Letter from Iceland #41

The Little Book of Icelandic—Women and men, plus eruption, and toilet shutdowns

Daginn!

If you’ve been keeping up with the Iceland news you will know that another eruption started on the Reykjanes peninsula yesterday morning. Like the last three it started with a bang, and quickly petered out … in fact, as I write this, pretty much all activity appears to have stopped.

Photo courtesy of the Civil Protection Agency, used with permission.

It did not stop, however, before the fast-flowing lava caused some serious damage. Most notable was the destruction of a pipeline that supplies the entire peninsula with hot water, including Keflavík International Airport. In most of Iceland, of course, hot water is synonymous with heating, since we Icelanders use geothermal heat (hot water pumped out of the ground) to heat our homes.

Workers have been hard at work for the last 24 hours trying to construct an alternate pipeline to connect into the main artery. Meanwhile, 30,000 people have been without house heating, save for gas and electric heaters, for those who managed to procure those (they sold out almost immediately). However, authorities appealed to the public to use only one electric heater per household, as they feared the electrical system would not be able to handle everyone heating the entirety of their homes with electric power. So far that has worked out fine, meaning there have not been any power outages.

Meanwhile, the country’s most important communications hub—the Keflavík International Airport—was also without heat and hot water. Earlier today the cold water supply failed as well, but only temporarily—it seems that it is now fixed, thank goodness (they had to shut down the toilets! 😱). Apparently that was not connected to the eruption however … all I can say is, when it rains it freaking pours!

The good people of Reykjanes will likely have to wait until tomorrow evening to have their hot water back on, er, full steam. Fingers crossed that they won’t have to wait any longer than that. My admiration and respect goes out to all those people … there were a number of “people on the street” interviews with them on TV last night, and everyone seemed to take this in stride, many people mentioning that their troubles were nothing compared with those of the residents of Grindavík, who have, of course, lost their homes. ❤️

Anyway, on to our Little Book of Icelandic installment for this week, which is a bit of a myth-buster regarding the supposed wonderful gender equality we have here in the Land of Ice.