There have been at least two dozen recorded eruptions and now threatens to wipe out a Guatemalan population in which they live 547 families.
The Pacaya volcano, located between the departments of Escuintla and Guatemala, in the southwest of the Central American country, began to expel a river of lava that is getting closer and closer to the town of Patrocinio and also threatens the village of San José el Rodeo .
Now the neighbors try to organize themselves and ask the authorities and international cooperation for help to evacuate the area.
Although they know that this means that they will have to start their lives over from scratch.
“ What can we do? “
This Friday a new emergency meeting of the residents of Patrocinio was held.
As the arrival of the lava to their houses seems “almost unstoppable”, the vast majority of the inhabitants requests an evacuation plan.
The Executive Secretariat of CONRED, through the Volcano Prevention Unit, the Immediate Response Team and Strategic Intervention Teams maintain surveillance and monitoring of lava flows that are currently not progressing. 1/2 pic.twitter.com/P5WqoYTPNX
– CONRED (@ConredGuatemala) April 23, 2018
This was explained to BBC Mundo by Carlos Donis, president of the Community Development Council of the town.
“We are looking for the best way to leave our homes and coordinate, but until now the authorities have not presented us with an immediate action strategy,” he indicates.
The neighborhood leader recognizes that abandoning Sponsorship will mean “losing everything” for many of them, but says that in this At the moment they don’t see any other option.
“The lava continues I’m walking, what can we do? We have to take our things, otherwise everything will be devastated “, he says.
” We have the lava at 400 meters from the community ”.
Most of Sponsorship is dedicated to working in factories that are installed in the surroundings.
The 80 % of the inhabitants of the town, Donis points out, have nowhere to go and that is why they ask the Guatemalan government for help .
The volcano
The Pacaya volcano has more than 8, 000 feet (2, 500 meters high.
It started leaking lava from one of its cracks and expelling ash and smoke from its crater two and a half months ago.
“We don’t know how long it can last. It can be many months or years in which the volcano expels lava and this advances about 5 or 10 meters per day until reaching the communities “, explains Gino González, a volcanologist who works for the organization Volcanes sin Fronteras.
The expert indicates that this phenomenon is” very common “in Pacaya and recalls that a similar or eruption even stronger has already occurred in 2010.
“We are talking about one of the volcanoes more active in Guatemala and it is foreseeable that at some point the lava flow that it emits will reach the communities ”, he indicates.
González adds that “ the The point is that you don’t know when you can stop. It is a kind of tongue that expands very slowly, but without stopping. ”
“ This only ends when the eruption begins to stop and the advance stops, but if the laundry remains in these levels cannot be prevented from expanding ”, he affirms.
The expert indicates that the activity of the Pacaya is similar to the Fagradalsfjall of Iceland, which also has fissures that expel lava flow.
Alert and monitoring
The National Coordinator for Disaster Reduction of Guatemala stated that it carries out permanent monitoring of the advance of the lava and coordinates with populations in danger.
The entity reported that the flow did not increase this Friday.
The Guatemalan authorities issued an alert sde Tuesday before the advance of the river of lava.
The National Institute of Seismology, Volcanology, Meteorology and Hydrology of Guatemala detailed that the lava flows are about 370 meters from the first villages and that it has already reached some coffee plantations.
The entity indicated that the magma tongue already reaches 3.7 kilometers in length.
At the end of February the authorities began operations to evacuate national tourists who visited the national park on the slopes of the volcano.
22 populations with 20. 000 people are found in the surroundings of the mountain, among them the most threatened: Patrocinio and San José el Rodeo, where they live 50 families.
El Pacaya is one of the three active volcanoes in Guatemala together with Fuego and Santiaguito. In total, the Central American country has 32 volcanic mountains .
In June 2018 a tragedy occurred due to the eruption of Fire that left at least 200 dead and more than 100 missing.
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