To be caught in the flow wouldn’t matter very much because it wouldn’t last very long.
If, for some reason, breathing the hot gas and volcanic ash didn’t kill you the temperature inside alone would be enough to boil your skin off. In some cases your brain would explode out of your skull due to it boiling out of control. Although you could be one of the lucky ones and just have your body literally blown to pieces after coming into contact with one of these flows.
As amazingly awful as that sounds it isn’t even the worst part. When it finally blows, the amount of volcanic ash and sulfur dioxide released into upper atmosphere could prove to be catastrophic. The gases released would create a thin cloud like sheet around the planet blocking the sun’s rays for up to approximately six years and would create a mini ice age. Temperatures would drop globally anywhere from ten to twenty degrees. Snow in June and frost in August would easily kill off the “bread basket of North America” as well as the “bread basket of Europe.”
No crops being grown would easily lead to the starvation of millions and potentially billions. Farm animals would die due to breathing in the ash being circulated. This event could easily wipe out sixty percent of the species that occupy the planet today.
Do you think bedbugs and cockroaches would survive it?