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Europe’s most dangerous volcano rumbles, and Italians weigh the risks

VaselineAugust 25, 2024

0 6 minutes read

Europe’s most dangerous volcano rumbles, and Italians weigh the risks

Anthony Faiola and Stefano Pitrelli
| Washington Post

Pozzuoli, Italy – In the red zone of the awakening Phlegraean Fields, Europe’s most dangerous volcano, 2,000-year-old ruins rise from the earth, pushed upward by hydrothermal force. The waterline is receding at the docks as the ground rises. Thousands of earthquakes, including one that forced 1,500 people into temporary shelters, send shockwaves of fear through coastal communities.

Residents are now keeping their emergency kit bags packed, bracing for larger quakes or, worse, an eruption that some experts fear could be devastating. Nearly 80,000 people happily inhabit the sulphurous caldera, playing football in the streets and cooking up rich stews in apartments with majestic views of Capri and Ischia, the emerald islands across the Gulf of Naples. In all, an estimated 485,000 people live in the designated danger zone of a smoke-belching colossus that ancient Romans believed was an entrance to hell.

The most pessimistic experts suggest that it may even be time to consider moving, leaving residents with a difficult choice: should they stay or should they leave?

The crisis is escalating a debate within Italy’s scientific community over the scale of the threat posed by the 8-mile-wide monster, which is scarred by more than two dozen craters and is believed to have produced the most violent eruption in prehistoric Europe. There is no evidence of a sudden surge of magma that would herald an impending eruption. But volcanic events can be highly unpredictable, and the new cycle of volcanic earthquakes — along with a measurable 2-centimeter (0.8 inches) rise in the ground each month — is worrying.

An eruption could range from the kind of limited eruption that toppled a boardwalk in Yellowstone National Park last month to something catastrophic. Experts say the fields could cause more damage than Vesuvius, about 25 miles away, did during its historic destruction of Pompeii in 79 A.D.

A number of scientists are warning of a possible tipping point—none more so than Giuseppe Mastrolorenzo, a senior researcher at Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV) who has been locked in a public battle with the agency he serves, arguing that it is not taking the threat seriously enough. He describes a worst-case scenario in which a deep fissure opens in the Earth, spewing forth a mushroom cloud of toxic gas, superheated ash and pyroclastic material. At night, the emissions would be shrouded in lightning bolts. Views of the coastline would be shrouded in a deadly black pall. In the aftermath, whitish-gray ash and rocks would blanket the land.

Even a significantly smaller but still powerful eruption, he said, “could devastate the entire metropolitan area of Naples, with its 3 million inhabitants.”

“The pressure could explode like a bomb,” he said, standing under the blazing sun and looking out over a vast crater lake created during the last major Phlegraean eruption in 1538.

Some of his own bosses—and Pozzuoli Mayor Luigi Manzoni, too—dismiss such talk as scaremongering, saying there is no reason to leave this sun-drenched country now. The danger is serious but manageable; the threat of a major eruption is remote. The biggest threat, they say, would be a new wave of volcanic earthquakes. They believe this can be dealt with without the costly evacuations and reinforcements that took place in the 1980s, the last time the Phlegraean Fields came to life.

Meanwhile, the national government is sending mixed signals. On the one hand, Rome imposed a temporary building ban last month, and a senior minister called it “criminal” that people would ever be allowed to live in the shadow of such a threat. Yet Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni also appears to want to stay. She has pandered to local politicians and pushed for a €1.2 billion redevelopment of a neglected waterfront threatened by the volcano, including a new city park, land reclamation projects, new housing and infrastructure.

The threat “has always existed in Pozzuoli,” Manzoni said. “We have to learn to live with it.”

The ominous science

Italy is the most volcanically active country on the European mainland, and two of the country’s most active volcanoes are in the midst of minor eruptions. On the southern island of Stromboli, the eponymous volcano spews lava with more bark than bite. In Sicily, the showy Etna blows its top, causing minor inconveniences rather than general panic.

And then there’s Campi Flegrei, the fiery or Phlegraean fields in English, a volcano with almost half of its caldera in the Mediterranean Sea. Rock samples suggest that a mega-eruption here 39,000 years ago triggered a volcanic winter in Europe linked to the extinction of the Neanderthals.

