Dozens killed in Guatemalan volcano eruption
DOZENS KILLED IN POMPEII-STYLE DISASTER IN GUATEMALA
Jose Antonio Rivera counted to nine on the fingers of his grey ash-encased hands as he tallied relatives who had vanished in the torrent of mud and fire. “My children are gone. There is just me, my wife, and one son left,” he told local television amid apocalyptic scenes in the shadow of Guatemala’s El Fuego volcano — The Volcano of Fire. The eruption blasted smoke more than seven kilometres into the sky and set off a pyroclastic surge of the kind that destroyed the city of Pompeii in AD79.
Such a surge — a mixture of ash, sand, and gas — can reach temperatures of 700 C and travel far faster than lava, more than 100 km/h. Guatemalan villagers were caught completely off-guard. Hilda Lopez described how it swept into her village of San Miguel Los Lotes.
“We were at a party, celebrating the birth of a baby, when one of the neighbours shouted at us to come out and see the lava that was coming. We didn’t believe it, and when we went out the hot mud was already coming down the street. My mother was stuck there, she couldn’t get out,” said Lopez, weeping and holding her face in her hands. One group of villagers gathered on a bridge to watch what they thought would be a slow lava flow, only fleeing at the last minute as the bridge was suddenly overwhelmed. Monday night the official death toll was 62 but expected to rise as rescue workers combed the worst affected area about 50 kilometres southwest of the capital Guatemala City. The village of El Rodeo was “buried,” the rescuers said. They described finding bodies so cased in ash they looked like statues.
“We are looking for people who are missing, but we don’t know how many there are,” said Mario Cruz, the spokesman for the fire brigade.
He said six children, and their pregnant mother, had just been rescued from their home and taken to a local hospital where survivors were being treated for burns and breathing difficulties. El Fuego began erupting at 1 p.m. on Sunday and that was immediately followed by a billowing grey cloud that filled the horizon.
THE RAIN MADE (THE ERUPTION) FAR MORE DEADLY.
Ash rained down on towns and cities across a far wider area, including the tourist city of Antigua and Guatemala City, where the airport was temporarily closed by debris on the runway.
More than 3,000 people had been evacuated to shelters. President Jimmy Morales declared three days of mourning, but his government was already facing criticism for not acting sooner to start forced evacuations.
The country’s disaster agency never told us to leave, said Rafael Letran, a resident of El Rodeo. “When the lava was already here they passed by in their pickup trucks yelling at us to leave, but the cars did not stop to pick up the people,” he said. “The government is good at stealing, but when it comes to helping people they lack spark.”
The slow reaction may have been related to the fact that Guatemalans are used to seeing El Fuego, one of Central America’s most active volcanoes, spit burning material into the sky.
A small industry exists of trips for tourists who trek up an adjacent volcano and camp to watch the spectacle.
Eddy Sanchez, the director of the country’s seismology and volcanology institute, said that El Fuego has an average of between 10 and 16 “explosions” a day. He said that last year the volcano erupted 12 times. The biggest recent one, in February this year, sent ash more than a kilometre into the sky. Sunday’s eruption, however, was on a completely different scale. He said that it was still much smaller than the last major eruption in 1974, although that one did not cause any deaths. He blamed the greater destruction on the fact that rivers were already overflowing and filled with mud, which meant that the pyroclastic flow became far more dangerous.
“The rain made it far more deadly,” he said. “It also meant that the evacuation effort was much more difficult.”
Janine Krippner, a volcanologist in West Virginia, noted on Twitter that the Guatemala eruption was unlike the continuing lava flows at Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano because it was spewing pyroclastic flows — quickly moving avalanches that can be “devastating and deadly.”
The U.S. Geological Survey defines a pyroclastic flow as a “chaotic mixture of rock fragments, gas and ash. It says the combination of speed and high temperature makes such flows particularly dangerous and deadly.