In my latin class, we watched a bbc documentary called "the last day of pompeii" and it mentioned a rescue mission sent from Rome, but how and who was notified and responsible for organising a response ? Generally, what was the reaction to what seems like an important city being completely wiped out in just one day ?
There are no other eyewitness accounts, but there are other references to it. Both Suetonius and Cassius Dio say that the emperor Titus directed some ex-consuls to relieve the displaced people of the region. The fact that men of consular rank directed the relief operation suggests how serious he considered the situation. Titus made gifts of public money to the refugees. He also gave them privately-owned land whose owners had been killed but had left no heirs. Generations after the event the Romans still remembered the eruption and destruction. In his Meditations Marcus Aurelius uses the examples of Pompeii and Herculaneum as how all human life is ephemeral.