June 1, 2016 • 36 mins
In 1973, after a series of earthquakes, a fissure opened up on the eastern side of the Icelandic island of Heimaey. As the eruption developed over time, it became more dangerous, and a variety of measures were undertaken to stop the flow of lava.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from works
dot com. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracie Wilson.
I'm Holly Frying. I went to Iceland. I know it
(00:22):
was for fun and not for work, which is why
you did not hear any Iceland episodes before I went
to there. I also did not take any notes for
the podcast while I was there. But what I did
do is get immersed in a lot of Icelandic history,
because it's just about impossible to go to Iceland and
not do that, Like you would literally have to go
into a hotel and not leave or talk to anyone. Uh,
(00:45):
there are lots of museums in Iceland and lots of
historical sites that are very easy to get to and
visibly marked from the road, so you kind of would
would have to work. It's the same little symbol as
a command key on a mac is this sort of
point of interest sign in Iceland and a lot of
other sort of Northern European countries, so it's very easy
(01:07):
to find things to learn about. And then sometimes you
just take a walk to give your camera battery a
little bit more time to recharge, and then you stumble
across a consecrated pool that's tied to both Iceland's saga
age and historical events during the Reformation. It's just everywhere.
That one pool is everywhere lurking. That one pool was
(01:31):
behind a guesthouse that we stayed at. We literally had
no idea there was anything interesting back there and then there.
It was one of the events that I learned about
that fascinated me the most, though, was from Iceland's much
more recent history than that particular serendipitous fond uh. And
it's really on the cusp of how recent we normally
get on the podcast. It is a massive and prolonged
(01:54):
volcanic eruption on the island of hay May. Heads up
that every piece of non ice Landic video footage I
have seen about this eruption pronounces it in some other
way like him or hay Mai or hay Me, but
hay May use closest to how I've heard people actually
pronouncing it while I was in Iceland. Hayma is a
small island off of Iceland's southern coast, and it's part
(02:17):
of the Vestman Air Archipelago, which is also known in
English as the Westman Islands and this eruption is what
we are going to talk about today. Iceland is located
on the Mid Atlantic Ridge, basically a long, mostly underwater
volcanic mountain range that runs all the way from the
Arctic down towards the southern tip of Africa. And this
(02:38):
ridge exists because of the divergence of tectonic plates. As
the plates slowly move apart, magma rises up and lava
fills that gap that's created gradually and sometimes suddenly, forming mountains.
And most of this happens under water, but in some
places the resulting mountains are tall enough to break through
the surface of the ocean, and this is the case
(02:58):
with Iceland, which eyes along the North American and Eurasian plates.
Iceland itself is a relatively young island, and in the
grand scheme of things, it really hasn't been inhabited for
very long. The first permanent settlement there was established in
the ninth century. The first written record of a volcanic
eruption on Iceland is from the tenth century, and volcanoes
(03:21):
have been an ongoing part of life in Iceland for
all of the centuries since then. Iceland is home to
well over a hundred volcanoes, and there are about thirty
active volcanic systems. Thirteen volcanoes have erupted since Iceland was settled,
with the links of the eruptions ranging from hours to months,
and a lot of people like to make the average
(03:42):
one eruption every five years. This brings us to the
Westman Islands. This is a group of fifteen Ish islands.
It depends on how you classify them where that number
exactly lands along with lots of smaller islets, including some
of the youngest islands on Earth. One of these is
the island of Searcy, which was formed through volcanic activity
(04:03):
in nineteen sixty three, so very young Searty has been
protected since it was originally formed, allowing scientists to study
the way species make their way to a new environment.
Hay May is the largest island in the West Bend
Islands and it's home to those islands only town, which
is also called Vestman Air. There are a couple of
(04:24):
summer homes on other islands in this archipelago, but Haymay
is the only one that's inhabited year round by an
actual established community. Although it's the biggest island in the
Westman Islands, Hamy is still quite small. It's about five
square miles or thirteen square kilometers, And there's a ten
CNN article that describes Hamy as quote a baron chunk
(04:46):
of volcanic rock. That is not an apt description. It
is volcanic, it is rocky, but it is plenty green,
and there are birds everywhere, and in the summer months,
it's actually home to one of the biggest puffin popula
sations in all of Iceland, so it is also adorable.
I was just gonna say, we should have a moment
to pause so everyone can go, oh the puffins. I
(05:10):
got the hold of puffin while I was there. It
was not a wild puffin. It was a rescued puffin.
I did not go pick up a puffin on a cliff.
That would be bad. Hey May's coast is largely formed
of tall cliffs with basalt stacks extending out into the
ocean in the middle. It's flatter, and before nineteen seventy
three it's most prominent feature in its relatively flat interior
(05:34):
was the volcanic cone known as Halgafel. I'm going to
take a moment and mentioned that in icelandic an l
at the end of the word makes a sound that's
classified as a voiceless lateral fricative. This is not a
sound that exists in English, and then two l's in
a row haven't even slightly different non English phony. Trying
to replicate the sound throughout the podcast would be extremely
(05:57):
distracting because it's it's like you put your tongue at
the top of your mouth and then kind of exhale
a little bit. It sounds very sibilant and kind of tiskey,
and it would be really distracting to hear two people
that don't speak Icelandic try to do that for all
of these volcano names. So we're just going to say
it the way it is spelled, which is more like
(06:17):
Helga fell. So Helga fell and the rest of the
island of Hami is Or was believed to be extinct
or at least dormant by both the residents of the
island and scientists. There had been plenty of offshore eruptions
of other volcanoes, including that one that created the island
of Surtsey a decade before this story happened. There had
also been plenty of eruptions on the mainland of Iceland,
(06:40):
but Helga fell had undergone no known eruptions since the
settlement of Iceland. Everybody thought where they were living was
a pretty safe spot to be. On January three, a
series of small seismic tremors rattled through southern Iceland, with
about two hundred seismic events over about fourteen hours. Another
(07:02):
shallower series of earthquakes started on the twenty second, at
around ten pm, and some of them could be felt
on the island of Hamay, but all were small, with
the largest having a magnitude of about three. If this
had happened today, these earthquakes would have basically been a
thirty hour heads up to the residents of Hamy that
something big was about to happen and they should probably evacuate.
(07:24):
But at the time, the field of seismology and Iceland
seismic network we're a lot less advanced than they are today.
Seismologists didn't have a way of pinpointing the epicenter of
these little earthquakes, and those that did think the sem
seismic activity was a warning of something that was going
to be in the form of an eruption were more
focused on Katla, which is a volcano on the mainland
(07:47):
which is known to be active, and has in fact
erupted more than twenty times since Iceland was settled. But
what this seismic activity was really foreshadowing was a massive
eruption on Hamy itself, which we were going to talk about,
but first we are going to pause for a word
from one of our fantastic sponsors. When shaking and noise
(08:11):
started on the island of Hamy at about two o'clock
in the morning on January nineteen seventy three, the residents
who noticed it and had also felt the earlier earthquakes
thought this was just another one. They're kind of like,
here we go again. What was really happening, though, was
that a fissure was opening up along the eastern side
of Haymy, just over a thousand yards from the center
of town. In about two hundred yards from the edge
(08:34):
of town. That's roughly nine hundred meters and a hundred
and eighty meters for those who are in the world
of metric measurements. The fissure quickly spread. It ran roughly
southwest to northeast, stretching all the way from Hamy southern
to its northern coasts and beyond. With submarine volcanic activity
going on at either end. At the beginning of the eruption,
(08:58):
a curtain made up of about four the fountains of
malten lava launched out of this fissure, which was incredibly dramatic,
but not at least for a first the first few hours,
all that damaging a natural slope of land kind of
directed the falling lava away from the town, and then
favorable wind also at first kept most of the tefra,
(09:19):
which is sort of a catch all term for a
volcanic material that has launched into the air, kept most
of the tefra from coming toward the town, and this
meant that even though the residents of Hamay had been
taken completely by surprise by the sudden appearance of a
huge fissure and a curtain of lava right next to
their town on an island believed to be volcanically inactive,
(09:42):
they had time to evacuate before things became really dangerous.
