r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/TheMarkola • 1d ago
Video Kids The moment school kids realized Mount Sinabung was erupting behind them (Indonesia, 2018). Look how gigantic and terrifying an eruption can be, even if it's relatively far away.
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u/UCFknight2016 1d ago
Imagine how Vesuvius must have looked to people in Pompeii. Some thing like this.
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u/Nairadvik 1d ago
Only closer (I think)
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u/MartianMule 1d ago
Pompei was 6 miles from Vesuvius. Not sure how close this one is here.
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u/UCFknight2016 21h ago
It looks a lot farther away but from the top of Vesuvius to Pompeii is like a 20 minute drive.
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u/billybob1x 1d ago
Imagine how these kids ancestors felt seeing Krakatoa.
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u/thekeffa 1d ago
If you were close enough to "See" the third major eruption of Krakatoa on 27th August 1883 which is the event people think of, you weren't feeling anything for very long. It detonated with the force of 200 megatons of TNT. The pressure wave nearly killed the entire crew of a ship that was 40 miles away from the island but left them all with some grievous injuries.
The photos and accounts you see from the period are mostly from other days before or after the 26-27th August because the entire eruption took place over five months, starting 19th May and ending the 21st October.
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u/Grif1121 1d ago
Crazy enough Anak Krakatoa just erupted in the last few days. Anak Krakatoa is the volcano that emerged in the caldera (massive sinkhole from implosion of a volcano) of Krakatoa. Anak Krakatoa literally means “Young Krakatoa”. 8 people are missing…
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u/CinnamonBunzAttack72 1d ago
Jesus no wonder people used to think the gods were angry
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u/BA_Bones_33 1d ago
Was thinking the same thing. Imagine being trapped on an island when something like that just pops off
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u/above_average_magic 1d ago
They for sure are... Have you seen the state of things?
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u/chintakoro 1d ago
pretty sure the gods are just eating popcorn and taunting us: "so, y'all said you got this, huh?"
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u/ObjectiveOk2072 1d ago
Illinois, USA must have done something to piss off the god of the wind this year
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u/Illustrious-Share312 1d ago
They still seem pretty peachy compared to most of the history of civilization.
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u/SwitchIndependent714 1d ago
Yeah and don't forget that there is often lightning when a volcano is erupting
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u/jason2354 1d ago
It’s neat how we’re constantly reminded why people from a long time ago believed in some pretty crazy stuff.
The world is a scary place.
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u/drdicerchio 1d ago
I mean the magnitude of this is absolutely absurd. These people will never forget this for the rest of their lives
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u/Pjoernrachzarck 1d ago
The amount of belief in crazy stuff was no higher in 29 BC than it is in 2026 AD.
Ancient people weren’t stupid. They were us. We’ve not significantly changed as beings.
We remain, today, just as driven by fictional characters and anthropomophisations of things out of our control as we were back then. The earth is still “angry” to us.
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u/Beneficial_Ball9893 1d ago
Yeah no if the clouds are that big in your line of sight you are NOT at a safe distance.
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u/kingtacticool 1d ago
If the clouds are that big I doubt running is going to change the outcome
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u/n8_Jeno 1d ago
Id still try. It might make the difference
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u/yamanagashi 1d ago
I’ve often wondered if I was in this situation would I want to be preserved looking like 🕺or should i look like 🏃
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u/domscatterbrain 1d ago
Finding the nearest shelter or at least a concrete building gives you better chance of survival than running away.
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u/Warstorm1993 1d ago
With a pyroclastic surge, no way. If you live, you will be burn to the majority of your body. Your best case is a basement or deep building but even than, you are likely to be slowly roasted alive inside a house size oven. You best luck if you have the time is going perpendiculary to the flow direction (if you are lucky and it's not a ignimbrite, it will follow the relief and waterway). If it's an ignimbrite / lateral blast / caldera collapse, your only escape is not being in the area when it happen.
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u/Daddynaughtyboy 1d ago
It's actually happened irl. During the 2006 Mt. Merapi eruption in Yogyakarta, 2 volunteer trapped in a bunker when the eruption happened. They were found burn alive trying to save their life
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u/adnanssz 1d ago
Yes, I have been visit to that shelter and realized no wonder they got roasted alive. The shelter only have 1 door and it buried. There should be alternative door to another route. Theres a lot material inside made by steels so the inside will be like an oven
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u/Badestrand 1d ago
Does that hot cloud not pass over the bunker quite quickly? I imagine it doesn't stay around for hours being that hot, to have enough time to heat up that whole thing?
