The spokesman of the National Coordinator for Disaster Reduction of Guatemala, David de León, affirmed that they continue with the evaluation tasks

Fuego volcano of Guatemala erupted last Sunday, June 4, leaving at least 69 people, 46 seriously injured and thousands of affected. The National Coordinator for Disaster Reduction of Guatemala (CONRED, in Spanish), in its most recent report, speaks of 1.7 million affected, 3,265 evacuated, and 1,687 sheltered.

Leer en español: Guatemala: Según David de León, lo principal es “encontrar personas desaparecidas y ojalá con vida”

The lifeguards: heroes without a cape

The spokesman of the CONRED, David de León, said at a press conference that they continue with the task of evaluating the tragedy but that the main thing is "to find missing persons and hopefully alive". The rescue teams fight in dangerous conditions looking for bodies under the ash and mud that descended from the volcano. The rescuers said they have found bodies covered with ashes that looked like statues. Inhaling hot ash or volcanic gases can suffocate people quickly.

For rescuers, the heat and the amount of mud have made rescue work difficult. However, despite their insistence on finding signs of life, the efforts seem in vain given the magnitude of the disaster. The hopes to find survivors diminish, but in the middle of the tragedy, the lifeguards managed to rescue a baby girl with life inside one of the houses that was buried by the mud and ashes of the Volcano of Fire. It is not known with certainty if the baby girl was alone, or if her family was buried by lava.

For their part, the survivors continue to search for their missing relatives and point out that many people still remain buried under the layers of ash and mud.

The president of Guatemala, Jimmy Morales, plans to visit the area devastated by the eruption in the next few hours along with his wife, Patricia Marroquin, to see first-hand the magnitude of the disaster and the needs of the inhabitants. The national government decreed national mourning for three days.

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"There were no evacuation routes": David Rothery

For the geologist David Rothery of the Open University of England there is no reason why the competent authorities of Guatemala have not established evacuation routes or a contingency plan in case the volcano erupts. His critique focuses mainly on the fact that if the volcano was in an eruptive phase since 2002 and maintained continuous activity since 2017, why were there no evacuation routes established? While it is not time to question, for Rothery, it is time to see why a situation that could be foreseen does not encourage an emergency plan

Rothery also mentions during his assessment of the situation a recent incident, when on May 17, a 25-meter-long lahar (muddy flow) came down the side of the volcano. A few days later, on May 19 and 21, explosions and clouds of volcanic ash were recorded and, even so, the National Institute of Volcanology was not attentive to what was happening.

The Volcano of Fire

Fuego volcano, located 35 kilometers southwest of Guatemala, the capital, is a volcanic cone that reaches 3,763 meters in height. The eruption was so strong that, according to the National Institute of Volcanology, the column of ash ejected reached 2,200 meters above the crater. For the Institute, although the eruption has been completed and believes that the volcano is returning to normal, the alert is maintained because "it is possible to reactivate" in the coming hours.

Fuego volcano had erupted for the last time in September 2012. At that time, about 10,000 people had to be evacuated, although the eruption on Sunday was the most violent in four decades

Latin American Post | Carlos Eduardo Gómez Avella
Translated from “Guatemala: Según David de León, lo principal es “encontrar personas desaparecidas y ojalá con vida””