GUATEMALA'S MOLTEN HELL

Grim hunt as volcano toll hits 62

Rescuers pulled survivors and bodies Monday from the charred aftermath of the eruption of Guatemala’s Volcano of Fire, as the death toll rose to 62 and was expected to go higher from a disaster that caught residents of remote mountain hamlets off guard, with little or no time to flee to safety.

Using shovels and backhoes, emergency workers dug through debris and mud on ter- rain still hot enough to melt shoe soles a day after the volcano in the country’s southwest exploded in a hail of ash, smoke and molten rock.

Bodies were so thickly coated with ash that they looked like statues. Rescuers used sledgehammers to break through roofs of houses buried in debris to see if anyone was trapped inside.

Fanuel Garcia, director of the National Institute of Forensic Sciences, said 62 bodies were found and 13 of them identified.

“It is very difficult for us to identify them because some of the dead lost their features or their fingerprints,” Garcia said.

Hilda Lopez said her mother and sister were missing after the slurry of hot gas, ash and rock roared into her village of San Miguel Los Lotes, just below the mountain’s flanks.

“We were at a party, celebrating the birth of a baby when one of the neighbors shouted at us to come out and see the lava that was coming,” she said. “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.

Her husband, Joel Gonzalez, said his father was believed to be “buried back there.”

Guatemalan authorities said they had been closely monitoring the Volcano of Fire, one of Central America’s most active, after activity picked up at around 6 a.m. Sunday.

David de Leon, a spokesman for the country’s disaster agency, Conred, said that at around 2 p.m. the volcano registered a new, more powerful explosion.

Soon, searing flows of lava, ash and rock were gushing down the volcano’s flanks.

“It traveled much faster,” de Leon said. “It arrived in communities right when the evacuation alerts were being sent out.”

DISASTER: Guatemala’s Volcano of Fire sends a plume of ash and gas into the air Sunday as police and soldiers pull sootcoated victims from mountainside villages wiped out by fast-moving lava flows.