Volcanoes were aknown hazard, and Hamay and the mainland both
had evacuation plans in place. The evacuation itself was also
aided by another stroke of incredibly good fortune that there
were people that even described as being providential a storm
(10:03):
had moved through the region on the twenty second, so
Hammy's fishing fleet was all safely docked at the harbor,
along with some boats that really worked from the mainland
but had taken refuge in Hammy when the gale blew in.
In other words, the island had a ready made evacuation
fleet that was already there in the harbor, which was
at that point not being threatened by the erupting volcano
(10:25):
thanks to the lay of the land and the prevailing winds.
The town's fire department and police used horns and sirens
to wake residents and inform them of the danger. Residents
took what they could carry. They crowded into fishing boats
to be taken to the mainland port of Thorlo Sutton
and then on too Rakivic, which is Iceland's capital, by bus.
This was a trip that, while not necessarily comfortable, was
(10:48):
made safely by all who were evacuated. Although the storm
had passed, the water was still choppy, so seasickness was
a problem. It also took a lot longer than it
takes to get to the mainland by boat today. A
now there's a ferry terminal at Landia Hutton that's much
closer to the island. People who were ill or elderly
were mostly airlifted from Hamany's airport to the Reikjavik and
(11:10):
Keflavik airports on the mainland, which are about forty five
minutes apart by car. The evacuation flights used planes and
helicopters from the U. S manned Iceland Defense Force and
Iceland Air The evacuation was completely successful, with about five thousand,
three hundred people safely taken to the mainland, where they
all met up in Reikjavik. And this was a really
(11:32):
calm and efficient affair. In five or six hours, anyone
who could leave the island had left the island, and
from the boats people could see this curtain of fire
along the edge of the town as well as under
the water as they passed by. This makes me think
of the contrast of how sometimes these things happen and
(11:52):
there's always that person that holds out and says they're
not going to leave. But everyone left in a very order.
There were a very few people who stayed behind to
basically fight the volcano, but there was It was a
very calm evacuation. I think the fact that a lot
of the adults on the island had been able to
see the formation of certaincy to the south of them
(12:13):
from the island, uh and like that had not endangered
them probably helped people stay calm. I mean, people in
Iceland seemed pretty pragmatic about volcanoes in a lot of ways,
uh from my experience in ten days of being there.
Later the Government of Iceland sent workers to remove cultural
(12:37):
and historical artifacts from the island. Four hundred head of
livestock were also evacuated from the island. Because this was
deep in the Icelandic winter, Kvik had a lot of
hotel rooms available, so after being received fed and temporarily
sheltered at schools, Haymy's residents who didn't have family on
the mainland were mostly housed in bacon hotel rooms. Most
(12:59):
of the residents did would have family that they could
stay with, though, so the housing needs that that needed
to be provided by the government of the Government of
Iceland turned out to be pretty minimal. At the same time, though,
you can just sort of imagine how a close knit
community of only a little more than five thousand people
all living together on a little island, it is it
was splitting people up, even if they were staying with family,
(13:21):
was still pretty traumatic for the community itself. The government
of Iceland created and funded an emergency relief fund for
people who had been displaced by the volcano. They requested
prefabricated housing from Sweden, Canada, and Norway in order to
build temporary housing on the coast so the people from
Hamy who had made their living in fishing could continue
(13:43):
to work and hopefully lower the impact on Iceland's economy
by the disruption in Hamy's fishing industry. For the next
few months, the only people on Hamy would be the
very few people who couldn't leave because of something related
to their jobs like say that, people who kept really
critical things running uh and the people who were trying
to save the town, as well as scientists, some of
(14:04):
whom were from Iceland and somewhere from elsewhere. He came
in to study the eruption in progress. Not long after
this very well organized evacuation was complete, lava stopped erupting
from most of the fissure, concentrating itself primarily in one
roughly central portion of it. Cinders and debris from this
(14:24):
eruption started to form a cone, which would eventually be
named eld Fell or Fire Mountain. Within a couple of days,
eld Felt grew to one d ten yards or one
hundred meters tall. However, the narrowing of the eruption from
a curtain too more like a cone did not mean
it was any less destructive. It was actually the opposite
that was true. The favorable wind that had kept the
(14:47):
volcanic debris mostly away from the town during the evacuation shifted,
which sent tefra, burning cenders and lava bombs toward homes
and other buildings. Some of these buildings immediately caught fire,
Others were buried and crushed and falling tefra. Some were
just crushed under the weight of volcanic material, even if
they were spared from catching fire. Emergency crews cleared debris
(15:11):
off of roofs to try to keep them from collapsing,
and propped them up from the inside. They put corrugated
iron over windows on the volcanic side of the buildings
to try to keep volcanic bombs from shattering them and
setting houses on fire from the inside, and they erected
barriers along one side of the lava field. In the
hope of slowing its progression. Moving into February of ninety three,
(15:34):
the cone continued to grow. It roughly doubled in height.
By the middle of the month, A very steep rim
started to form on one side of Eldfell thanks to
a combination of wind and falling tephra. A lake of
lava started to form in the middle of the cone also,
and soon pressure from the lava lake combined with the
wind and caused this increasingly steep rim to collapse. The
(15:57):
collapsing wall in the mountain rolled across the eastern side
out of the town and buried a number of houses.
At about this time, the volcano also started to emit
increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. Air around
the volcano became progressively more dangerous to breaze. Birds and
other animals began to die as the build up of
(16:18):
gases in the air became poisonous. According to the museum
now located on the site of the eruption, poisonous gases
were the cause of the soul human fatality directly tied
to this eruption. At about at the same time as
Ldfell's rim collapsed and buried more of the town. The
lava flow from the volcano shifted directions as well. A
(16:39):
submarine lava flow broke a cable and a pipeline, which
were responsible for carrying electricity and drinking water from the
mainland to the island. On top of that, lava started
to threaten the islands. Port hey May had a natural
harbor that was sheltered on one side by a cliff,
and this harbor was critically important to both the islands
and i Sland's economy. If the volcano filled in or
(17:03):
blocked the harbor, it would become vastly harder to get
people and supplies on and off the island for the
remediation and cleanup efforts as well. This meant that Haymany
needed a way to fight back against this volcano, and
we're going to talk about that, but first we will
pause for another sponsor break. Today's podcast is brought to
(17:27):
you by square Space. Whether you need a landing page,
or beautiful gallery, or professional blog and online store, all
of these things are possible with a square Space website.
Holly and I have both used square Space for our
personal projects and have been really, really satisfied with how
easy it's been to use how great our websites have
looked when we've been done, and how easy it's been
(17:49):
to find answers to our questions and help for special
things that we were trying to do. Square Space is
really easy. Creating a website is simple with square Space
at the very intuitive cross us, and you can add
and arrange your content and your features with a click
of the mouse. There's a free custom domain that you
can get. If you sign up for a year, you
get that custom domain for free. The templates are really beautiful.
