Eruption in the Canaries: lava engulfs a hundred houses, 6,000 people evacuated – bfmtv

While a slowdown in lava movement was observed on Monday, it remains difficult to predict when the eruption will end, within a week or several months.

The lava flows spewed out by the Cumbre Vieja volcano, which erupted on Sunday on the Spanish island of La Palma, in the Canary Islands, resulted in the evacuation of around 6,000 people and destroyed a hundred houses as it descended towards the ocean, without yet reaching it during the night of Monday to Tuesday, according to the latest forecasts.

A new eruption point appeared Monday evening around 9.15 p.m. local (8:15 p.m. GMT) in the town of El Paso, forcing new evacuations in the area, alerted the archipelago’s emergency service on Twitter.

“We have no human loss to deplore (…) and I think this is the best news”, welcomed the president of the region, Angel Victor Torres, during a press conference joint with the Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, arrived on the spot Sunday evening.

“Lava tongues” which “swallow up everything in their path”

This eruption, the first since 1971 on this island populated by nearly 85,000 inhabitants, on the other hand caused significant damage. Lorena Hernandez Labrador, city councilor in Los Llanos de Aridane, one of the villages affected by the lava flows, said that “a hundred houses” had been “destroyed in the municipalities of Los Llanos, El Paso and Tazacorte” .

Noelia Garcia, the mayor of this municipality, said she felt “helplessness and rage” in the face of this disaster. “It’s nature” but “we are worried about the banana and avocado plantations, which have suffered, and for the economic future of the island,” she explained.

Images disseminated by the media or circulating on social networks showed impressive lava flows, reaching up to ten meters in height, burning trees in their path, covering roads and rushing into houses through windows left open.

Asked about public television, the president of the local authority of La Palma, Mariano Hernández Zapata, spoke of a landscape of desolation, left by “tongues of lava (…) which swallow up everything in their path”.

“We are about ten meters thick so imagine the mass moving”

Cumbre Vieja spits columns of smoke reaching several hundred meters high and between 6000 and 9000 tonnes of sulfur dioxide per day, according to the Canary Islands Volcanological Institute (Involcan). Smoke that has so far not resulted in the closure of airspace.

It is about an “effusive” eruption which will “flood areas of land, at a certain speed and with a certain flow”, explains on BFMTV Edouard Kaminski, researcher in physical volcanology at the institute of physics of the globe of Paris. If it causes damage, it remains “less dangerous” than an explosive eruption, because “these are eruptions during which you still have a certain time to evacuate people, to delimit risk zones, it is easier. to manage”.

According to the Involcan, these flows – which followed lava jets several tens of meters high – are advancing at an average speed of 700 meters per hour at nearly 1000 ° C.

“A few hundred meters per hour is still high speeds”, emphasizes Édouard Kaminski, “but above all it is very high flow rates, because we are around ten meters thick, so imagine the mass that moves”. The movement of the lava “is significantly slower than it was initially”, however explained Monday evening a spokesman for the regional government.

“Rashes for a week to three months”

“The night has been long” and “the days to come will be long” also for those affected, Pedro Sanchez said on Monday, promising them that they would not “suffer economically” thanks to the “solidarity” of the whole country.

“We are able to predict the start of the eruption, its duration is complicated,” says Édouard Kaminski. According to him, if “we look at the historical data, we see that it is a volcano that will erupt for a week to three months”. According to the scientific coordinator of the Involcan, Nemesio Perez, the activity of the volcano could indeed last “several weeks or even a few months”, due to the presence of a second pocket of magma located 20 or 30 kilometers from depth.

The Cumbre Vieja volcano had been under close surveillance for a week due to a huge surge in seismic activity. According to Angel Victor Torres, it would contain between 17 and 20 million cubic meters of magma. Of volcanic origin, the Canary Islands had its last eruption in 2011, this time underwater, at the island of El Hierro.