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u/Icyrow 1d ago
i mean there's tons of thermal mass of VERY hot stuff, filled with small layers of air, so it's kinda like having a heating coil hotter than anything you've normally been around, then throwing over a really good insulating blanket.
it's basically luck as to whether you burn to death or not and you can't possible know when you first go in.
just imagining being a dad, finding shelter, thinking it will be safe only to hear the rumbling with your kid down there as it slowly starts heating, soon to be agony.
i feel fucking awful just imagining how difficult a situation so many people have found themselves in in the past.
nature is brutal.
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u/adnanssz 1d ago
from what i know it's not just a hot cloud. a lava buried the door so the cannot reopen it. if they have alternative door, they probaly have a chance to get out from bunker once hot cloud left them.
it stated that because they cannot reopen the door, the temprature gradualy increased to 500 celcius
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u/Warstorm1993 1d ago
Pyroclastic density current (PDC, the real term) is separated in two part (same for a snow avalanche). You have the pyroclastic surge, with is less dense and a mix of hot volcanic gas, air, steam, ash and some debris. Like a snow avalanche, it act as a surging cloud, shred trees, blowout building and (since it's a PDC), incinerate everything. Inside the cloud, you have the pyroclastic flow, where most of the material is ... flowing. It's a strange state, because it have the caracteristic of a lava flow, a debris flow but at the same time, is still very light and can go to high speed. That is the part of the PDC that will follow topography and leave most of the deposit, but also is the part that annihilate everything since it's akin to an high speed, abrasive, extremely hot debris flow. The surge and the flow create distinct deposit and effect. The surge is deadlier since it cover a large area and is fast, but nothing survive the center of the PDC, the pyroclastic flow.
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u/fell-off-the-spiral 1d ago
Could you like try to take shelter in some water or would it start to heat and boil? Say if you’re near the coast line or river?
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u/Warstorm1993 1d ago
Also not a good idea, pyroclastic flow split in contact with water. The surge continue over the water at high speed and still lethal heat (but with less tephra and other pyroclastics material). The rest continue underwater in a turbiditic flow (a kind of density current). The contact between the two is often explosive. In large volume pyroclastic flow and ignimbrite, the mass of water moved by the material can also result in a local tsunami (or global in the case of very large eruption).
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u/Empty_Sea9 1d ago
Didn’t the survivors of Pompei successfully manage to escape by fleeing to the surrounding hills vs going to the ocean, for that same reason?
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u/shitpostsuperpac 1d ago
There’s a book called Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why by Laurence Gonzales (I think, it’s been a minute).
Anyway the author looked at mass casualty events that also had a number of survivors, focusing specifically on the “why” part.
I remember the most pivotal answer to “why” is that the people who survived always understood the threat earlier and immediately began making moves. They didn’t hesitate, wait, feel embarrassed, care about social norms. They simply realized that they had entered into a moment where survival was paramount.
One heartbreaking story I remember is an adult son and his elderly mother being trapped on a sinking ferry. It had capsized and the mother couldn’t manage the climb out of the dining hall or whatever they were in. The tables were bolted to the floor and it was possible to climb up to the stairs and then out.
The son refused to leave his mother and he began the climb with her clutching to him. His mother realized that they would both die if she let him try to rescue her. At first she pleaded with him to let her go and when he wouldn’t, she fought her way out of his arms and jumped down into the climbing water.
Because of her, the son survived to relate the story. But he has to live the rest of his life having gone through that.
Anyway, you asked about Pompei. Pompei would have been survivable for more people if they just knew they had to leave. There was enough time to evacuate because many did. The total eruption lasted ~2 days and began with 18 hours of ash and pumice rain.
Out of an estimated population of 10,000 - 20,000, to date we have only discovered about 1,100 bodies.
Most got away it seems. We can’t know why others stayed but it isn’t too crazy to theorize that at least two of those individuals were an elderly mother and a dutiful son that would not leave without her.
Just tragic.
