The Tajogaite volcano has not been extinguished. The truce opened in the early hours of yesterday morning with the eruption at rest was broken in the afternoon and the violent episodes of the weekend were repeated. Above all, in the population center of Todoque .
On Sunday the bell tower of the Church of St. Pius X collapsed by lava fell, but the cemetery and the incinerator – located about 15 minutes by car from that point – are still standing. One of the streams, the one facing north, stopped short a little more than a hundred meters from those constructions and the miracle is still possible.
“If he doesn’t start walking again, we’re going to save him,” Adelmo, the gravedigger of the Los Angeles cemetery (Los Llanos de Aridane), wished with all his might, just before the reactivation.
Ángel Morcuende, technical director of the Volcanic Risk Prevention Plan (Pevolca), confirmed the truce. “The wash that yesterday [for last Sunday] descended rapidly from the north of the eruptive cone has been divided into two fingers,” he specified in an appearance in which he was accompanied by María José Blanco, director of the National Geographic Institute in the Canary Islands ( IGN).
The existence of a slope has slowed down one of the flows –if it moves south it will be out of the path of the cemetery and the incinerator in the town of Todoque–, but “it is not slowed down,” Morcuende said. This slowness does not become a guarantee to lift the confinement in four nuclei (San Borondón, Marina Alta, Marina Baja and La Condesa) of Tazacorte , which is the municipality through which the lava will foreseeably end up reaching the sea: the avalanche of material magmatic ejected by the Tajogaite is about a thousand meters in a straight line from the coast.
The first symptoms of rest that the volcano emitted were detected around 04:10 hours. And it is that yesterday’s was the calmest breakfast since the beginning of this volcanic crisis, on September 19. “Something strange happens because the birds do not sing and the dogs do not bark”.
Delfín pointed out three quarters of an hour before an intense fumarole rose about two kilometers high above the ridge of Cumbre Vieja. But this was not the only chimney effect that was registered yesterday. “They have been repeated throughout the morning, although not all have been able to be appreciated by the neighbors due to the great distance that exists with respect to the point of emission of the gases,” explained Itahiza Domínguez, a seismologist at the National Geographic Institute based on to the behavior of the Tajogaite.
Before noon the neighbors followed, confused, the stillness of a monster that “reawakened”
The dead time that opened the largest volcanic crisis in Spain in the last five decades in ground zero coincided with the location of a seismic swarm of 15 movements that was felt towards the southern slope, in the Fuencaliente area, –Without detecting displacement of the magma towards the Teneguía volcano– with a depth that ranged between 10 and 11 kilometers.
This movement was positioned exactly in the same coordinates where the crisis of September 11 began – that day the presence of about 11 million cubic meters of magma was verified in the perimeter in which the earthquakes were concentrated -, although then the distance It was between six and seven kilometers long and the Canary Islands Geodetic Network was already talking about deformations in the terrain.
Another of the data that the Pevolca scientific committee gave while the Tajogaite seemed to “take a nap” has to do with the more than 46.3 million cubic meters of volcanic material that have been expelled since the beginning of the eruption: these data increased as soon as the orange flares of the evening appeared.
Specialists rule out that the volcanic crisis is moving towards the southern slope
During the shared appearance of Morcuende and Blanco, it was pointed out as a possibility that “there had been a change in the conduit that feeds it, which would generate a decrease in gas levels and a lower contribution of material,” the specialist explained without venturing to what could happen in the next few hours. At the moment, the only certainty is that in the area.
Tazacorte some 300 residents are still confined – on the island there are about 6,000 of the housed – and the notice of cutting the coast road is contemplating in the event that the expulsion of wash. And that was what happened around seven in the afternoon. The smoke became more and more intense and with the darkness, accelerated with the sunset, the tongues of flames returned, the explosions and, above all, the noise returned. Yes. The Tajogaite volcano was roaring again with virulence.