(18:11):
There are seamless commerce tools if you're looking to sell
things on your website, and there's twenty seven customer support
and every person in the customer care team is an
experienced user of square space and they all work in
the square Space office. So no matter how technical your
problem is or if it actually seems really trivial, it
doesn't matter, as somebody there is going to help you out.
(18:31):
Start your free trial today at square space dot com
and in to offer code history to get ten percent
off your first purchase. Square Space set your website apart.
As we alluded to before the break, Haymy was home
to a protected harbor that was critically important to the
Little Islands survival was one of two ways to get
(18:54):
on and off the island, the other being Ham's airport.
On top of that, fishing was one of Hammy's most
important industries, and Hammy's fishing industry was also extremely important
to Iceland's fishing industry as a whole twenty percent of
Iceland's fish processing plants were located on the island, So
without a working port, the island of Hammy would be
(19:17):
far less habitable and far less economically sustainable once the
eruption eruption was over, and really if if Hammy's fishing
industry was destroyed, that was going to be a huge
problem for Iceland's economy as well. Real threats to the
port began on February eleventh when a huge flow of
lava broke through Eldfell's base. It was about twenty meters
(19:38):
wide and twenty meters tall, and it threatened to fill
in the harbor. At this point, cargo planes had to
be requested to transport heavy earth moving equipment onto the
island because this flow of lava meant the harbor could
no longer accommodate boats large enough to carry them. It
was basically making the harbor shallow were the only things
that had a shallower draft could really get in and
(19:59):
out of there. In an effort to cool the lava
and slow it down, crews started spraying it with water,
first from the town's fire trucks using the municipal water supply.
Then a pumping ship was requested from the United States,
which would continue to draw water from the municipal supply. Basically,
the municipal water supply was the big volcano fighting power
(20:20):
source until the lava we mentioned earlier broke that pipeline
that had been carrying the water from the mainland, so
the decision was made at that point to try seawater.
The government of Iceland requested more pumping equipment from the
United States, and in the end, more than nineteen miles
that's thirty kilometers of pipe and forty three pumps operated
(20:41):
by seventy five workers at the peak of the operation
hurled water at the advancing lava in the hope of
cooling it down. Some of this work, and other work
associated with trying to salvage as much of the town
as possible, was incredibly dangerous due to the proximity to
the volcano as well as the poisonous gases in the
air and decreased visibility due to steam from cooling operations
(21:03):
and blowing ash and cinders. Over the next few months,
an estimated five point five million tons of seawater were
used to try to cool the lava down and divert
it away from the harbor and later from the town
as well. Basically, the lava heated up the water, making
lots and lots of steam and cooling off in the process.
(21:25):
As it cooled, the lava hardened, eventually making a wall
that molten lava couldn't could creep over but not really breakthrough.
So as this creeping lava would sort of top the
solid layer, they would spray that part to make this
increasingly tall wall of of hardened lava. There are some
(21:48):
people who will argue that we can never really know
if this worked, because who knows how the lava would
have behaved without all of this human intervention. However, the
lava flow was stopped yards or a hundred meters short
of blocking the harbor, and its progress was slowed through
the town as well. However, several of Iceland's fish processing
(22:09):
plants were destroyed before the water project could really begin.
Yeah I feel like some of the people who were like, well,
the lava could have completely shifted course will never know.
I feel like they're just kind of naysayers wanting to
say nay about it. The eruption was declared over on
July third, nineteen seventy three, and had been slowing down
(22:31):
for a while, but that was really five months. It
was more than five months after it had started. Water
cooling operations stopped on the tenth of July, and schools
were reopened that fall. It's estimated that two hundred million
tons of ash and lava fell in and around hey
May during the eruption. Lfell grew to a height of
(22:51):
six hundred and fifty six feet that's two hundred meters.
About a third of the town was destroyed. Not all
of the five thousand, three hundred people who had evacuated returned.
The population today is only four thousand, five hundred, so
it is still below its nineteen seventy three pre volcano level. Yeah,
there are still houses that are are buried, and a
(23:12):
lot of the people who didn't return where people whose
houses were under so much, uh so much volcanic debris
that they were like, it's never gonna get dug out,
and even if it is dug out, everything that is
in there is crushed. Uh. However, all of that lava
and tafra did wound up having some favorable impacts on
(23:34):
the island. I mean, there was definitely a huge loss
of property, fortunately not a loss of human life other
than the one person um who was killed because of
the poisonous gases. But the lava flow that almost blocked
the harbor was made into a breakwater and it now
provides more shelter for the harbor from a direction that
(23:55):
it had previously been exposed to. This huge increase and
volcanic material on the island also provided a much needed
source of landfill. Previously, if they had needed to fill
land in any way, they would have to sort of
have earth shipped in on a boat, which was not
very practical. Um, and the cooling lava under the surface
(24:18):
of the island is now one of the island's primary
sources of heat and hot water. In two thousand five,
the town council of Vestmaner agreed to excavate some of
the houses that were still buried. Lots of comparisons were
made to Pompeii. Under that ash. Some of the homes
were still intact, and even the ones that were crushed
still contained most of their owner's possessions. A museum, Eldheimar
(24:42):
opened in two thousand fourteen, and its centerpiece is one
of the homes that was crushed volcanic debris. And all
that museum is really cool. We should go you've are yen,
I'll just go. Yeah, if you uh, if you are
in Iceland, if you can get to Haymy from a
brief a brief air plane, a little airplane, little airplane.
(25:06):
Little airplanes still make me kind of nervous. So I
personally like the ferry. The ferry is about half an
hour um and this particular we didn't really plan an
itinerary beyond our lodging. We didn't we didn't plot out
day by day what we wanted to do, and so
we were staying somewhere not far away. And I realized
that this volcano or this volcano museum was on the
(25:29):
island and said, hey, do you want to take the
ferry and check this out? And we did so. Yeah.
That's that's how basically, uh, people fought a volcano, and
mostly one using what feels to me like a child's
logic of can't we just spray this with water and cool?
(25:50):
A little child's logic that mostly worked in this case. Yeah,
do you want to polish this episode off with some
listener mail? I do that. Listener mail is from Rachel,
and Rachel says hello. I'm an avid listener. I discovered
the podcast last summer when I started a fitness regiment
and was super sick of listening to the same playlists
(26:11):
over and over and over. I typically walk one to
one and a half miles a day, and your podcast
have made my walks much more interesting. I'm writing today
after listening to the White Wedding episode. I myself in
the wedding industry. I've been a wedding photographer for almost
ten years. I completely understand the sticker shocks the couples
feel when they begin to plan a wedding, and it
can seem, sometimes justly, that things cost more just because
(26:33):
the event is a wedding. You had referenced this wedding
up charge in the podcast, and I wanted to take
a second to address that and hopefully hopefully defend my industry. Yes,
it is true weddings can cost a lot of money,
but The misconception that vendors are charging more because they
can quote get more out of the bride trying to
plan the perfect wedding is false. We're in no way
trying to price gouge engaged couples. What must be understood
(26:54):
is that most wedding vendors are boutique businesses, and most
of these businesses are not only owned by individuals, but
also by that same person. If you hire my company
to be your photographer, you get me. I don't send
out a fleet of employees to cover our events because
we develop a relationship with our couples and we feel
the success of their day lies in our hands. Because
it is impossible for me to be in more than
(27:14):
one place at a time, I can only book one
wedding per week. I discreet that my services cost thousands
of dollars, but I'm limited in the number of events
I can do per year. Because I own my company
and handled not only the photographer, photography, editing business, running meetings,
engagement sessions, and communication with my clients. I work in
excess of sixty or more hours per week, if even
in the off season, when I may not be shooting
(27:35):
an event, when dividing out the hours worked by our
gross you would be able to see that the prices
wedding vendors command are actually quite reasonable. This is not
just in the photography business, but also for florists, cake bakers,
caters and planners. Weddings demand of not a lot of
attention and hours, and that is why the cost is
more than other events. For example, a wedding cake requires
days to create a birthday cake only hours. Cake bakers
(27:57):
must deliver the cake and many times cut the cake.
