The Daily Telegraph

‘My children are gone. There is just me, my wife and one son left’

Guatemalan­s tell of shock and despair as volcanic blast swamps villages and claims at least 62 lives

- By Jo Tuckman

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 eruption blasted smoke more than four miles into the sky and set off a pyroclasti­c surge of the kind that destroyed Pompeii in AD79.

Such a surge – a mixture of ash, sand, and gas – can reach temperatur­es of 1292F (700C) and travel far faster than lava, more than 60mph. Villagers were caught completely off guard.

Hilda Lopez described how it swept into her village of San Miguel Los Lotes. She said: “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.”

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. Last night, the official death toll was 62 but expected to rise as rescue workers combed the worst affected area about 30 miles south-west of 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,” Mario Cruz, the spokesman for the fire brigade, told The Daily Telegraph.

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. Volcan El Fuego – the “Volcano of Fire” – began erupting at 1pm on Sunday and that was immediatel­y followed by a billowing grey cloud that filled the horizon.

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. Jimmy Morales, the president, declared three days of mourning but his government was already facing criticism for not acting sooner to start forced evacuation­s.

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, last February, sent ash a mile into the sky. Sunday’s eruption, however, was on a completely different scale. He told The Telegraph 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 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.”

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 ??  ?? Rescue workers, right, remove injured villagers from the path of the explosion, above, which belched out clouds of ash and flows of lava, top right. Bottom right: residents stand outside a makeshift morgue in the town of Alotenango
Rescue workers, right, remove injured villagers from the path of the explosion, above, which belched out clouds of ash and flows of lava, top right. Bottom right: residents stand outside a makeshift morgue in the town of Alotenango

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