Guatemala volcano toll growing
The official number of dead is more than 60, but rescuers say it will be much higher.
EL RODEO, Guatemala — Rescuers frantically dug through ash in Guatemala on Monday in a desperate search for survivors of a volcanic eruption that killed dozens.
Using rescue dogs and shovels, rescuers combed through the remains of homes destroyed Sunday when cascading flows of volcanic matter erupted from Guatemala’s Volcano of Fire about 25 miles west of the capital, Guatemala City. Authorities said the volcano was unlikely to erupt again, but a massive column of ash still hung in the sky Monday, leading officials to close Guatemala’s international airport and urge residents to stay inside.
Rescuers searching the poor agricultural communities near the volcano found the bodies of the dead more often than they found survivors.
The official death toll announced by Guatemala’s disaster response agency was 62, but rescuers said the number was much higher.
In and around a single small farming town, El Rodeo, rescuers recovered 38 bodies Monday, according to local firefighter Luis Pineda. He said they discovered just one survivor, a man who was treated for seconddegree burns.
Volunteer firefighter German Padilla said there was a moment of hope when a survivor reported a cellphone communication from a person inside a home that had been in the lava’s path. But when rescuers reached the home hours later, they found the burned corpses of the entire family, including five children.
In El Rodeo, bodies wrapped in tarps and blankets lay side by side on a dirt road as survivors urgently sought information about missing loved ones.
Eufemia Garcia, 38, wandered in a daze.
She wasn’t home when the lava swept into her community, burying everything in its path, but her three children were.
“It all happened in an instant,” she said. “Not minutes, but seconds. The lava came down and swept everything away.”
Her children, all in their 20s, had not been found.
The Volcano of Fire, which rises 12,346 feet above sea level, is one of Central America’s most active. It also erupted earlier this year, according to a statement from Guatemala’s seismology and volcanology institute, but that eruption was not deadly.
According to the institute, the volcano shot a 3,000-foot-tall column of ash into the air this time and spewed lava that reached temperatures of 1,300 degrees. Ash from the volcano fell on Guatemala City and in the town of Antigua, a colonial-era city popular with tourists, as burning-hot lahar — a slurry of lava, rocky debris and water — gushed down onto the communities that dot the side of the volcano. Video showed lahar slamming into and partly destroying a highway bridge.
Survivor Sofio Morales, a coffee farmer, said many coffee, bean and corn farms were destroyed by the lava.
“Everything is ruined,” he said.
Thanks to God, he said, his wife and his 10 children were safe. But as he waited at an evacuation center in El Rodeo, he worried about the future.
“The whole crop was ruined,” he said. “What are we are going to do to feed our children?”