This first letter tells the story of Pliny the Elder, uncle of Pliny the Younger, naturalist, and Commander of the Roman fleet at Misenum. Pliny received a plea for help from the threatened Herculanium and rushed with his galleys to help the disaster stricken population and observe the eruption from a closer point. Seismic action prevented Pliny from landing at Herculanium and in fact moved the shoreline causing him to land farther south at Stabiae, where they spent the night. Pliny died at Stabiae from volcanic gas, though that is debatable (Mau 162). It may have been because he was a very obese man and died from a heart attack (Cornell 202).
Heavy rain from the hot clouds of dust in the high atmosphere fell back through clouds to create mud rivers that, in turn, mixed with lava giving it a depth of over twenty feet (Cornell 202). The mud was what buried Herculanium, completely, and is why excavations there are exceedingly difficult. Pompeii, on the other hand, was first rained down on by around eleven feet of pumice and stones, which caused roofs to fall in). The pumice was followed by at least nine feet of ash which fell for nineteen hours, adding up to a total of nineteen to twenty-three feet of ash and debris in different areas (Cornell 203). At 11:30pm the silt column and cloud started to fall altogether, so by 7:30am the next day Pompeii was engulfed, and completely buried by around 8:30 (Rice 1-28). .
Ostia, another well known site was preserved by layers of mud, where Pompeii was covered by volcanic ash, causing some degradation to Ostia, but the way Pompeii was buried makes Pompeii the best preserved site for studying Roman life (Cootes 144). .
As was mentioned before, there lived 20,000 people in Pompeii at the time of the eruption, and it is known that the majority must have escaped as only 2,000 bodies have been found in the remains (Rice 9). The number of people who were overwhelmed outside the walls of the city and the number who actually made it to safety are not known.