IT WAS LIKE BEING IN HELL

Priest’s horror as volcano erupts on Italian holiday isle – and kills hiker

LOOKING like the fallout from an atomic bomb, this was the scene when a volcano erupted in Italy – killing one hiker, and sending tourists and locals fleeing for their lives.

Some islanders threw themselves into the sea to escape the destruction as lava poured forth.

Describing a ‘rain of fire coming from the sky’, local priest Giovanni Longo said: ‘It was like being in Hell.’

The volcano, on the island of Stromboli off the toe of Italy, began erupting yesterday just before 5pm local time. The resulting ash cloud stretched more than a mile high.

The dead man, a 35-year-old from nearby Sicily, was killed by stones flung out by the explosion, the Italian rescue service said. His companion was found dehydrated and in a state of shock.

Fiona Carter, a British tourist on the nearby island of Panarea, heard the blast from 17 miles away. She said: ‘We turned around to see a mushroom cloud coming from Stromboli. Everyone was in shock. Then red hot lava started running down the mountain towards the village of Ginostra.

‘The cloud... it enveloped Ginostra and covered Stromboli entirely.’

Visitors to the island and its 500 inhabitants were told to take refuge. James Attlee, a writer from London holidaying on Panarea, said: ‘The volcano has been grumbling the last few days but no one expected this. We heard a massive boom. The birds and insects are silent.’

Witness Gianluca Giuffre said those in Ginostra, on Stromboli’s south-west coast, barricaded themselves indoors or threw themselves into the sea. The volcano is one of the world’s most active and has been erupting almost constantly since 1932.

Despite the danger, tourists are attracted to the five-square-mile island to climb to the volcano’s 3,031ft summit and peer into its crater.

The island was the setting for a 1950 film – Stromboli, Land Of God – starring Ingrid Bergman. Stefano Branca, of Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics and Vulcanology, said yesterday’s event was a ‘paroxysmal eruption’, when pressurised magma bursts from an underground chamber.

He said it was ‘of great intensity and quite rare’.