“They were aboard a tour boat that takes visitors to see lava plunging into the ocean …”
Darwin’s little troopers…
Edit: Especially this…
I mean, you don’t actually want to be anywhere fucking near lava meeting the ocean…AT ALL.
Here’s somewhat of an explanation as to why you’d be breathing glass: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6V2eCFsDkK0
Drat, I regret passing on the chance to invest in Darwin Awards Tourism Ltd.
“How’d you break your leg, Susan?”
“Oh, I got hit by lava.”
So metal.
What did you do during your vacation in Hawaii?
Duh.
“What? You mean the boat is not on tracks and the exploding lava isn’t special effects?”
Normal human inclination to gawk coupled with TV disassociation AKA another lesson in how life is not the same as a Universal Studios ride.
Q. Is that sulphur and burning flesh I smell?
A. No. That’s the smell of burning rubber as attorneys race to the courthouse to file the first of many negligence lawsuits.
On second thought, Would that be covered under an “Act of God” clause?
Crash metal?!
Ok, maybe I’m stupid, but I’d love to see that from a boat. From a safe distance of course, with the wind blowing the laze away. But I’d still want to see it.
Thanks Obama!
The U.S. Coast Guard in May instituted a safety zone where lava flows into the ocean off the Big Island. It prohibits vessels from getting closer than 984 feet (300 meters) from ocean-entry points.
Okay, this is going to strike some of you as needlessly pedantic, but I can’t hold back. This:
984 feet (300 meters)
is stupid. As written, it means that 985 feet is fine, but 983 feet is dangerously close. That is not the correct precision, and in fact it’s borderline innumerate.
The original Coast Guard restriction was 300 meters. News articles like this one, written by someone who knows how to plug numbers into a calculator but doesn’t understand what the results mean, then render that for the benefit of their metric-ignorant readers (“Americans”) as “300 meters (984 feet)”. The AP then takes that nonsense one step further and puts the “standard” measurement first.
Needlessly pedantic, right? Fortunately, boneheaded mistakes with different systems of measurement never have any real world consequences. At least, none that matter.
Has anyone confirmed that this wasn’t a Russian attack on Pearl Harbor, given Donnie’s total capitulation to all things Putin?
My better half and I took the lava boat tour a year and a half ago. The lava was a like a firehose going into the ocean.
Luckily getting hit by lava bombs was not on the itinerary that morning.
You know where fake precision bugs me the most? In polls and such. If three out of eleven people say that the campus gym should be open later, you can’t tell me 27.3% of students think it closes too early.
Oh my god that is amazing. I hope you stayed well upwind though!
The one time I was in Hawaii we had three kids two and under along, so there were lots of places in Volcanoes National Park we weren’t allowed to go to. We did drive down Chain of Craters to see the lava from a distance; it wasn’t usually visible from the road but we timed it right.
We spent an afternoon playing in tidepools near Hilo and I am pretty sure it’s the place that was obliterated by lava this year.
Anyway I’ve wanted to go back ever since.
Did none of those people experience Scout camp? I mean, even in Kentucky we learned in Brownies to stay the fuck away from major fucking danger like poisonous snakes, tornadoes, floodwater, cliff edges and, you know, live fucking lava.
If you’re on a boat it doesn’t matter what you learned in scout camp. It’s what the captain learned in scout camp, lol.
I took the tour and it was really interesting but watching the lava chunks explode on contact with the ocean with the boat as close as we were seemed to be quite concerning.
I had the privilege of visiting volcanoes national park some years ago. It was absolutly worth it. Yes, there was one idjit who felt the need to poke the lava with a stick, but I and the other thousand or so people who traveled thorough the park that afternoon were cautiously enthralled.
If you get a chance, you should go.
I think the really hard part is evaluating tour operators. “Everyone” always knew about cowboy operators after an accident, but objective information about operational safety is very hard for tourists to find.
Assumption of risk. If the company has lawyers, they have waivers. If they have good lawyers, they disclosed the hazards before the waivers were signed.
Caveat: I was a criminal lawyer. This is what I think I remember from first year of law school, Summer 1975. (Along with Alan Page among the good students, and at least two sociopaths and a [Hispanic] racist, appointed to the bench by Dubya, among the rest.)