What is the biggest amount of damage caused by a volcano (recorded)?
Ben
Dear Ben,
That's kind of a hard question to answer. It depends on how you count the
damage--# people killed? area of farmland buried? total $$ amount lost?
Probably the most people killed by a recorded eruption was in 1815 by the
Indonesian volcano Tambora. More than 90,000 people were killed, most by
starvation because of the destruction of farmland and crops. I'm not sure what
the most expensive eruption was. You can often have a big eruption in a
sparsely populated place costing much less than a small or medium eruption in a
populated place. The 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens was probably pretty
expensive since it occurred in a developed country and was in a location
relatively close to populated areas. The Pinatubo eruption was also expensive
because of all the people who were affected and because it hastened the
departure of all the US troops from Clark Air Force Base.
Scott Rowland, University of Hawaii
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