A man was lost in a crack in the town a few days ago, falling into the crack, then into a hole leading to a larger chamber underneath. The chamber had water in it experiencing tidal flow. His body was not recovered. If magma erupts into such cracks it could cause steam explosions (phreatic or phreatomagmatic eruptions).
This may be a dumb question but near me is a cement factory that (incidentally) makes stackable concrete blocks the size of a car. They stack them multiple stories high and multiple blocks deep, at least while being stored at the factory.
What about lava makes it so we can’t redirect the flow around neighborhoods with these things?
There is a berm that got built around the north of the town but unfortunately the fissures go under the town. The initial eruption came across the barrier so a lot of the lava has been diverted. The second eruption was inside the barrier so not a lot can be done. If you scroll down the linked page there’s a map of the flow and barriers.
There’s footage of them saving the machinery being used to build the barriers.
Go to about 11:58 on the timestamp in the bottom right corner, you will see the lava flowing along the berm (which is doing a good job of protecting a large building) while workers with bulldozers and diggers close the gap in the berm that the road goes through.
The fissure close to the town opens up at about 12:20. The lava flowing behind the berm reaches the road at about 12:50.
In this case, I believe it’s that the eruption is getting bigger and lava is seeping out of new & unexpected places in the ground, thwarting the existing redirection barriers. They do have some flow barriers, but the lava is oozing around them. They were hoping it wouldn’t come to this, but at some point, if the eruption gets big enough, lava barriers become pointless.
Imagine owning the house over the road where the lava is heading right now, watching the disaster in slow motion. I guess the lava flow could stop right in front of it?
Iceland has socialised National Catastrophe Insurance. The premiums are very low but if your house is lava'd or avalanched you get a reasonable payout.
Of course it's better if that doesn't happen, but if it does there's solid support for the victims.
Hopefully, everyone is safe. But what of the homes? I'm interested to know what generally occurs, in terms of insurance, when homes and property are destroyed by lava flow? Is there insurance coverage for such events? Are the homeowners covered to rebuild/buy new homes elsewhere?
Yeah they evacuated the entire town from what I heard. So there is no danger to any lives. I'm pretty sure the city has accepted that as long as no one dies, that everything else can burn.
It's crazy to think that just one week before all of this started me and my girlfriend were hiking to Gunnuhver hot springs and stayed at pretty much the exact spot over the night where the eruption happened next to Grindavik, mostly because there's nearly absolute darkness ... except for the bright light above Grindavik that looks like an island of light in the middle of nowhere, it was really magical.
Iceland is such a beautiful place.. although I was angry and sad for most part of the trip seeing how tourism changed Iceland over the last 20 years. As recently as 2014 we had to ask the locals in mostly sign language and paper maps how to navigate the Westfjords; there's 5G now in even the last corner of the island.. guess I'll need to resort to Svalbard and Greenland to go truly off-grid in the future :-)
Even if the lava doesn't destroy too many buildings, can the town survive the dual shocks of the ground under all the rest of the buildings being unstable, and uncertainty about whether any further investment in the town will be obliterated by a future eruption? The long term looks bleak to me.
That's not very helpful for people not from Iceland as far as indicating distance. An hour drive doing 60mph is totally different from windy roads along a coast line or through valleys.
Google Maps isn't too useful: "Sorry, we could not calculate driving directions from "Reykjavík, Iceland" to "Grindavik, Iceland"
A man was lost in a crack in the town a few days ago, falling into the crack, then into a hole leading to a larger chamber underneath. The chamber had water in it experiencing tidal flow. His body was not recovered. If magma erupts into such cracks it could cause steam explosions (phreatic or phreatomagmatic eruptions).