The earth trembled again during the night of Monday to Tuesday, September 21 on La Palma, in the Canary Islands, while the volcanic eruption that has shaken the island since Sunday continues to pour out waves of magma engulfing everything in their path and liberating thousands of tons of sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere.
The earthquake, with a magnitude of 4.1, on the Richter scale, caused the opening of a new eruptive mouth – the ninth -, associated with one of the two volcanic cracks several hundred meters deep. long appeared in the pine forest of the Cumbre Vieja natural park, in the southwest of the island located off the African coast (in the south of Morocco).
Nearly 500 people were forced to leave their homes overnight. Since Sunday, nearly 6,000 inhabitants of five municipalities in the south of La Palma have had to be evacuated because of the risk of lava flows, ash rains, impact of pyroclasts or exposure to gases. Most of them are staying with relatives or in a military barracks set up by the Red Cross.
The damage is estimated at more than 400 million euros
At the Tajuya belvedere, in the town of El Paso, one of the most affected by the volcanic eruption, dozens of residents kept arriving on Tuesday morning in order to observe, helplessly, the devastation caused by this breathtaking spectacle of nature. “ The night is a spectacle, the day is a tragedy ”, summed up a resident to the cameras of Spanish television TVE. On the roads, vehicles loaded with furniture and household appliances, tried to shelter most of a life. The day before, before the lava reached Todoque, the last village before the ocean, there were crucifixes and statues of the Virgin Mary that the neighbors helped the priest to transport.
Tuesday evening, more than 180 houses had been swallowed by the lava flows whose temperature exceeds 1000 degrees and whose height reached 6 meters in places. According to the headmistress of the small school Los Campitos consumed by magma, Angeles Nieves, at least half of the 23 children aged 3 to 12 who were educated there no longer have a school or a home. The balance sheet should be revised very largely upwards, as the material damage increases as the two large lava flows which escape from the volcano are heading towards the tourist coastal villages of Tazacorte and Los Llanos de Aridane.
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