Dr. Jessica Venner

There's dogs crying underneath beds because they're stuck there and they're chained up.

It's just chaos.

And they're trying to cover their mouths.

And then a pyroclastic flow very soon after that starts coming down again.

But this time it breaches the wall.

It comes over the wall because it's such a bigger one.

It's got more force behind it and it takes out the city.

And everyone that is there is killed instantly with this flow that hit them.

The heat was incredible, hundreds of centigrade, and they would have been killed instantly, which is a small comfort.

But the petrifying circumstances for those very many hours before is not a comfort.

Yes, there's a good, not a majority, but a good amount of the people that have been found.

So we've found about 1,600 to 1,700 victims so far.

So when you base that on 20,000 people, that's a death toll, I think, of between 8% and 11%-ish.

So it's not as big as you'd think for an eruption of this size.

And so the people that were found in the city, there's a lot of them that have been found in the Pames level, which means that they have asphyxiated.

So they've suffocated or they have been hit by debris.

So actually not all of them were killed by this pyroclastic flow.

There is a good amount of them that were killed in these other layers.

But then the pyroclastic flows hit

and it's more than half of the people, but they were in really different positions around the city.