Heart of fire: followup
Aucklanders aren't the only people living close to volcanoes
Last week, I talked about what it means to live close to an active volcano or, in Auckland’s case, an active volcanic field. Since then, I’ve found out a few more curious points about living near volcanoes. It turns out that more than 800 million people – more than 10% of the world’s population – live within 100 kilometres of an active volcano. The countries with the largest numbers of people living close to active volcanoes are Indonesia, the Philippines and Japan. Volcanoes are a very real hazard for many, many people.
As the world’s population grows, more and more people are exposed. However, our overall vulnerability to volcanoes is decreasing, as shown by a decreasing number of deaths due to volcanoes, in proportion to the world’s population. We are better at monitoring volcanoes, better at planning, better at communicating and better at evacuating people from vulnerable areas.
For Auckland, a recent study has found that evacuating an area within a 5 kilometre radius would take around two days. This number is higher than the evacuation times for hurricanes in places like Texas and North Carolina, largely because Auckland’s geography is difficult, with few routes out of the city. However, the times aren’t as long as they are for some other cities with difficult geography and few evacuation routes, such as New Orleans and Florida. That’s encouraging news, given that Auckland is likely to have a warning time of 5-15 days. Nonetheless, I still hope that we don’t need to test those figures anytime soon.
The remains of an ancient lava flow at Takapuna beach
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