Final Guatemala volcano toll unclear
Several areas too hot for searches
The Associated Press
ESCUINTLA, Guatemala — Lilian Hernandez wept as she spoke the names of aunts, uncles, cousins, her grandmother and two greatgrandchildren — 36 family members in all — missing and presumed dead in the explosion of Guatemala’s Volcano of Fire.
“My cousins Ingrid, Yomira, Paola, Jennifer, Michael, Andrea and Silvia, who was just 2 years old,” the distraught woman said — a litany that brought into sharp relief the scope of a disaster for which the final death toll is far from clear.
Guatemala’s National Institute of Forensic Sciences raised the death toll Tuesday evening to 75. The institute said that 23 of those recovered bodies had been identified.
What was once a collection of verdant canyons, hillsides and farms resembled a moonscape of ash, rock and debris in the aftermath of the fastmoving avalanche of superheated muck that roared into the tightly knit villages on the mountain’s flanks, devastatingentire families.
Two days after the eruption, the terrain was still too hot in many places for rescue crews to search for bodies or — increasingly unlikely with each passing day — survivors.
By Tuesday afternoon a new column of smoke was rising from the mountain and Guatemala’s disaster agency said volcanic material was descending its south side, prompting an evacuation order and the closure of a nearby national highway. Rescuers, police and journalists hurried to leave the area as a siren wailed and loudspeakers blared, “Evacuate!”
The new eruption could release ashes and hot gases, the National Institute of Seismology warned.
The new evacuation order set off a panic even in areas that were not under it. Dozens of people could be seen walking down roadsides carrying children or belongings beside paralyzed traffic in parts of Escuintla township south of the volcano.
Retiree Pantaleon Garcia was able to load his grandchildren into the back of a pickup with a jug of water and some food, to go to stay with relativesin another town.
“You have to be prepared, for the children,” he said.
Even in more distant central Escuintla, which hosts most of the shelters for those evacuated from other areas, businesses were closed as people left.
On Sunday, when the volcano exploded in a massive cloud of ash and molten rock, Ms. Hernandez said her brother and sister ran to check on their 70-year-old grandmother on the family’s plot of land in the village of San Miguel Los Lotes.
“She said that it was God’s will, she was not going to flee,” Ms. Hernandez said. “She was unable to walk.”
Her brother and sister made it to safety, but their grandmother has not been seen again.
Firefighters who reached the hardest-hit parts of the village on Tuesday found an eerie, desertlike landscape strewn with boulders. The rescuers walked single file behind a leader testing the unstable ground with a stick, their orange uniforms a jarring contrast with the pallor of the ash.
“Those people didn’t stand a chance. They were just lying there like statues,” said Armando Paredes, a 55, a volunteer firefighter who was amongthe first to reach the disaster zone on Sunday. “Their housesbecame their tombs.”
The fast-moving flows with temperatures as high as 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit and hot ash and volcanic gases that can cause rapid asphyxiation caught many off guard.