26 The Sunday Times December 19, 2021WORLD NEWS
lage of Todoque, its church buckling
under the advance of the lava. Another
flow barreled through an industrial park
on the fringes of Los Llanos de Aridane.
Amid acres of steaming black rock, only a
warehouse belonging to an avocado
packing plant and some concrete mixers
from a cement factory are still standing.
The volcano could hardly have chosen
a worse place to strike. The valley on the
western coast enjoys the best weather on
the island while the earth, much of which
was brought from the top of the moun-
tain in the 1950s, is considered the most
fertile for growing bananas.
The black wasteland created by the
volcano blocks access from Los Llanos de
Aridane to Puerto Naos, which has the
island’s most beautiful beach and is a hub
for adventure sports fans. The area has
been cordoned off and is guarded by
police, with only farmers and business
owners allowed in with a QR code.
Roger Frey owns a parasailing busi-
ness in Puerto Naos but his home is in El
Paso, on the other side of the exclusion
zone. Puerto Naos is directly exposed to
the prevailing wind that has pushed a
cocktail of noxious gases including sul-
phur dioxide, carbon dioxide, carbon
monoxide and even acid rain over the
beach resort.
Once authorities can confirm that the
eruption is over, the next job will be to
clear the blanket of ash that has fallen
over the town like black snow, said Car-
men Castro, a bar owner.
Business owners such as her and Frey
are allowed in every other day if the air
quality is not considered hazardous. A
car journey from Los Llanos de Aridane
that used to take 20 minutes now takes
two hours, and involves crossing the
mountain ridge in the middle of the
island and driving around the south on a
single-lane road.
No one expects a new road to be built
for at least a year. It will take months for
the lava to cool before construction can
begin, said Lieutenant Colonel Jose
Alberto Gallego, head of the military
emergency response unit on the island.
He said that the biggest success of the100 days later...
and we’re still
knee-deep in ash
Almost a month after the volcano on La
Palma erupted in September, a 20ft wall
of lava came to a halt yards from the edge
of Max Deffner’s property.
For five days he thought a miracle had
saved him but then the lava flow contin-
ued its march towards the sea, taking
with it the complex of five houses, an
office building, a mechanic’s workshop
and several outhouses.
It had been a home for him and his
family since his German parents settled
on the island off the northwest coast of
Africa more than 30 years ago. Now the
complex in La Laguna, which included
homes for himself, his mother and his sis-
ter and her husband, as well as two
houses rented to tourists, are all gone,
buried under lava that is gradually start-
ing to cool, as the most destructive erup-
tion in the history of the Canary Islands
shows signs of coming to an end.
“I don’t feel any anger,” said Deffner,
nursing a drink at a bar in the local foot-
ball stadium that has become a meeting
point for those displaced by the volcano.
“It’s no one’s fault. This is a volcanic
island so it has to happen at some point.”
Volcanologists are wary of declaring its
definitive end but after almost a week
with no seismic activity the inhabitants of
this Atlantic island of about 85,000 peo-
ple are turning to the next phase: taking
stock of the damage and working out how
to pick up broken lives. More than 3,000
buildings, about half of which were
homes, and 1,237 hectares of land have
been destroyed, displacing 7,000 peo-
ple, almost 10 per cent of the population.
The Cumbre Vieja volcano erupted on
a sunny Sunday afternoon on a bluff
above the island’s largest town, Los Lla-
nos de Aridane. For almost three months
about a dozen lava flows bulldozed their
way down the mountain, destroying
everything in their path including hun-
dreds of hectares of banana plants, the
main driver of the island’s economy
alongside tourism, which was already
reeling from cancellations due to the cor-
onavirus.
The hamlet of El Paraiso with about 60
houses went on the first day, then the vil-Cumbre Vieja’s eruption destroyed thousands of livelihoods,
but now the great clean-up can begin, writes Charlie DevereuxLava and ash
have covered
large areas of the
island. Noxious
gases released
by the volcano
have to be
carefully
monitoreddisaster management operation has been
the prevention of any fatalities, espe-
cially given the urban density of the area
where it surfaced. Matt Pankhurst, an
Australian volcanologist working for
Involcan, the Canary Islands Volcanol-
ogy Institute, said the island had also
enjoyed a large slice of luck.
“Zero fatalities from this eruption is
staggering,” Pankhurst said. “The erup-
tion started in an unpopulated area at
2pm on a bright sunny afternoon on a
Sunday. It could equally have come up in
the middle of town in the middle of the
night and we would have been looking at
potentially enormous loss of life.”
A rapid rise in the urban population
explains why the eruption has been so
damaging. About half of the buildings
destroyed were built in the past 30 years.
It is a challenge the world will have to face
as people encroach on land at risk of vol-
canic eruptions, Pankhurst said.
The flip side is that the proximity to
urban development has allowed scien-
tists the opportunity to bring equipment
to study the volcano’s effects in a live con-
text. Pankhurst and his team have set up
a makeshift laboratory in a pumping sta-
tion lent by the local water company.
He is hopeful of a virtuous circle in
which the kind of advances made in La
Palma bring more investment, giving sci-
entists better tools to build a four-dimen-
sional picture of where the magma is, was
and, potentially, will be. “What we’re
hoping to do as volcanologists is decrease
damage, decrease loss of life and also
learn a few things about how the Earth
works,” he said.
In La Palma, insurance is on every-
one’s lips. Jose Andres Sanchez said he
lost about 4,000 banana plants that
could have raised about €500,000
(£424,000). He is waiting for confirma-
tion of his insurance claim but thinks he
will recoup only about a quarter.
Dessler, who inherited the family car-
hire agency also runs a business provid-
ing solar panels for homes, says his prop-
erties were worth €2 million to €3 million
and he will only recoup about a fifth of
that. But he appears more concerned
about others on the island. He says he is
faced more difficult crises, such as when
his father died suddenly nine years ago
and he had to return to the island to res-
cue the business.
He has also been touched by the gener-
osity of others; tourists who had reserva-
tions at the houses that were destroyed
have refused to take back deposits while
other customers who moved their holi-
day to neighbouring Tenerife have paid
for their hire cars to be delivered by ferry.
Dessler has been receiving donations
from friends and clients abroad that he
has distributed to neighbours. He is con-
cerned about how the island will cope
once the dust settles, especially the thou-
sands of jobs lost with the destruction of
the banana groves. “I think there’s going
to be a kind of depression,” he said.
“Nobody has been thinking about this
because the volcano has only just gone
out but once there’s a period of peace
people are going to get really mad.”Zero
fatalities is
staggering
— we could
have had
enormous
loss of lifeEMILIO MORENATTI/AP