On La Palma in the Atlantic, thousands of people have to be brought to safety before a volcanic eruption, including holidaymakers. The Canary Island could face a long state of emergency.
Madrid / La Palma – “The lava destroys the houses like butter,” says Celia on the Spanish TV station RTVE. The middle-aged woman ran a small hotel on the holiday island of La Palma, which belongs to Spain.
But since Sunday a volcano in the area of Cumbre Vieja has been spitting ash and lava – and Celia no longer has a hotel. “When the lava reaches a house, there is nothing left in seconds, just a black mass,” says the visibly shaken woman. Like around 5000 other people in the region in the south of the small Canary Island, she had to flee from the volcanic eruption. 500 of them were tourists. At first it was not known whether there were Germans among them.
The volcano hurls ash, rocks and lava upwards from eight different chimneys. Especially at night there were eerily beautiful pictures of fire fountains that shot hundreds of meters high into the sky. “It’s an incredible natural spectacle that scares you,” said local resident María del Pino Hernández of the newspaper “El Diario.es”. The air traffic to the island was initially not suspended.
Like a giant dragon
The lava, which is around 1000 degrees Celsius, has been rolling slowly but inexorably downhill towards the west coast of the island like a giant dragon since Sunday – 700 meters per hour. Everything burns in its path: trees, bushland, banana plantations, fields, roads, power lines and so far dozens of houses. In the town of Los Llanos de Aridane, around 150 apartments were affected.
Initially, nobody was injured – because the island of volcanic origin, on which the last eruption occurred in 1971, was prepared. Thousands of small earthquakes during the past few days were a relatively sure indication of what was to come for the volcanologists. People were asked to prepare light luggage for their escape and were given information on where to gather in the event of an evacuation. Elderly and disabled people were brought to safety shortly before the outbreak.
A total of 17 to 20 million cubic meters of magma could have accumulated under the volcano, reported RTVE, citing the regional head of government of the Canaries, Ángel Víctor Torres. Volcanologist Stavros Meletlidis warned that nature is unpredictable. “We only have very simple models of the extremely complicated processes under our feet,” he said on television. How long could the outbreak last? “We do not know it. There are outbreaks that end after nine days and some that last for years. “
Red alert declared
The volcano came to life on Sunday at 3:12 p.m. local time (4:12 p.m. CEST) with violent explosions. The authorities called the red alert of the volcano emergency plan and began evacuations. Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said a planned trip to the USA and arrived on La Palma on Sunday evening. He assured the victims of quick and unbureaucratic help.
The fire brigade had to move out again and again to fight the bush and forest fires that flared up due to the volcanic eruption and at the edge of the lava flows. Police and military units arrived on Monday to reinforce the island.
The authorities called on the population to remain calm. The outbreak has not been very intense so far. However, warnings were given about the black ash from the volcano and possibly harmful gases. The people on the island with 83,000 inhabitants should, if possible, not leave their homes. Onlookers were asked to leave the area so as not to obstruct the evacuations.
La Palma is located in the north-west of the Canaries, an archipelago in the Atlantic off the west coast of Africa. It is 85 kilometers from the nearest larger island of Tenerife, which is also very popular with German tourists, and 57 kilometers from La Gomera. Mass tourism like on the better known Canary Islands Tenerife, Gran Canaria, Fuerteventura and Lanzarote does not exist on La Palma. dpa
