima Cristi – tears of Christ.
Faced first with the terrors of modern war, the Nazi “occupation” and then with the thunderous advance of Allied armies to drive the enemy out, these folk are entitled to shed especially bitter tears of sorrow for this visitation of misery and desolation beyond their due.
Reporter visits scene
Lt. John H. Senseney of St. Louis, Capt. Carleton Harkrader of Bristol, Virginia, a jeep named Doris and I watched the lava consume San Sebastian between midnight and sunrise this morning.
Man is a pigmy before such force and can only conceal his awe in hollow wisecracks or rich but reverent bursts of profanity.
Our first view of this particular stream was a lateral one, from the stone house of Signora Galla Giorgio which was bypassed a scant 10 feet. As the slag and glowing coals inched forward, the mass gave off an eerie tinkling sound like icicles breaking up in a spring thaw.
Houses wrecked
In the course of two hours, we watched the seething orange tongue of the river lick forward and demolish a three-story stone mansion along with a wheelless Italian limousine and an upright piano which only shortly before seemed so sturdy and durable.
High tension poles of steel melted like solder sticks and the bridge over San Sebastian’s Via Rome simply crumpled up and vanished before our eyes.
Ahead of this inferno ran the refugees in little individual rivulets. The women stretched their arms to heaven in the black night and called on God for help. Children sobbed in the streets and one old lady wailed that she would not leave her hovel of a home, but U.S. and British military police gently loaded her into a truck.
Pitiful people
An Italian couple named Mario and Rosa came trotting down a path carrying two washtubs full of crockery, a clucking hen and a prodigious mattress. They crossed the edge of a small bluff and started down a precarious flight of crumbling stone steps, picking their way into the blackness with a ruddy glow silhouetting their burdened backs.
Suddenly Mario pitched headlong down the steps, strewing broken plates everywhere.
Rosa moaned and said a prayer, but Mario picked himself up and, despite her protestations, marched back to their hut and retrieved another staggering load of hardware.
This time they descended safely and struggled off to a friend’s house.
