56 pages • 1-hour read
Eruption
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Chapters 81-109Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 81 Summary
Colonel Briggs calls General Rivers and tells him they have found Leilana Kane, the woman Sergeant Mahoe met with at the bar. Leilana is on the run, avoiding the soldiers looking for her. She spent the night at her grandparents’ macadamia farm before sleeping on the beach. When she is recognized at the dock, she evades the soldiers and returns to the farm. She finds the trees and other vegetation blackened. Her grandparents are dead inside.
Chapter 82 Summary
At the Military Reserve, General Rivers gets news from Briggs and then tells the group he wants to try to get the canisters out of the Ice Tube. Mac does not believe it is possible.
Chapter 83 Summary
Mac and Rivers pull up to the Ice Tube where hazmat teams are beginning to assemble. Just then, Mauna Loa erupts, and they have to retreat. When Mac and Rivers return to the base, they learn Brett and the Cutlers have gone up in a helicopter to film the eruption.
Chapter 84 Summary
Mac and Rebecca go to the Summit Cabin, located on the rim of the caldera, to watch and prepare to detonate the buried explosives. The volcano erupts again.
Chapter 85 Summary
Mac realizes the lava flow is bigger than they expected and heading toward them. He hears a helicopter, but the lava has destroyed the helipad, and they cannot land.
Chapter 86 Summary
Jake Rogers is piloting a helicopter with Brett and the Cutlers as passengers. Oliver Cutler is filming the eruption. The helicopter gets hit with debris from the explosion. The volcano explodes again, and the helicopter begins to plummet.
Chapter 87 Summary
In the Situation Room at the White House, the president is monitoring events in Hawai‘i. He is scared.
Chapter 88 Summary
Mac and Rebecca had not planned for lava to vent from the caldera. The lava rushes toward them. Mac and Rebecca abandon the cabin and begin running from the lava down the mountain.
Chapter 89 Summary
Captain Sam Aukai, chief of police in Nā‘ālehu, a town south of Hilo, sees the news report about the explosion and calls the HVO. The librarian Ms. Kilima tells him that his town is in the red zone and should be evacuated. Someone from HVO should have informed him. There is only one road out of Nā‘ālehu, Route 11.
Chapter 90 Summary
The boys of the Canoe Club, including Tako’s son, decide to ignore the shelter warning and go out in their canoes. They are out on the ocean when the lava rushes down toward the beach. They try to make it to shore, but the lava reaches the ocean first. The boys fall into the boiling water and die.
Chapter 91 Summary
Rivers gets news of the death of the boys, Sergeant Mahoe, Leilana, and her grandparents. He sends a plane out to look for Mac and Rebecca. He deploys fighter jets to bomb the lava flow in coordination with the explosives the Cruzes placed.
Chapter 92 Summary
Captain Sam Aukai watches the pyroclastic flow rush toward his town. He goes to Route 11 and finds it gridlocked. A cop calls to tell him lava has blocked the road. Sam begins racing toward the water. He gets caught by the lava and dies.
Chapter 93 Summary
Mac decides to leave the trail and cross the lava field to avoid the lava flow. Rebecca runs ahead of him. A fissure with lava flowing beneath it opens up in front of her, and she trips and falls.
Chapter 94 Summary
Mac catches her arm, but Rebecca hasn’t fallen because her left foot is caught in a crevice. Mac carries her down the mountain. They see a reconnaissance plane above them stall out and start to fall toward the Mauna Loa Observatory.
Chapter 95 Summary
Rivers watches the plane on the monitors. The pilots had reported that the ash and glass from the volcano damaged their propellers. He knows it is going to crash.
Chapter 96 Summary
Mac and Rebecca arrive at the Observatory. They see the remains of the plane crash. The destruction caused by the crash killed many people inside the Observatory. Mac is checking the bodies when he hears Rebecca scream.
Chapter 97 Summary
Meanwhile, Sergeant Iona is digging trenches in an excavator to prevent the lava flow between Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea. He and his team think the lava flow has turned away from their location when Iona gets a call from Briggs. Briggs tells him to retreat because the lava is heading his way. Iona attempts to drive away but there is an eruption and his excavator tips over, trapping him inside. The lava kills him.
Chapter 98 Summary
Mac tells Rivers that there is going to be another, even bigger eruption.
Chapter 99 Summary
Rivers spends the evening overseeing the construction of new canals and lakes to protect the Ice Tube. Mac tells Rivers they need to direct the lava south toward the ocean. Then, Rebecca sends Mac some new data. Mac goes to Rivers and tells him “we might have to sacrifice Hilo” (391).
Chapter 100 Summary
Rebecca’s data shows that the lava will likely flow from Mauna Loa toward Mauna Kea and may hit the Ice Tube. Programmer Kenny Wong calls to tell Mac they need to evacuate the base. Mac tells Rebecca her explosives have done all they can, and they need to use air bombing to divert the lava headed toward them. Mac tells Rivers he needs his best fighter pilot.