None that is required. None of that is required for
a birthday cake. Once again, I love your show. Thank
you for entertaining me while I'm on my walks. Um
and that is from Rachel. Thank you Rachel for sending
that note. I want to say, number one, these points
are true. Number two, that's not what we were talking
(28:17):
about when we said wedding markup. Uh. That's basically the
exact same explanation I gave to Patrick who is now
my husband, to explain to him why we were going
to spend lots of money on a wedding photographer. Right.
I wanted a wedding photographer who who knew what he
was doing, who would give us pictures that we would
be really happy with. Um, we needed to have our
(28:37):
wedding where my mother lives so that my mother could
be present at the wedding. That having it anywhere else
was not an option, and I that meant that there
would be other people who couldn't be with us because
of travel. Um, and I wanted to make sure that
we would have pictures and video to share with them
that would really capture what the day was like. And
so I used basically that same explanation to explain why
(28:58):
the wedding photographer was going to cost or than Patrick
really felt comfortable spending a photographer. But that's not what
I'm talking about when I say wedding markup. When I
say wedding markup, I mean like six identical dresses and
the white one costs two thousand additional dollars. Yeah. I
(29:20):
have some knowledge of this from the bridal gown side,
because I have made a lot of wedding gowns in
my time. Um uh, both as like a jobby job
and you know, just in making them for friends. Um.
Particularly in the larger bridle industry of fashion, like in
(29:42):
the larger stores, boutique stores are definitely not what I'm
referring to in that case here, because you will notice
there is always particularly if it is a store that
also offers alterations. M hmm. This is not always the case,
but there are certainly sometimes instances where they encourage people
(30:03):
to order address that they know is not going to
be the appropriate size because where they really make their
moneys and alterations. I remember seeing an episode of a
TV show where someone learned her dress is going to
cost five dollars to him and she was crying about it.
Uh So, yeah, I definitely we we both know lots
(30:24):
of people who work in creative industries and specifically in
wedding industries, and because they are experts in their field,
they charge rates for their work that I am happy
people are able to make uh and and to be
able to support themselves doing this work. But that's like
what we were really talking about was things like um uh.
(30:45):
When I was pricing cakes, I found several bakers whose
baseline for wedding cakes was more than double per serving
like any other cake. But that was before also having
a cake cutting fee and a delivery fee, or having
talked to the couple at all about what their needs are.
(31:06):
And then uh, there's also tied into the whole thing
that a whole industry of wedding magazines and websites that
I don't necessarily think intentionally. I mean, we used to
have a wedding website as part of our business when
we were owned by Discovery Channel, so we have like
some firsthand experience were you you were here at this point, Uh,
(31:26):
we have some firsthand experience and in writing about weddings
and what how wedding websites operate and and often they
maybe not consciously, but definitely do concretely reinforce what is
expected of a wedding and what is expected of a
bride and sort of put out the idea that, for example,
if your cake is not a multi tier wedding cake
(31:49):
that's like exquisitely perfect and beautiful and covered in seamless
uh beautiful sheerness, that everybody is going to think your
wedding is tacky and that is all they are going
to remember about your wedding for the rest of their life,
and from now on you will be remembered as the
cheap bride who had a grocery store sheet cake instead
of one that cost seven hundred dollars. So yeah, I
(32:13):
definitely respect like the hard work that people who own
beautique businesses and people who do like one on one
work with couples, uh to to make their day wonderful.
We definitely relied on some of those people for our wedding.
What I'm talking about is like the more here's a
mass produced dress that costs two thousand more dollars because
it's white. Or here are mass produced bras and undergarments
(32:38):
that also cost sixty dollars more than comparable ones because
they are from the bridal collection. Like that's the kind
of stuff I'm talking about. Well, and I will also
in defense of the bridal industry because I said I
have been part of it at various points on the
curve in my life. And I'm gonna preface this by
saying hashtag not all brides, but some of that up
charge is in dealing with It's very stressful sometimes to
(33:03):
deal with wedding parties brides. And I don't mean to
in any way um despair any particular bride. It's just
understandable that people get very worked up over their wedding.
They want everything to be perfect, and so sometimes things
(33:24):
can get a little dramatic. A little um high anxiety,
and I have to admit there is a certain degree
of up charge that I'm like, that's just like the
fee for your sanity, Like, like, I know this is
going to be a rough ride, so I should at
least make it worth my while. Understand that. Yeah, we're
(33:46):
getting sort of into stuff Mom never told you territory. Like,
I feel like some of that is a is a
circular problem because that then we circle back onto you.
Uh so much cultural Yeah, so many advertisements and so
many magazines that are geared towards this is the best
day of your life and it must be perfect. And
(34:07):
I would like to tell you that idea is crap. Uh.
I took a cue from my dear friend Juliana Finch,
who who banned the word perfect, because like, saying this
is my day and it has to be perfect just
sets everybody up for a way more stress. I do
feel also compelled to say, just for the record, you
were the antithesis of a bread zilla. So and so
(34:32):
many things that I was like, sure, Tracy, I've changed
the design of the beating on your dress. Cool. Uh. Yeah.
My favorite moment was realizing that the direction cards that
I had printed out for everyone who was staying at
the hotel had incorrect directions on how to get to
(34:53):
the venue because the exit from the parking deck was
and I was like, wow, let's see how life can
go on anyway. So yes, I I definitely admire in
respect people who are doing good quality, professional work as
a service. That's you know that people are in a
demanding position, but definitely not what we meant when we
(35:16):
said wedding markup. So if you would like to write
to us about this or any other podcast, we are
at History Podcast at how stuff works dot com. We're
also on Facebook at facebook dot com slash miss in
history and on Twitter at miss in History. Our tumbler
is miss in History dot tumbler dot com. We're also
on Pinterest at pentriest dot com slash missed in History.
Our instagram is at missed in History, and you can
(35:38):
come to our parent companies website. It is how stuff
works dot com. But the word volcano in the search
bar you will find a classic house stuff works article
about how volcanoes work. It will explain in some more
details about exactly what was going on from that volcano
when Hey May you basically exploded into a curtain of fire. Uh.
You can come to our website, which is missed in
history dot com, where you will find show notes for
(36:00):
all of the episodes Holly and I have ever worked on.
You will find an archive of every episode we have
ever done. You will find uh some tips about how
to search the archive. They're the lots of different stuff.
So you can do all that and a whole lot
more at how stuff works dot com or missed in
history dot com for more on this and thousands of
(36:22):
other topics because it how stuff works dot co.
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from works
dot com. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracie Wilson.
