LOS ARIDANE: A huge wall of molten lava creeping down the slopes of Spain’s La Palma island has now destroyed 320 buildings, as distraught residents watched the flow inching towards the ocean on Wednesday.
The Cumbre Vieja volcano erupted on Sunday within the south of Los Angeles Palma, one among seven islands that structure the Canary Islands archipelago off the coast of Morocco.
The EU’s Copernicus observation program said the lava now covered 154 hectares and had destroyed 320 buildings, double the figure it had given 24 hours earlier.
Experts expect the amount to rise because the slow-moving mass slides towards the island’s western coast when its interaction with the ocean is probably going to cause explosions and trigger toxic gas emissions.
So far, 6,100 people are evacuated, among them 400 tourists who were taken to the neighboring island of Tenerife, the Canaries regional government said.
Although there are no casualties, the damage to land and property has been enormous, with the Canaries regional head Angel Victor Torres estimating the figure to be over 400 million euros ($470m).
In a desperate plan to divert the flow, firefighters might be seen using heavy machinery to dig a channel towards a close-by ravine because the advancing lava glowed within the background.
“It’s not for a want of trying,” they tweeted alongside a video of the digger hard at work.
Experts performing on the Pevolca volcanic emergency plan say there are two lava flows one to the north and one further south, which is barely moving.
David Calvo, an expert with the Involcan volcanology institute, said the lava had “slowed down tons because it’s reaching a really flat area but it’s gaining height. There are areas where it’s already 15 meters thick”.
If the lava — which features a temperature of 1,100 degrees Celsius — continues to maneuver at an equivalent pace, it’ll reach the ocean by Thursday.
And when it gets there, there’ll be “a huge battle of the titans between the water and therefore the lava,” he said. “With those contrasting temperatures, it causes massive explosions and a fragmentation of the lava which shoots out like missiles.”
Involcan experts witnessed an equivalent phenomenon in 2018 at the Kilauea volcano in Hawaii where 16 people were hurt by the explosion of fragments and one person “almost lost a leg”, he said.
When the lava reaches the shore, it’ll also send clouds of acidic, toxic gas into the air, generated by the interaction with the seawater, which may be dangerous to inhale, experts say.
The volcano was also putting out some 10,000 tonnes of sulfur dioxide emissions per day which showed “the pace, the intensity of the eruption isn’t getting to decrease”, Calvo said.
