Guatemala volcano residents thought it was safe
SAN MIGUEL LOS LOTES (AP) — Orlando Paez plans never to go back to his hamlet of San Miguel Los Lotes, where he narrowly escaped an onrushing river of superheated volcanic ash as his dying neighbors screamed for help.
“I don’t know what they are going to do with this land,” Paez said days after Guatemala’s Volcano of Fire violently erupted, “but please, nobody should ever be allowed to live there again.”
A good question is why authorities ever allowed it in the first place.
Nestled on the flanks of the extremely active volcano, the village was square in the path of a gulch that channeled the downhill flow of a fast-moving hot rock, ash and debris when the mountain erupted Sunday, burying homes up to their rooftops.
At least 109 people were killed and nearly 200 remain missing, according to the most recent official toll.
While the volcano hadn’t produced a similar town-destroying outburst since 1974, it has been almost continuously active since 2002, and over the past year, it has repeatedly sent lava or superheated flows of ash and debris running down ravines on its flanks, sometimes for more than two kilometers.
Still, locals said that since the village was first settled in the 1950s as housing for coffee pickers who worked on local plantations, such rivers of ash and rock had never flowed through Los Lotes. Residents thought they were safe. “Not disaster officials, not anybody, nobody knew what was going to happen,” said Efrain Suarez, 59, a truck driver who lived in the neighboring village of El Rodeo and whose relatives lived in Los Lotes.
Locals said any ash flows normally would travel down a deeper gulch, called Las Lajas, just to the north.
But in the decades since the Volcano of Fire’s last major eruption, the government had built a bridge across the gully of Las Lajas.
Suarez believes that bridge — seen collapsing as the ash flow hit it in a video widely shared on social media — may have had fatal consequences.
The downward flow became blocked by the bridge and debris that piled up behind it, causing it to overflow into the narrow valley just to the south, where Los Lotes is located, he said.
“It changed course because the gully couldn’t hold the ash flow. It came too rapidly, and there was too much of it,” Suarez said.