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u/-SaC 23h ago
IIRC there were a good couple of days that the inhabitants had to leave the city at their own pace and to wherever they wanted before shit went down. Pliny the Elder came to the city with some friends during this time and they wandered around with a cushion or pillow on their heads to protect against the falling rocks.
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u/JustKindaShimmy 1d ago
The air temp of a pyroclastic flow can get over 1000°F and drop well over 100 meters thickness of debris, so unless you're near the ocean, and suddenly develop gills and the ability to deep sea dive, you're toast
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u/Connect_Vacation_458 1d ago
Yeah, I can imagine the kids were just in shock at first. It’s wild how quickly a situation like that can escalate.
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u/bbreddit0011 1d ago
On an island? I would be walking around in a stupor just like them… like what would you do.
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u/Beneficial_Ball9893 1d ago
At Pompeii most of the survivors did so by fleeing to the ocean. There were boats that took people away. Pliny the Elder actually died saving people from Pompeii.
Edit: He was actually saving people from Stabiae, another city near to the volcano.
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u/Tyler_Zoro 1d ago
Nah. At that point the distance you can run is a trivial fraction of the distance from the volcano. If it's going to reach you then, being an inch further out is the same odds of dying as being another 50 yards to any reasonable approximation.
What you really need to worry about is lava bombs.
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u/Efficient_Stomach_21 1d ago
From being burned and turned to ashes and being burned and turned to charcoal
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u/AspergerKid 1d ago
Running maybe not but if Indonesia has school busses then driving the kids to safety should be the number 1 priority
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u/AdvancedSandwiches 1d ago
There is a distance at which you are not safe but running will make you safe. There is a distance where your wounds will be severe but running will make them moderate.
If you don't know what those distances are, you should assume you are in that window and run.
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u/ConfessSomeMeow 1d ago
Same thing for nuclear bombs, except with duck-and-cover. There is no worse advice than the nihilistic "we're all gonna die anyway" attitude.
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u/Infinite_Music2059 1d ago
But no one died, so like what are you trying to say?
These eruptions can go 55 miles up into the sky. That is going to fill a lot of your perspective even if you are completely safe.
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u/PlasticSignificant69 1d ago
IIRC, this is recorded 6km away from the crater, which it is already at a safe distance. Most likely issue is probably the contaminated water
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u/ARM_Alaska 1d ago
Easiest method is to make a "thumbs up" and hold your arm fully extended in front of you. When your thumb covers the entire incident, you are now far enough away. This is taught in HAZMAT courses for responders but it's useful for a lot of scenarios. Explosions, spills, fires.. Not for gooses. You're never far enough away to be safe from gooses.
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u/Goby-WanKenobi 1d ago
It was a safe distance. There were evacuation plans within 6km and there were no casualties.
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u/King-of-Plebss 1d ago
If I were in charge of making sure those kids were safe, I wouldn’t stop moving them further away until an authority told me we were safe.
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u/SleepingAmoebas 1d ago
Better hope the wind is at your back.
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u/GinjaNinja-NZ 1d ago
Maybe, but if you're being chased by a cloud of gas and ash, you might be better off with a headwind 🤷
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u/Revolutionary_Eye887 1d ago
I’ve been to Pompeii. I know how it ends. No thanks.
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u/blade276 1d ago
google says no fatalities fwiw
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u/ConfessSomeMeow 1d ago
Google's AI is so fast it's already quoting the 15 comments to that effect in this thread.
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u/GoldDragon149 1d ago
Google's AI is so fast it read the news from when this happened eight years ago.
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u/Abigail-Marston 1d ago
Fwiw when I asked Gemini just barely, one of the sources it provided was this reddit post. A pretty good reason not to use it for things that actually matter.
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u/an_older_meme 1d ago
That pyroclastic base surge. Good God. They're transfixed. The adults should be loading them into vehicles and hauling the mail upwind.
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u/tytxnium77 1d ago
Brother they drive motorbikes & 3 wheelers ahaha probably no school buses either. Everyone walks
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u/weasel_mullet 1d ago
I've seen a mother, father and 5 children all on the same scooter. And thats a pretty normal thing to see on the daily! Don't underestimate Indonesians and their scooters..