Chapter 101 Summary
Mac goes up with Colonel Chad Raley in a bomber. They watch the lava heading toward the Ice Tube to find the best bombing target until a “vog,” or volcanic air pollution mixed with fog, makes it impossible to see.
Chapter 102 Summary
On the ground, Lono is with his mother who refused to evacuate. She trusts in “Pele’s will.” Lono sees the bomber in the sky and wonders if Pele, the volcano goddess, will protect him from military bombing.
Chapter 103 Summary
The Military Reserve has been mostly evacuated, except for Rebecca and Rivers. Rivers receives news that they can no longer see or contact Mac and Raley. One of their engines failed after flying through a “cloud of ash and glass and rocks” (404). They prepare to sacrifice their lives to save the world.
Chapter 104 Summary
Raley tells Mac they need to bomb the lava flow at that moment if they are going to save the Ice Tube, even if it causes a pyroclastic flow toward Hilo. Rivers orders them to deploy, but Raley circles back to get closer.
Chapter 105 Summary
Finally, with a damaged left wing, they find a good target. Mac orders Raley to deploy the bombs, but the ejector rack is damaged, and the bombs won’t drop. Raley pulls up. Mac and Raley agree they have to crash the plane to cause an explosion.
Chapter 106 Summary
Mac and Raley make their descent, but Raley pulls up at the last second. A wall formed by the four-thousand-year-old cooled lava from Mauna Kea diverts the lava flow away. The lava heads away from the Ice Tube and toward the beach.
Epilogue, Chapter 107 Summary
The events in the Epilogue take place four weeks later. The canisters in the Ice Tube are packaged and taken away to an undisclosed location.
Epilogue, Chapter 108 Summary
Mac and Lono stand on the beach. Lono asks Mac if he is going to drop bombs on him. Mac replies, “What bombs?” Mac tells Lono he is leaving HVO to teach. He is going to Houston with Rebecca.
Epilogue, Chapter 109 Summary
The Army covers up the Ice Tube “as if nothing had ever happened there” (419).
Chapters 81-109 Analysis
The final chapters of Eruption explore the stakes and impacts of Man Versus Nature. The eruption of the Mauna Loa volcano, anticipated throughout the rest of the novel, begins in Chapter 83. In this and the following chapters, the authors demonstrate the destructive force and power of nature. In contrast, they show human beings as weak and relatively powerless to control the outcomes. There are three scenes that most clearly underscore man’s frailty in these chapters: the destruction of the town of Nā‘ālehu, the deaths of Tako’s sons and the other boys in the canoes, and Sergeant Iona’s death.
Looking at just one of these examples, the experience of the boys in the canoes illustrates how the text addresses this theme. In Chapter 90, Luke Takayama and his canoe club are out on the water to watch the eruption. They have assumed that the lava flow will not hit the beach. However, after the warning alarm goes off, they see “the lava cascading out of the hills, rushing toward the beach” (364). They desperately begin to paddle toward shore. When the lava hits the water, it causes a chain reaction. The water begins to boil and splash into the canoes; huge waves form suddenly; and the air is full of a “combination of steam and glass particles” (365). Finally, the sudden waves overturn the canoes, and the boys fall “in the boiling water, seeing their skin turn the color of lava, violently choking on gases and fumes suffocating them” (365). This is a gruesome way to die, and the text describes it in vivid detail. The boys are helpless, despite their rapid paddling, to avoid their deaths as a result of the volcano’s eruption—demonstrating the futile nature of man against nature.
Even the novel’s strong, dedicated protagonists, Mac, and Rivers, despite their best efforts, are not entirely capable of thwarting or defeating nature. Rivers, for example, makes a last-minute decision to try and remove the canisters of Agent Black from the Ice Tube. When Mac protests that it is too late to do so, Rivers insists, “it will be too late when I say it is” (341). However, at the moment when Mac and Rivers arrive to oversee the transport of the canisters, Mauna Loa erupts, forcing them to abandon the plan. Even the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Rivers cannot enforce his will over the volcano. Similarly, Mac is caught off-guard when the volcano erupts from the caldera, which he didn’t anticipate. He and Rebecca must abandon their position and retreat. All his scientific knowledge is insufficient to defeat the volcano, demonstrating the dominant role nature ultimately plays.
This plotline and theme come to its resolution toward the end of the novel when a basalt wall diverts the path of the lava flow and saves the canisters—and the rest of the world—from destruction. The irony of this resolution is that ultimately it is nature itself that saves humanity from the damage it inflicts. All of Mac’s team’s efforts in the lead-up to the eruption ultimately have a negligible effect on the lava flow. The beginning of the book foreshadowed this outcome when the DARPA report Mac reviewed concluded, “Vulcan’s likelihood of success is no greater than chance—that is, it is entirely ineffective” (79). This finding ends up being largely true, although some of the dikes and ponds the army dug do manage to stave off some of the potential destruction.
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