Nearly 3,000 evacuated in the Philippines as Mayon Volcano shows signs of eruption

The Philippines has evacuated nearly 3,000 villagers in a permanent danger zone on the foothills of the Mayon Volcano after officials raised the alert level due to recent activity

A string of low-level eruptions at the Philippines’ most active volcano has forced authorities to evacuate nearly 3,000 residents living within a permanent danger zone on its lower slopes, officials said on Wednesday.

The alert level at Mayon Volcano in Albay province was raised to level 3 on the country’s five-step warning system on Tuesday, after monitors recorded intermittent rockfalls, some as large as cars, tumbling from the crater, along with dangerous pyroclastic flows of superheated ash, gas and rocks.

“This is already an eruption, a quiet one,” said Teresito Bacolcol, the Philippines’ chief volcanologist, explaining that lava is accumulating near the summit and causing parts of the volcanic dome to crack, triggering repeated rockfalls.

Alert level 5 would indicate that a major explosive eruption, often accompanied by violent ejections of ash and debris and widespread ashfall, is underway.

“This is already an eruption, a quiet one, with lava accumulating up the peak and swelling the dome, which cracked in some parts and resulted in rockfalls, some as big as cars,” Teresito Bacolcol, the country’S chief volcanologist, told the Associated Press.

He said it is too early to tell if Mayon’s restiveness will worsen and lead to a major and violent eruption, given the absence of other key signs of unrest, such as a spike in volcanic earthquakes and high levels of sulfur dioxide emissions.

Troops, police and disaster-mitigation personnel helped evacuate more than 2,800 villagers from 729 households inside a 6-kilometre (3.7-mile) radius from the volcano’s crater that officials have long designated a permanent danger zone, demarcated by concrete warning signs, Albay provincial officials said.

Another 600 villagers living outside the permanent danger zone have evacuated voluntarily to government-run emergency shelters to be safely away from the volcano, Claudio Yucot, regional director of the Office of Civil Defence, said.

Entry to the permanent danger zone in the volcano’s foothills is prohibited, but thousands of villagers have flouted the restrictions and made it their home or maintained farms on and off for generations. Lucrative businesses, such as sand and gravel quarrying and sightseeing tours, have also thrived openly despite the ban and the mountain’s frequent eruptions — now 54 times since the record began in 1616.

The 2,462-metre (8,007-foot) volcano is one of the Philippines’ top tourism draws because of its near-perfect cone shape. But it’s also the most active of the country’s 24 restive volcanoes.

A terrifying symbol of Mayon’s deadly fury is the belfry of a 16th-century Franciscan stone church, which protrudes from the ground in Albay. It’s all that’s left of a baroque church that was buried by volcanic mudflow along with the town of Cagsawa in an 1814 eruption, which killed about 1,200 people, including many who sought refuge in the church, about 13 kilometres (8 miles) from the volcano.

The thousands of people who live within Mayon’s danger zone reflect the plight of many impoverished Filipinos who are forced to live in dangerous places across the archipelago — near active volcanoes like Mayon, on landslide-prone mountainsides, along vulnerable coastlines, atop earthquake fault lines, and in low-lying villages often engulfed by flash floods.

Each year, about 20 typhoons and storms batter the Philippines, which lies along the Pacific “Ring of Fire,” an arc of fault lines along the Pacific Ocean basin often hit by volcanic eruptions and earthquakes.