Italy’s Mount Etna started erupting again earlier today, sending panicked tourists running for safety. Take a look at these images. Officials say the eruption sent a plume of ash and rock several kilometres high into the sky.
And you can see those images there, there’s tourists running and producing explosions that could be heard up to 50 kilometres or 30 miles away. The Sicilian Civil Protection Agency is warning all aircraft to avoid the area. CNN’s Barbie Nadeau is following the story for us from Rome.
I mean, these images are, I have to say, pretty scary. And you can see the tourists reacting, trying to run away. Do we know anything about evacuations at this point in terms of danger that it could pose to neighbouring villages? Yeah, you know, these villages that are up and down the flanks of Mount Etna are used to this kind of activity.
And so, you know, they’re not easily terrified from the mountain, from the erupting mountain. But they will have to evacuate them if there is intense activity that’s continuing. And the observatory that keeps a close eye on this said that they feel that the activity is intensifying and they can’t be sure when it will calm down.
But they did evacuate, you know, tens of tourists, all these groups of tourists. We talked to one tour operator who had 40 people up there, and they were able to get all of them off. And there are maybe a dozen tour operators, we were told, running operations at the time.
Also important to note, this is a long holiday weekend. Today’s a national holiday here, so there would have been even more people and kids up there, too. But, you know, they got everyone to safety off the mountain, but no one who was up there was expecting this sort of intense explosion, usually what we see from Etna is the more fiery lava flows, and we have been seeing an intensity of that over the last couple of months, too.
So this was a surprise to everyone, and it was heard, you know, so far away. They haven’t had to close the airport in Catania yet because the wind is favourable, but the minute or if that wind switches direction, they’ll have to close the airport because that plume of smoke so many kilometres up is really hazardous to aircraft, Eleni. Yeah.
I mean, the reality is that Mount Etna is one of the most active volcanoes in the world, and it’s, I mean, it’s such a show, right? If you’re a tourist, I saw some people taking videos and photos, but it is dangerous. And there’s a real process in terms of monitoring and ensuring that its activity is under control in some way. Yeah, you know, and there’s also a lot of seismic activity on these earthquakes.
You know, I’ve been up Etna many, many, many times over the last 10, 15 years, and it is always a magical experience. It is just amazing. And you can take some of these tours that take you very close to the top where you have to wear special shoes because the ground is so hot, but it is really, really dangerous.
And I think, you know, there are so many tour groups that bring people up because they just want to get close to this incredible, you know, force of nature, but, you know, we’re so constantly reminded that it’s very unpredictable and, you know, they’ve been watching the seismic activity. What’s interesting, though, there wasn’t an increase of seismic activity in terms of earthquakes where we had seen there were some eruptions in January that led to these incredible lava sprays and there had been more earthquakes and seismic activity ahead of those. So, you know, people are looking at the data, trying to understand what the projections are.
But, you know, you can’t predict an eruption of an earthquake or an eruption of a volcano or the intensity or when an earthquake will happen. So all of this is really up to looking at trends and studying the data and hoping that they’re making the right future calls. Absolutely.
Barbie Nadeau, thank you so very much for that update. Interesting pictures there from Sicily, Mount Etna.