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u/Overall_Astronaut_33 1d ago
Lmao, not anymore though, it's quite rare to see that sight now, either they use cars or buses
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u/Mixander 1d ago
That bring back memories. Lol My mom/dad used to do that, and I as the eldest son always sit on the very back, I always hold as strongly as I could for my dear life whenever they speed up. Lol
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u/AspergerKid 1d ago
I just checked, Indonesia does have school busses but not everywhere. Mount Sinabung is located on Sumatra with the closet big city to it being Medan. Medan has school busses so if the kids' school fall under the Medan administration then these kids should have access to them.
But given we even have this footage it is safe to assume they survived.
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u/Pinky_Boy 1d ago
School bus is certainly not the norm
Hell, even i jakarta, or surabaya, i've never heard of any school that have busses that picks up students within their district like in the US
Most (like 95%+) of student arrive at the school either by walking, public, or private transport
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u/BowlApprehensive2642 1d ago
kids in Jakarta start school at 6 or 7am to avoid traffic jams. There's no point sitting in a school bus going nowhere for hours.
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u/Pinky_Boy 1d ago
Yeah
School officialy starts at 7, but a lot of them have some kind of activity before that so the school start hour usually 10 to 15 minutes before 7
And by 6.20 or 6.30, the road usually has already jammed full
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u/perenniallandscapist 1d ago
I love that you found 1 school district in a huge country to extrapolate the commonality of school busses, and pretty poorly at that since so many school districts don't have busses and any 1 of those could be used to extrapolate school busses, or a lack there of, in Malaysia, too.
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u/JejeBeans 1d ago
If the cloud is that close, it is most likely filmed from a town up on the mountain as well (maybe Berastagi). There are plenty of villages on the mountain.
Medan is still a couple of hours away by car and you can't even see the mountain from the city. Even there, school busses is not the norm.
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u/Sylvan_Strix_Sequel 1d ago
No one died in this. Y'all are overreacting to lens compression like those photos that make my fuji look like it's looming over towns it's not even close to.
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u/OneCrustyEarbud 1d ago
Oh that little baby crying for his momma broke my heart.
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u/Beibzi 21h ago
Now im wondering why so many languages, some on different sides of the planet have the same sounding word for mother, it's the same in my language, mama.
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u/OneCrustyEarbud 20h ago
Probably because babies make the mama (and dada) sound easier and earlier than other sounds. At least that's what I always assumed.
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u/dkyguy1995 20h ago
I think this is actually one of the leading theories sort of.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mama_and_papa
It's all speculative, but we do know that the sounds of -m -p and -b are the easiest to make and among the first that babies master, so it makes sense to use those sounds to represent the things babies are going to want to talk about the most.
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u/Glagaire 1d ago
Title says "relatively far" and people in the thread are claiming lens effects make it look closer than it really was. The opposite is true. The school is SD Negeri 046417 Naman and its only 5.5 km from the summit of the volcano. The pyroclastic flow reached 4.9 km (i.e. just 600m short fo where they were) and the area they were in experienced significant ash and tephra with visibility soon after this dropping to 500m. If anything for the people there this would have actually looked even more terrifying.
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u/ThatGuyBackThere280 1d ago
The comments freaking out, going "Why aren't they getting people out of there" amuses me, of a video that is 8 years old and you can just easily look up the information on it:
The danger zones were already evacuated before the eruption. There were 0 fatalities from this.
People really need to look stuff up before panic commenting.
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u/Nami_Pilot 1d ago
I love watching a spectacle just as much as the next person... but FUCK THAT! I'm the fuck out of there the moment I realize what's happening.
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u/Independent_Cash1873 1d ago
A pyroclastic surge can travel over 200 MPH, and is hot enough to barbecue anything it touches. So, yeah. They're right to feel afraid.
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u/ARM_Alaska 1d ago
200 to over 450MPH! Let's be clear about that.. "Over 200" is fast as fuck and insanely terrifying but adding that "to over 450MPH" really helps with the pant-shitting idea of just how fast it can move.
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u/bimbinibonbooboo 1d ago
Impact Zone: Hot gas and ash clouds swept down the slopes in a 5-kilometer diameter, coating nearby villages in thick ash. Ash falls were reported as far away as Lhokseumawe, 260 kilometers to the north. [1, 2]
Casualties: Indonesia's National Disaster Mitigation Agency reported zero fatalities or injuries.