I'm Holly Frying. I went to Iceland. I know it
(00:22):
was for fun and not for work, which is why
you did not hear any Iceland episodes before I went
to there. I also did not take any notes for
the podcast while I was there. But what I did
do is get immersed in a lot of Icelandic history,
because it's just about impossible to go to Iceland and
not do that, Like you would literally have to go
into a hotel and not leave or talk to anyone. Uh,
(00:45):
there are lots of museums in Iceland and lots of
historical sites that are very easy to get to and
visibly marked from the road, so you kind of would
would have to work. It's the same little symbol as
a command key on a mac is this sort of
point of interest sign in Iceland and a lot of
other sort of Northern European countries, so it's very easy
(01:07):
to find things to learn about. And then sometimes you
just take a walk to give your camera battery a
little bit more time to recharge, and then you stumble
across a consecrated pool that's tied to both Iceland's saga
age and historical events during the Reformation. It's just everywhere.
That one pool is everywhere lurking. That one pool was
(01:31):
behind a guesthouse that we stayed at. We literally had
no idea there was anything interesting back there and then there.
It was one of the events that I learned about
that fascinated me the most, though, was from Iceland's much
more recent history than that particular serendipitous fond uh. And
it's really on the cusp of how recent we normally
get on the podcast. It is a massive and prolonged
(01:54):
volcanic eruption on the island of hay May. Heads up
that every piece of non ice Landic video footage I
have seen about this eruption pronounces it in some other
way like him or hay Mai or hay Me, but
hay May use closest to how I've heard people actually
pronouncing it while I was in Iceland. Hayma is a
small island off of Iceland's southern coast, and it's part
(02:17):
of the Vestman Air Archipelago, which is also known in
English as the Westman Islands and this eruption is what
we are going to talk about today. Iceland is located
on the Mid Atlantic Ridge, basically a long, mostly underwater
volcanic mountain range that runs all the way from the
Arctic down towards the southern tip of Africa. And this
(02:38):
ridge exists because of the divergence of tectonic plates. As
the plates slowly move apart, magma rises up and lava
fills that gap that's created gradually and sometimes suddenly, forming mountains.
And most of this happens under water, but in some
places the resulting mountains are tall enough to break through
the surface of the ocean, and this is the case
(02:58):
with Iceland, which eyes along the North American and Eurasian plates.
Iceland itself is a relatively young island, and in the
grand scheme of things, it really hasn't been inhabited for
very long. The first permanent settlement there was established in
the ninth century. The first written record of a volcanic
eruption on Iceland is from the tenth century, and volcanoes
(03:21):
have been an ongoing part of life in Iceland for
all of the centuries since then. Iceland is home to
well over a hundred volcanoes, and there are about thirty
active volcanic systems. Thirteen volcanoes have erupted since Iceland was settled,
with the links of the eruptions ranging from hours to months,
and a lot of people like to make the average
(03:42):
one eruption every five years. This brings us to the
Westman Islands. This is a group of fifteen Ish islands.
It depends on how you classify them where that number
exactly lands along with lots of smaller islets, including some
of the youngest islands on Earth. One of these is
the island of Searcy, which was formed through volcanic activity
(04:03):
in nineteen sixty three, so very young Searty has been
protected since it was originally formed, allowing scientists to study
the way species make their way to a new environment.
Hay May is the largest island in the West Bend
Islands and it's home to those islands only town, which
is also called Vestman Air. There are a couple of
(04:24):
summer homes on other islands in this archipelago, but Haymay
is the only one that's inhabited year round by an
actual established community. Although it's the biggest island in the
Westman Islands, Hamy is still quite small. It's about five
square miles or thirteen square kilometers, And there's a ten
CNN article that describes Hamy as quote a baron chunk
(04:46):
of volcanic rock. That is not an apt description. It
is volcanic, it is rocky, but it is plenty green,
and there are birds everywhere, and in the summer months,
it's actually home to one of the biggest puffin popula
sations in all of Iceland, so it is also adorable.
I was just gonna say, we should have a moment
to pause so everyone can go, oh the puffins. I
(05:10):
got the hold of puffin while I was there. It
was not a wild puffin. It was a rescued puffin.
I did not go pick up a puffin on a cliff.
That would be bad. Hey May's coast is largely formed
of tall cliffs with basalt stacks extending out into the
ocean in the middle. It's flatter, and before nineteen seventy
three it's most prominent feature in its relatively flat interior
(05:34):
was the volcanic cone known as Halgafel. I'm going to
take a moment and mentioned that in icelandic an l
at the end of the word makes a sound that's
classified as a voiceless lateral fricative. This is not a
sound that exists in English, and then two l's in
a row haven't even slightly different non English phony. Trying
to replicate the sound throughout the podcast would be extremely
(05:57):
distracting because it's it's like you put your tongue at
the top of your mouth and then kind of exhale
a little bit. It sounds very sibilant and kind of tiskey,
and it would be really distracting to hear two people
that don't speak Icelandic try to do that for all
of these volcano names. So we're just going to say
it the way it is spelled, which is more like
(06:17):
Helga fell. So Helga fell and the rest of the
island of Hami is Or was believed to be extinct
or at least dormant by both the residents of the
island and scientists. There had been plenty of offshore eruptions
of other volcanoes, including that one that created the island
of Surtsey a decade before this story happened. There had
also been plenty of eruptions on the mainland of Iceland,
(06:40):
but Helga fell had undergone no known eruptions since the
settlement of Iceland. Everybody thought where they were living was
a pretty safe spot to be. On January three, a
series of small seismic tremors rattled through southern Iceland, with
about two hundred seismic events over about fourteen hours. Another
(07:02):
shallower series of earthquakes started on the twenty second, at
around ten pm, and some of them could be felt
on the island of Hamay, but all were small, with
the largest having a magnitude of about three. If this
had happened today, these earthquakes would have basically been a
thirty hour heads up to the residents of Hamy that
something big was about to happen and they should probably evacuate.
(07:24):
But at the time, the field of seismology and Iceland
seismic network we're a lot less advanced than they are today.
Seismologists didn't have a way of pinpointing the epicenter of
these little earthquakes, and those that did think the sem
seismic activity was a warning of something that was going
to be in the form of an eruption were more
focused on Katla, which is a volcano on the mainland
(07:47):
which is known to be active, and has in fact
erupted more than twenty times since Iceland was settled. But
what this seismic activity was really foreshadowing was a massive
eruption on Hamy itself, which we were going to talk about,
but first we are going to pause for a word
from one of our fantastic sponsors. When shaking and noise
(08:11):
started on the island of Hamy at about two o'clock
in the morning on January nineteen seventy three, the residents
who noticed it and had also felt the earlier earthquakes
thought this was just another one. They're kind of like,
here we go again. What was really happening, though, was
that a fissure was opening up along the eastern side
of Haymy, just over a thousand yards from the center
of town. In about two hundred yards from the edge
(08:34):
of town. That's roughly nine hundred meters and a hundred
and eighty meters for those who are in the world
of metric measurements. The fissure quickly spread. It ran roughly
southwest to northeast, stretching all the way from Hamy southern
to its northern coasts and beyond. With submarine volcanic activity
going on at either end. At the beginning of the eruption,
(08:58):
a curtain made up of about four the fountains of
malten lava launched out of this fissure, which was incredibly dramatic,
but not at least for a first the first few hours,
all that damaging a natural slope of land kind of
directed the falling lava away from the town, and then
favorable wind also at first kept most of the tefra,
(09:19):
which is sort of a catch all term for a
volcanic material that has launched into the air, kept most
of the tefra from coming toward the town, and this
meant that even though the residents of Hamay had been
taken completely by surprise by the sudden appearance of a
huge fissure and a curtain of lava right next to
their town on an island believed to be volcanically inactive,
(09:42):
they had time to evacuate before things became really dangerous.
