I’ve hiked atop active volcanoes, and am still here to talk about it. It depends on the volcano and its risk factors.
Cruise ships stop for layovers at various places and tourists may get off and do their own thing. It looks like that is what happened here. The cruise ship had **4579 passengers;
** thus only a very small fraction went for a volcano tour on this 12 day excursion from Australia.
Wikipedia never did update its change in height.
Not in Baltimore. In Baltimore, they’re all Ernest Borgnines.
I don’t know if “hit by a FU tornado” was a typo or intentional, but it was awesome either way. Tornadoes act exactly like they’re dancing around going “fuck you, fuck you, and fuck you”.
Wouldn’t Andy Serkis be a better analogy?
No. Gollum died…but Joe Banks lived happily ever after with Meg Ryan and some really great luggage.
When I heard the first reports on the radio I said to my wife “must be White Island”.
We were in NZ in 2003 and a White Island trip was a possible but when we read up on it, it was clear that it was, and always has been a pretty unstable place with clear risks inherent in an active and unreliable volcano. The literature impressed upon us right there and then that an eruption, without warning, was a possibility.
We didn’t go.
A newlywed couple from Virginia, Matthew and Lauren Urey, were badly burned.
American couple on honeymoon seriously injured in New Zealand volcano eruption
As of this morning there are six confirmed deaths (one person died in the hospital on Tuesday) That leaves 31 in the hospital, of which 27 have burns over 30% or more of their bodies, many over 50%. Some of these burns are deep and severe and patients have already had to undergo surgery for them. Burn injuries also include injuries to the lungs, probably from inhaling sulfur dioxide (a pretty common volcanic gas) as well as hot air and volcanic ash. By the way, volcanic “ash” is actually very, very fine fragments of volcanic glass with sharp edges. It’s not something you want to inhale. That is extremely bad news and likely more of the injured will die.
New Zealand is looking at transferring the injured Australians to Australia to free up local resources, but many patients are not stable enough to transport, and people from places like the US and UK will have to remain in New Zealand for some time as there is no way to transport severely injured people halfway around the world in a safe manner. It will be weeks, at the very least, before those patients are stable enough to move.
No one is expecting those missing on the island (eight people) to be found alive.
And plenty of people book those tours independently of the cruise line - you can often book the exact same tour directly from the tour operator at a lower price.
On its face this sounds reasonable, but you know that the risk management calculus for rescuers (and the resource utilization calculus for emergency medical personnel) will never be made dependent on moral judgments about the victims they rescue/treat.
San Franciscan Michael Schade (not the opera singer, Michael Schade - Wikipedia) reported that he was standing at the crater’s edge just 20 minutes before the eruption, both he and his family.
He’s been tweeting about it:
He is very fortunate (of course). Wow, talk about an event that’ll make you think how closely you came to dying.
What are the legal issues? It was known before the disaster that going near the volcano was dangerous as fuck, but so are a lot of extreme sports and people are still allowed to do them. Or is it a question of whether some tour operators baldly lied and told people the trip was 100% not risky?
Don’t play in active volcanoes, people!
Why weren’t we told about this before? I was planning to go play in an active volcano and now I have non-refundable plane tickets.
I suspect they told the truth - something along these lines:
“A true eruption could be dangerous - but we’ve been doing this tour for X years with no problems and many happy customers. We’re confident enough that we send our helicopters, pilots and tour guides there regularly.”
I recently returned from Hawaii, where I walked across the floor of the Kīlauea Iki crater. That’s associated with a volcano that’s still active. Hundreds of people make that hike every day, and I don’t believe it has erupted since 1959
Of course, there haven’t been any special warnings recently about that one, and I gather there were in NZ. I wonder if the tourists knew that the risk was unusually high.
What did the brochure say about Sentinel Island?
A few articles about the rescue: