Corrected entry: During specific scenes, volcanic gas is shown to have vaporized several city workers entirely, burned half a workers' head to the point where it appeared coal black, steamed rats, and vaporized Amy's friend. Volcanic gas in real life could burn a subject, but not instantly vaporize them like it did in the movie.
Corrected entry: When Dr. Barnes is down in the storm drain with her friend Rachel, who falls through the fissure, Rachel screams "I'm burning up!", despite being at least several hundred feet above the volcanic gas. At other points in the movie, Roark, his daughter, Barnes, and the subway rescue team are all literally within a couple feet of the lava and show no effects.
Correction: Rachel is screaming in panic, because she can feel the heat and is 'afraid' to be burned. She is nowhere near the temperature for combustion, but her panic does not allow her to think that straight. Plus the enclosed space would make the heat more intense than it would have felt to Roark when he was outside.
Corrected entry: At one point we see a camera's view inside a tunnel with some lava approaching it. The lava then hits the camera, and it shows noise on the screen. However this wouldn't happen, a black screen should have shown because the camera would be severely damaged by the lava so it wouldn't be able to operate any longer.
Correction: Not so. The camera is connected to a VCR - it is not a camcorder. When the camera is destroyed the VCR will then send a disrupted signal to the monitor banks, and you get signal noise. What you see on the screen is 100% accurate.
Corrected entry: This is probably the most blatant mistake in the movie: The lava in the first half of the movie is MUCH hotter than it should be. The speed at which a lava flow moves is determined by its temperature, so lava moving at that speed would be much cooler. If the lava was really as hot as it is in the movie, it would be moving as fast as the lava in the Red Line train tunnel.
Correction: No. When lava first emerges, it is incredibly hot and as it keeps flowing, it cools. So the filmmakers got it right.
Corrected entry: When the lava is first approaching Roark's SUV, the right rear tire gets done in by the lava. A minute later, he and his kid are on top of the vehicle, and the right rear tire blows out again.
Correction: The second time it is the front tire.
Corrected entry: Kelly is in the hospital and she has an injury on her face. In the final scene of the movie where they are standing out in the rain, the injury is gone. (00:56:50)
Correction: It's not an injury, it's dried blood, more than likely from when she was helping the injured fireman on the way to the hospital, and would easily wash off.
Corrected entry: At the start, when we see the two cops pull up outside the church, the cops get out of the car and start to walk past the burnt out car. The cop with the brown hair walks ahead of the cop with the blonde hair, yet in the following shot, the blonde haired cop is now ahead of the other cop. (00:05:20)
Corrected entry: There is a scene where it shows one of the trucks bumping into one of the concrete dividers to help hold it still whilst the lava flows. In a few shots later, the truck and the divider get shunted back by the weight of the lava. Its simply the previous sequence of the truck reversed. (01:08:00)
Corrected entry: Many of the helicopters fly through a heavy ash fall to dump water on the lava. All that ash falling through the air should clog up the engines of the helicopters and shut them down - as was the case with all the police cars that one character said were stuck on the freeway because the ash seized up their engines.
Correction: These are fire fighting Helicopters. They routinely fly through large amounts of smoke, ash, and grit, and therefore all working parts are either sealed tight, or where airflow is needed, heavily filtered.
Corrected entry: The blonde volcano expert says something about rocks floating on the molten magma mantle. This is not true; the mantle is not molten magma.
Correction: She doesn't say that the mantle is molten magma; what she means is that rocks float on the magma mantle, which is molten.
Corrected entry: When Kelly Roark's leg is burnt by the lava and she goes to hospital she has no marks on her face, when at the hospital she has a large graze on her left cheek, however at the end of the film when they all go out in the rain the graze has remarkably vanished again.
Correction: She fell at the hospital, resulting in the graze on her face. They cleaned up the graze. She was in the hospital, that's their job.
Corrected entry: In the scene where they are allowing the lava to pool, all of the firefighters are in heavy gear, while the reporters are not. The heat from the lava should have been so intense that they would have been heavily burned from it.
Correction: Not true, I've seen a volcano documentary showing people (without protective gear)about two feet from the lava and nothing happened to them except some sweating. That's it.
Corrected entry: The lava ignites everything it touches or gets near to. Why not the little dog in the house?
Correction: Just like the reporters at the barricade, you don't just catch fire. This was the same thing I saw in the documentary.
Corrected entry: Near the beginning there is a train pulling into (out of?) the subway station and you can see the reflection of the cameraman and his camera in the glass of the train.
Correction: That's not a crewmember. At the beginning of the film, they are doing a news story on the Red Line. That's a newsman shooting footage of the trains.
Corrected entry: In the scene where all the firemen are standing at and on top of the concrete spraying water onto the lava which is right up against the barrier- as a fireman, myself there is no way they would be able to stand anywhere near the concrete barrier due to the heat and the gases lava gives off. The water being sprayed on would also be useless due to the heat that would make the water evaporate before it went anywhere near the lava.
Correction: Not true. In Iceland when 7 volcanoes erupted, they used water and the lava subsided. I watched the documentary used to promote "Volcano."
Corrected entry: When the fireman is swinging the ladder with Tommy, Anne, and the other guy over the lava, the down-the-ladder shots are still, then you cut back to the wide angle and it is still moving.
Correction: That's not true. It's not still. I watched this movie today and looked at this mistake and it is not true. The lava underneath them is moving and so is the ladder.
Corrected entry: After Anne Heche comes out of the hole (after her friend/colleague was burned to death)she takes off her silver overall suit. Her jacket hangs off her shoulders, around her arms. In the following close-up the jacket is over her shoulders again, and in the next scene it once again hangs off her shoulders, around her arms.
Correction: She puts it back on, and then off again just in case anything happens again.
Corrected entry: After getting off the phone with the girl from the subway, Tommy Lee Jones barks out a list of orders and then gets on a motorcycle and speeds off to meet the girl. The next shot shows him arriving in a Jeep or similar vehicle, not on a motorcycle.
Correction: He stopped at the OEM office. That is their emergency truck.
Corrected entry: A volcano could never happen in Los Angeles. The earth's crust (and portions of the mantle) are made up of plates, which move about in three ways: divergent, convergent, and transform. In L.A. we have a transform boundary, which means the plates slide alongside one another, accounting for the many earthquakes in California. Volcanoes happen along convergent boundaries, where a plate subducts under another, goes deep into the mantle and hence melts, then rises back to the surface as magma. The entire "Ring of Fire" is made up of such boundaries. As this type of boundary does not exist along California, a volcano is effectively impossible until the plate movements change (which would take millions of years).
Correction: Simply put, not true. According to the USGS website, the most recent eruption of a volcano in California was in 1917. And there are many volcanoes in California.
Corrected entry: The lava flowing through the Red Line train tunnel was under very high pressure. Why didn't it erupt out of the access shaft that they used to lower the camera down into the tunnel, and for that matter, out of all the other access shafts as well?
Correction: The point at which the lava finally erupted was the end of the tunnel. Listen to Tommy Lee Jones and Anne Heche's dialogue as they're racing back to the hospital.
Correction: It's never shown that gas vaporized somebody, dead workers were present in the bags in the beginning of the film, a woman fell in the fissure, rats were lying roasted, but nobody vaporizes, and it's never mentioned by anybody in the film.