Volcanoes were aknown hazard, and Hamay and the mainland both
had evacuation plans in place. The evacuation itself was also
aided by another stroke of incredibly good fortune that there
were people that even described as being providential a storm
(10:03):
had moved through the region on the twenty second, so
Hammy's fishing fleet was all safely docked at the harbor,
along with some boats that really worked from the mainland
but had taken refuge in Hammy when the gale blew in.
In other words, the island had a ready made evacuation
fleet that was already there in the harbor, which was
at that point not being threatened by the erupting volcano
(10:25):
thanks to the lay of the land and the prevailing winds.
The town's fire department and police used horns and sirens
to wake residents and inform them of the danger. Residents
took what they could carry. They crowded into fishing boats
to be taken to the mainland port of Thorlo Sutton
and then on too Rakivic, which is Iceland's capital, by bus.
This was a trip that, while not necessarily comfortable, was
(10:48):
made safely by all who were evacuated. Although the storm
had passed, the water was still choppy, so seasickness was
a problem. It also took a lot longer than it
takes to get to the mainland by boat today. A
now there's a ferry terminal at Landia Hutton that's much
closer to the island. People who were ill or elderly
were mostly airlifted from Hamany's airport to the Reikjavik and
(11:10):
Keflavik airports on the mainland, which are about forty five
minutes apart by car. The evacuation flights used planes and
helicopters from the U. S manned Iceland Defense Force and
Iceland Air The evacuation was completely successful, with about five thousand,
three hundred people safely taken to the mainland, where they
all met up in Reikjavik. And this was a really
(11:32):
calm and efficient affair. In five or six hours, anyone
who could leave the island had left the island, and
from the boats people could see this curtain of fire
along the edge of the town as well as under
the water as they passed by. This makes me think
of the contrast of how sometimes these things happen and
(11:52):
there's always that person that holds out and says they're
not going to leave. But everyone left in a very order.
There were a very few people who stayed behind to
basically fight the volcano, but there was It was a
very calm evacuation. I think the fact that a lot
of the adults on the island had been able to
see the formation of certaincy to the south of them
(12:13):
from the island, uh and like that had not endangered
them probably helped people stay calm. I mean, people in
Iceland seemed pretty pragmatic about volcanoes in a lot of ways,
uh from my experience in ten days of being there.
Later the Government of Iceland sent workers to remove cultural
(12:37):
and historical artifacts from the island. Four hundred head of
livestock were also evacuated from the island. Because this was
deep in the Icelandic winter, Kvik had a lot of
hotel rooms available, so after being received fed and temporarily
sheltered at schools, Haymy's residents who didn't have family on
the mainland were mostly housed in bacon hotel rooms. Most
(12:59):
of the residents did would have family that they could
stay with, though, so the housing needs that that needed
to be provided by the government of the Government of
Iceland turned out to be pretty minimal. At the same time, though,
you can just sort of imagine how a close knit
community of only a little more than five thousand people
all living together on a little island, it is it
was splitting people up, even if they were staying with family,
(13:21):
was still pretty traumatic for the community itself. The government
of Iceland created and funded an emergency relief fund for
people who had been displaced by the volcano. They requested
prefabricated housing from Sweden, Canada, and Norway in order to
build temporary housing on the coast so the people from
Hamy who had made their living in fishing could continue
(13:43):
to work and hopefully lower the impact on Iceland's economy
by the disruption in Hamy's fishing industry. For the next
few months, the only people on Hamy would be the
very few people who couldn't leave because of something related
to their jobs like say that, people who kept really
critical things running uh and the people who were trying
to save the town, as well as scientists, some of
(14:04):
whom were from Iceland and somewhere from elsewhere. He came
in to study the eruption in progress. Not long after
this very well organized evacuation was complete, lava stopped erupting
from most of the fissure, concentrating itself primarily in one
roughly central portion of it. Cinders and debris from this
(14:24):
eruption started to form a cone, which would eventually be
named eld Fell or Fire Mountain. Within a couple of days,
eld Felt grew to one d ten yards or one
hundred meters tall. However, the narrowing of the eruption from
a curtain too more like a cone did not mean
it was any less destructive. It was actually the opposite
that was true. The favorable wind that had kept the
(14:47):
volcanic debris mostly away from the town during the evacuation shifted,
which sent tefra, burning cenders and lava bombs toward homes
and other buildings. Some of these buildings immediately caught fire,
Others were buried and crushed and falling tefra. Some were
just crushed under the weight of volcanic material, even if
they were spared from catching fire. Emergency crews cleared debris
(15:11):
off of roofs to try to keep them from collapsing,
and propped them up from the inside. They put corrugated
iron over windows on the volcanic side of the buildings
to try to keep volcanic bombs from shattering them and
setting houses on fire from the inside, and they erected
barriers along one side of the lava field. In the
hope of slowing its progression. Moving into February of ninety three,
(15:34):
the cone continued to grow. It roughly doubled in height.
By the middle of the month, A very steep rim
started to form on one side of Eldfell thanks to
a combination of wind and falling tephra. A lake of
lava started to form in the middle of the cone also,
and soon pressure from the lava lake combined with the
wind and caused this increasingly steep rim to collapse. The
(15:57):
collapsing wall in the mountain rolled across the eastern side
out of the town and buried a number of houses.
At about this time, the volcano also started to emit
increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. Air around
the volcano became progressively more dangerous to breaze. Birds and
other animals began to die as the build up of
(16:18):
gases in the air became poisonous. According to the museum
now located on the site of the eruption, poisonous gases
were the cause of the soul human fatality directly tied
to this eruption. At about at the same time as
Ldfell's rim collapsed and buried more of the town. The
lava flow from the volcano shifted directions as well. A
(16:39):
submarine lava flow broke a cable and a pipeline, which
were responsible for carrying electricity and drinking water from the
mainland to the island. On top of that, lava started
to threaten the islands. Port hey May had a natural
harbor that was sheltered on one side by a cliff,
and this harbor was critically important to both the islands
and i Sland's economy. If the volcano filled in or
(17:03):
blocked the harbor, it would become vastly harder to get
people and supplies on and off the island for the
remediation and cleanup efforts as well. This meant that Haymany
needed a way to fight back against this volcano, and
we're going to talk about that, but first we will
pause for another sponsor break. Today's podcast is brought to
(17:27):
you by square Space. Whether you need a landing page,
or beautiful gallery, or professional blog and online store, all
of these things are possible with a square Space website.
Holly and I have both used square Space for our
personal projects and have been really, really satisfied with how
easy it's been to use how great our websites have
looked when we've been done, and how easy it's been
(17:49):
to find answers to our questions and help for special
things that we were trying to do. Square Space is
really easy. Creating a website is simple with square Space
at the very intuitive cross us, and you can add
and arrange your content and your features with a click
of the mouse. There's a free custom domain that you
can get. If you sign up for a year, you
get that custom domain for free. The templates are really beautiful.
(18:11):
There are seamless commerce tools if you're looking to sell
things on your website, and there's twenty seven customer support
and every person in the customer care team is an
experienced user of square space and they all work in
the square Space office. So no matter how technical your
problem is or if it actually seems really trivial, it
doesn't matter, as somebody there is going to help you out.