In case anyone is curious like me
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u/Zealousideal_Pie8706 1d ago
The poor little child crying and calling for their mumma, aw, hope they were reunited quickly.
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u/Kurtman68 1d ago
Take a deep breath children. You won’t be able to breathe easy for the next few weeks.
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u/Internal_Situation69 1d ago
I remember watching Mt. Saint Helens erupt while sitting on our deck eating brunch. The debris cloud filled the horizon. A couple of hours later ash was raining out of the sky.
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u/Bina_Assault 16h ago
Ngl, that would scare the snot out of me. I don't blame those kids one bit for reacting that way.
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u/iamshitting 1d ago
Humans have built big, wonderful things but they all pale in comparison to what nature is capable of.
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u/Fit-Let8175 1d ago
Not something I'd like to see out my bedroom window first thing in the morning.
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u/Creepy-Astronaut-952 1d ago
“See what happens when you don’t do your chores?”
Wholesome core memory
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u/Sweet-Palpitation473 1d ago
In the very last moments when all you see is a giant wall of pyroclastic ash, it looks like some kind of Lovecraftian, soulslike horror
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u/SleepingAmoebas 1d ago
I lived on Mt. Etna when I was stationed in Sicily back in the early 2000s when it erupted. It was late at night, and I was sitting on my coach watching TV when all of a sudden there was a thunderous explosion and the house shook. It probably lasted for 30 seconds. That was 30 full seconds of sheer terror and panic. My first thought was a large just crashed in my front yard. I was convinced that was what happened. I expected to open my front door to flames and destruction, but when I opened my door and looked out there was nothing. I was confused, but then I noticed the people across the street coming out and looking past my house. My front door faced away from the top of the mountain. I went around the corner, and I could see lava spewing from the volcano. We were several miles from the top, and you could tell it was spewing a hundred feet up. I grabbed my video camera and started recording. I zoomed in and you could see huge boulders, probably bigger than a school bus, flying through the air and bouncing down the mountain. Even that far away it was scary, even though we figured we were safe. I can't imagine how scared I would've been as a child experiencing that.
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u/Smile_Space 1d ago
Knowing what I know about pyroclastic flows I would also be running even though I'd never beat it lolol.
Good thing no one died.
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u/ulyssesfiuza 1d ago
I'm sticking to my original plan to deciding what to do if a volcano blast off. I live in a place where there are no volcanoes for thousands of kilometers.
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u/sarmard 1d ago
Interestingly, it was inactive for about 400 years till it started erupting again almost annually from 2013. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Sinabung
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u/Jemenezzz 19h ago
This look likes some shit they show on tv in movies where everything goes wrong around the world
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u/firebender_airsign 11h ago
Completely unrelated but… these kids crying and calling for their moms just broke my heart…
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u/Repulsive-Cry2968 1d ago
Living surrounded by mountains on three sides here on the border, this footage is genuinely my worst nightmare. You realize how quickly the geography goes from being breathtaking to a literal trap. Just trying to evacuate the local street dogs I look after during our regular landslides is panic-inducing. I cannot even imagine the sheer terror of trying to outrun a pyroclastic cloud like that. Those kids must have been so scared.
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u/Independent_Cash1873 1d ago
A pyroclastic surge can travel over 200 uphill, and is hot enough to barbecue anything it touches. So, yeah. They're right to feel afraid.
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u/Vuila9 1d ago
Tbh, for me as a child in that scenario, it probably would’ve been a good time. I likely wouldn’t have thought much about the consequences beyond the immediate benefit of being able to skip class that day. also the eruption looks magnificent, not something you see everyday
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u/AbominableGoMan 1d ago
I would also be losing my shit. Or loosing my shit. Pyroclastic flow is no joke.
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u/Inevitable_Gain8296 1d ago
I looked up mount sinabung on google earth and it is the most stereotypical looking volcano. Almost out of a cartoon.
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u/MrSyaoranLi 1d ago
No direct fatalities doesn't mean no fatalities. Exposure to ashfall and smoke leaves lasting health problems. The air quality must have been horrible that month
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u/Sasoroshii 1d ago
sadly, Indonesia has the most craziest and dangerous volcanoes out there
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u/Greyh4m 1d ago
No fatalities reported.