Although the magma beneath the Phlegraean Fields isn’t shooting up, the volcano has become more dangerous, said Giovanni Chiodini, a retired geochemist who was previously in charge of geochemical monitoring for the area and has published academic papers on the Phlegraean Fields. The volcano’s magma is losing pressure, releasing gas and vapor that rises through the rocks and liquefies.

“If we were talking about a volcano in Antarctica, we would all say it was heading for an eruption,” Chiodini says, suggesting that in a densely populated area like Italy there may be a greater reluctance to alarm people.

Chiodini said the volcano could just as easily calm down as erupt, but it’s the uncertainty that breeds fear. How much warning residents would get is anyone’s guess. The 1538 eruption had earthquakes so intense and persistent that early residents had days, even weeks, to leave. Current assessment plans — now being refined for speed and efficiency — call for 72 hours to move half a million people to safety.

But Mastrolorenzo says an eruption could occur within hours, threatening the metropolis of Naples, Italy’s third-largest city. The area may not be prepared. Evacuations during the May quake were disastrous, citizens say; some drivers were stuck in gridlocked traffic and forced to walk to the safety of a beach. A subsequent evacuation involved only a handful of participants.

For decades, the Macellum of Pozzuoli, the columned ruins of an ancient market, has risen and fallen as volcanic activity has alternately lifted and pushed down the earth beneath its foundations. The ruins are now in a period of uplift again, with the waterline rising by between 2 and 4 cm per month since last year, though still far less than the 14 metres of rise seen in less than a year before the 1538 eruption.

Carlo Doglioni, director of the INGV, said the land’s rise is not as dramatic as the last major volcanic eruptions here four decades ago. Citizens should be concerned, he said, but he criticized Mastrolorenzo’s doomsday predictions. A yellow alert is in effect in the area. But current measurements, he said, do not suggest “people should evacuate at this time.”

“Mastrolorenzo is looking for visibility, to attract attention,” he said. However, Doglioni said it would also be “wrong” to underestimate the risk. Asked whether people should leave Pozzuoli, he said: “Personally, I wouldn’t like to live there.”

The threat is clear

At 1:46 p.m. on July 26, Andrea Vitale, a 67-year-old retired schoolteacher, froze in the kitchen of his apartment built into the Phlegraean Field caldera. He heard a loud bang and felt a surging sensation, as if the building were riding a wave. In the living room, his young granddaughter screamed. Balou, his Pit Bull mix, barked incessantly. A crack appeared in a living room wall.

“In Pompeii they had no idea,” he said. “But the threat is clear to us. That’s what they’ll say when they find us in the ashes.”

The 4.0 quake in July was the second major earthquake in two months. A 4.4 quake on May 20 caused more damage and forced the evacuation of three schools, a women’s prison and more than 100 families. Others, like Vitale, have homes that were reinforced in the 1980s, when his neighborhood was evacuated for 18 months. But even some of those structures have begun to crack.

Civil society groups stress that local government is deliberately downplaying the threat and that the national government must do more, for example by providing faster and additional assistance with repairs and helping residents who want to relocate.

“They have minimized the problem so as not to scare people, who are more concerned about the economy,” said Laura Lovinelli, head of the citizens’ group Campi Flegrei.

Nello Musumeci, Italy’s minister for civil protection, acknowledged that a government plan for large-scale redevelopment in a nearby red-zone city appeared to conflict with efforts to discourage new construction in the area. The local government is offering allowances to residents in temporary housing because of the May quake, and the national government has approved subsidies to help with construction. But the state cannot cover all the costs, Musumeci said, suggesting that residents who choose to live there should share the cost.

As tourism declines, restaurants have closed and trade has plummeted. Rossana Maurelli, 56, said sales at her family’s ceramics shop — which sells dishes decorated with fiery images of volcanic eruptions — have fallen by 60 to 70 percent since last year.

She recognizes the danger. These days, the local beach is the only place she finds peace. She says she goes there every day to avoid being stuck in her apartment, where she sometimes imagines the walls collapsing.

But she cannot imagine leaving Pozzuoli, her family’s home for generations.

“We are so in love with our country,” she said. “Our businesses are here, our homes.”

VaselineAugust 25, 2024

0 6 minutes read