(18:31):
Start your free trial today at square space dot com
and in to offer code history to get ten percent
off your first purchase. Square Space set your website apart.
As we alluded to before the break, Haymy was home
to a protected harbor that was critically important to the
Little Islands survival was one of two ways to get
(18:54):
on and off the island, the other being Ham's airport.
On top of that, fishing was one of Hammy's most
important industries, and Hammy's fishing industry was also extremely important
to Iceland's fishing industry as a whole twenty percent of
Iceland's fish processing plants were located on the island, So
without a working port, the island of Hammy would be
(19:17):
far less habitable and far less economically sustainable once the
eruption eruption was over, and really if if Hammy's fishing
industry was destroyed, that was going to be a huge
problem for Iceland's economy as well. Real threats to the
port began on February eleventh when a huge flow of
lava broke through Eldfell's base. It was about twenty meters
(19:38):
wide and twenty meters tall, and it threatened to fill
in the harbor. At this point, cargo planes had to
be requested to transport heavy earth moving equipment onto the
island because this flow of lava meant the harbor could
no longer accommodate boats large enough to carry them. It
was basically making the harbor shallow were the only things
that had a shallower draft could really get in and
(19:59):
out of there. In an effort to cool the lava
and slow it down, crews started spraying it with water,
first from the town's fire trucks using the municipal water supply.
Then a pumping ship was requested from the United States,
which would continue to draw water from the municipal supply. Basically,
the municipal water supply was the big volcano fighting power
(20:20):
source until the lava we mentioned earlier broke that pipeline
that had been carrying the water from the mainland, so
the decision was made at that point to try seawater.
The government of Iceland requested more pumping equipment from the
United States, and in the end, more than nineteen miles
that's thirty kilometers of pipe and forty three pumps operated
(20:41):
by seventy five workers at the peak of the operation
hurled water at the advancing lava in the hope of
cooling it down. Some of this work, and other work
associated with trying to salvage as much of the town
as possible, was incredibly dangerous due to the proximity to
the volcano as well as the poisonous gases in the
air and decreased visibility due to steam from cooling operations
(21:03):
and blowing ash and cinders. Over the next few months,
an estimated five point five million tons of seawater were
used to try to cool the lava down and divert
it away from the harbor and later from the town
as well. Basically, the lava heated up the water, making
lots and lots of steam and cooling off in the process.
(21:25):
As it cooled, the lava hardened, eventually making a wall
that molten lava couldn't could creep over but not really breakthrough.
So as this creeping lava would sort of top the
solid layer, they would spray that part to make this
increasingly tall wall of of hardened lava. There are some
(21:48):
people who will argue that we can never really know
if this worked, because who knows how the lava would
have behaved without all of this human intervention. However, the
lava flow was stopped yards or a hundred meters short
of blocking the harbor, and its progress was slowed through
the town as well. However, several of Iceland's fish processing
(22:09):
plants were destroyed before the water project could really begin.
Yeah I feel like some of the people who were like, well,
the lava could have completely shifted course will never know.
I feel like they're just kind of naysayers wanting to
say nay about it. The eruption was declared over on
July third, nineteen seventy three, and had been slowing down
(22:31):
for a while, but that was really five months. It
was more than five months after it had started. Water
cooling operations stopped on the tenth of July, and schools
were reopened that fall. It's estimated that two hundred million
tons of ash and lava fell in and around hey
May during the eruption. Lfell grew to a height of
(22:51):
six hundred and fifty six feet that's two hundred meters.
About a third of the town was destroyed. Not all
of the five thousand, three hundred people who had evacuated returned.
The population today is only four thousand, five hundred, so
it is still below its nineteen seventy three pre volcano level. Yeah,
there are still houses that are are buried, and a
(23:12):
lot of the people who didn't return where people whose
houses were under so much, uh so much volcanic debris
that they were like, it's never gonna get dug out,
and even if it is dug out, everything that is
in there is crushed. Uh. However, all of that lava
and tafra did wound up having some favorable impacts on
(23:34):
the island. I mean, there was definitely a huge loss
of property, fortunately not a loss of human life other
than the one person um who was killed because of
the poisonous gases. But the lava flow that almost blocked
the harbor was made into a breakwater and it now
provides more shelter for the harbor from a direction that
(23:55):
it had previously been exposed to. This huge increase and
volcanic material on the island also provided a much needed
source of landfill. Previously, if they had needed to fill
land in any way, they would have to sort of
have earth shipped in on a boat, which was not
very practical. Um, and the cooling lava under the surface
(24:18):
of the island is now one of the island's primary
sources of heat and hot water. In two thousand five,
the town council of Vestmaner agreed to excavate some of
the houses that were still buried. Lots of comparisons were
made to Pompeii. Under that ash. Some of the homes
were still intact, and even the ones that were crushed
still contained most of their owner's possessions. A museum, Eldheimar
(24:42):
opened in two thousand fourteen, and its centerpiece is one
of the homes that was crushed volcanic debris. And all
that museum is really cool. We should go you've are yen,
I'll just go. Yeah, if you uh, if you are
in Iceland, if you can get to Haymy from a
brief a brief air plane, a little airplane, little airplane.
(25:06):
Little airplanes still make me kind of nervous. So I
personally like the ferry. The ferry is about half an
hour um and this particular we didn't really plan an
itinerary beyond our lodging. We didn't we didn't plot out
day by day what we wanted to do, and so
we were staying somewhere not far away. And I realized
that this volcano or this volcano museum was on the
(25:29):
island and said, hey, do you want to take the
ferry and check this out? And we did so. Yeah.
That's that's how basically, uh, people fought a volcano, and
mostly one using what feels to me like a child's
logic of can't we just spray this with water and cool?
(25:50):
A little child's logic that mostly worked in this case. Yeah,
do you want to polish this episode off with some
listener mail? I do that. Listener mail is from Rachel,
and Rachel says hello. I'm an avid listener. I discovered
the podcast last summer when I started a fitness regiment
and was super sick of listening to the same playlists
(26:11):
over and over and over. I typically walk one to
one and a half miles a day, and your podcast
have made my walks much more interesting. I'm writing today
after listening to the White Wedding episode. I myself in
the wedding industry. I've been a wedding photographer for almost
ten years. I completely understand the sticker shocks the couples
feel when they begin to plan a wedding, and it
can seem, sometimes justly, that things cost more just because
(26:33):
the event is a wedding. You had referenced this wedding
up charge in the podcast, and I wanted to take
a second to address that and hopefully hopefully defend my industry. Yes,
it is true weddings can cost a lot of money,
but The misconception that vendors are charging more because they
can quote get more out of the bride trying to
plan the perfect wedding is false. We're in no way
trying to price gouge engaged couples. What must be understood
(26:54):
is that most wedding vendors are boutique businesses, and most
of these businesses are not only owned by individuals, but
also by that same person. If you hire my company
to be your photographer, you get me. I don't send
out a fleet of employees to cover our events because
we develop a relationship with our couples and we feel
the success of their day lies in our hands. Because
it is impossible for me to be in more than
(27:14):
one place at a time, I can only book one
wedding per week. I discreet that my services cost thousands
of dollars, but I'm limited in the number of events
I can do per year. Because I own my company
and handled not only the photographer, photography, editing business, running meetings,
engagement sessions, and communication with my clients. I work in
excess of sixty or more hours per week, if even
in the off season, when I may not be shooting
(27:35):
an event, when dividing out the hours worked by our
gross you would be able to see that the prices
wedding vendors command are actually quite reasonable. This is not
just in the photography business, but also for florists, cake bakers,
caters and planners. Weddings demand of not a lot of
attention and hours, and that is why the cost is
more than other events. For example, a wedding cake requires
days to create a birthday cake only hours. Cake bakers
(27:57):
must deliver the cake and many times cut the cake.
None that is required. None of that is required for
a birthday cake. Once again, I love your show. Thank
you for entertaining me while I'm on my walks. Um
and that is from Rachel. Thank you Rachel for sending
that note. I want to say, number one, these points
are true. Number two, that's not what we were talking
(28:17):
about when we said wedding markup. Uh. That's basically the
exact same explanation I gave to Patrick who is now
my husband, to explain to him why we were going
to spend lots of money on a wedding photographer. Right.
I wanted a wedding photographer who who knew what he
was doing, who would give us pictures that we would
be really happy with. Um, we needed to have our
(28:37):
wedding where my mother lives so that my mother could
be present at the wedding. That having it anywhere else
was not an option, and I that meant that there
would be other people who couldn't be with us because
of travel. Um, and I wanted to make sure that
we would have pictures and video to share with them
that would really capture what the day was like. And
so I used basically that same explanation to explain why
(28:58):
the wedding photographer was going to cost or than Patrick
really felt comfortable spending a photographer. But that's not what
I'm talking about when I say wedding markup. When I
say wedding markup, I mean like six identical dresses and
the white one costs two thousand additional dollars. Yeah. I
(29:20):
have some knowledge of this from the bridal gown side,
because I have made a lot of wedding gowns in
my time. Um uh, both as like a jobby job
and you know, just in making them for friends. Um.
Particularly in the larger bridle industry of fashion, like in
(29:42):
the larger stores, boutique stores are definitely not what I'm
referring to in that case here, because you will notice
there is always particularly if it is a store that
also offers alterations. M hmm. This is not always the case,
but there are certainly sometimes instances where they encourage people
(30:03):
to order address that they know is not going to
be the appropriate size because where they really make their
moneys and alterations. I remember seeing an episode of a
TV show where someone learned her dress is going to
cost five dollars to him and she was crying about it.
Uh So, yeah, I definitely we we both know lots
(30:24):
of people who work in creative industries and specifically in
wedding industries, and because they are experts in their field,
they charge rates for their work that I am happy
people are able to make uh and and to be
able to support themselves doing this work. But that's like
what we were really talking about was things like um uh.
(30:45):
When I was pricing cakes, I found several bakers whose
baseline for wedding cakes was more than double per serving
like any other cake. But that was before also having
a cake cutting fee and a delivery fee, or having
talked to the couple at all about what their needs are.
(31:06):
And then uh, there's also tied into the whole thing
that a whole industry of wedding magazines and websites that
I don't necessarily think intentionally. I mean, we used to
have a wedding website as part of our business when
we were owned by Discovery Channel, so we have like
some firsthand experience were you you were here at this point, Uh,
(31:26):
we have some firsthand experience and in writing about weddings
and what how wedding websites operate and and often they
maybe not consciously, but definitely do concretely reinforce what is
expected of a wedding and what is expected of a
bride and sort of put out the idea that, for example,
if your cake is not a multi tier wedding cake
(31:49):
that's like exquisitely perfect and beautiful and covered in seamless
uh beautiful sheerness, that everybody is going to think your
wedding is tacky and that is all they are going
to remember about your wedding for the rest of their life,
and from now on you will be remembered as the
cheap bride who had a grocery store sheet cake instead
of one that cost seven hundred dollars. So yeah, I
(32:13):
definitely respect like the hard work that people who own
beautique businesses and people who do like one on one
work with couples, uh to to make their day wonderful.
We definitely relied on some of those people for our wedding.
What I'm talking about is like the more here's a
mass produced dress that costs two thousand more dollars because
it's white. Or here are mass produced bras and undergarments
(32:38):
that also cost sixty dollars more than comparable ones because
they are from the bridal collection. Like that's the kind
of stuff I'm talking about. Well, and I will also
in defense of the bridal industry because I said I
have been part of it at various points on the
curve in my life. And I'm gonna preface this by
saying hashtag not all brides, but some of that up
charge is in dealing with It's very stressful sometimes to
(33:03):
deal with wedding parties brides. And I don't mean to
in any way um despair any particular bride. It's just
understandable that people get very worked up over their wedding.
They want everything to be perfect, and so sometimes things
(33:24):
can get a little dramatic. A little um high anxiety,
and I have to admit there is a certain degree
of up charge that I'm like, that's just like the
fee for your sanity, Like, like, I know this is
going to be a rough ride, so I should at
least make it worth my while. Understand that. Yeah, we're
(33:46):
getting sort of into stuff Mom never told you territory. Like,
I feel like some of that is a is a
circular problem because that then we circle back onto you.
Uh so much cultural Yeah, so many advertisements and so
many magazines that are geared towards this is the best
day of your life and it must be perfect. And
(34:07):
I would like to tell you that idea is crap. Uh.
I took a cue from my dear friend Juliana Finch,
who who banned the word perfect, because like, saying this
is my day and it has to be perfect just
sets everybody up for a way more stress. I do
feel also compelled to say, just for the record, you
were the antithesis of a bread zilla. So and so
(34:32):
many things that I was like, sure, Tracy, I've changed
the design of the beating on your dress. Cool. Uh. Yeah.
My favorite moment was realizing that the direction cards that
I had printed out for everyone who was staying at
the hotel had incorrect directions on how to get to
(34:53):
the venue because the exit from the parking deck was
and I was like, wow, let's see how life can
go on anyway. So yes, I I definitely admire in
respect people who are doing good quality, professional work as
a service. That's you know that people are in a
demanding position, but definitely not what we meant when we
(35:16):
said wedding markup. So if you would like to write
to us about this or any other podcast, we are
at History Podcast at how stuff works dot com. We're
also on Facebook at facebook dot com slash miss in
history and on Twitter at miss in History. Our tumbler
is miss in History dot tumbler dot com. We're also
on Pinterest at pentriest dot com slash missed in History.
Our instagram is at missed in History, and you can
(35:38):
come to our parent companies website. It is how stuff
works dot com. But the word volcano in the search
bar you will find a classic house stuff works article
about how volcanoes work. It will explain in some more
details about exactly what was going on from that volcano
when Hey May you basically exploded into a curtain of fire. Uh.
You can come to our website, which is missed in
history dot com, where you will find show notes for
(36:00):
all of the episodes Holly and I have ever worked on.
You will find an archive of every episode we have
ever done. You will find uh some tips about how
to search the archive. They're the lots of different stuff.
So you can do all that and a whole lot
more at how stuff works dot com or missed in
history dot com for more on this and thousands of
(36:22):
other topics because it how stuff works dot co.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Intentionally Disturbing
Join me on this podcast as I navigate the murky waters of human behavior, current events, and personal anecdotes through in-depth interviews with incredible people—all served with a generous helping of sarcasm and satire. After years as a forensic and clinical psychologist, I offer a unique interview style and a low tolerance for bullshit, quickly steering conversations toward depth and darkness. I honor the seriousness while also appreciating wit. I’m your guide through the twisted labyrinth of the human psyche, armed with dark humor and biting wit.