Villagers lose sleep over Mayon, evacuation

(Page A16)

LEGAZPI CITY—VILLAGERS near Mayon are losing sleep over two things—the volcano’s continued rumbling and soldiers on patrol enforcing orders to forcibly move people out of harm’s way.

Josie Perez, 41, knows how it is to spend sleepless nights. She sneaked back into her house in Barangay Mabinit here to escape an evacuation center that was getting more crowded as Mayon kept sending signs of a major eruption.

Loud rumbling from the volcano kept her awake all night. It didn’t help that the roof of her house shook each time.

At each rumbling, she would go out to look at Mayon. “Its glow has become more intense,” she said.

Evacuees, she said, sneak back into their homes near or inside the danger zones during the day to do three things—wash clothes, gather firewood and feed the animals.

Denver Balenzuela, 3, was in Barangay Matnog in Daraga town at dusk while the rest of the village sat empty like a ghost town after forced evacuation.

Teresita Poquilla, 55, the boy’s grandmother, said they spent the night in their house despite the danger because her grandson refused to use toilets at the evacuation center.

“When the Army went around last night, we turned our lights off for fear that they might force us to go back to the shelters,” Poquilla said.

She recalled seeing a neighbor, a paralytic, being carried away by soldiers.

Poquilla said she and her grandson leaves the evacuation center at 6 a.m. and returns at 4 p.m.

On Monday, they stayed home but rumbling sound from Mayon kept her awake. It sounded, she said, “like rocks chasing one another.”

The absence of a lava fountain despite the raising of the alert level to 4, she said, was what worried her.

“There seems to be a blockage inside the volcano,” she said.
Conrado Nuñez, 71, of Barangay Mabinit, has seen seven previous eruptions.

He sat at the door of his house in the village, keeping watch while his family stayed at the evacuation center in San Roque Elementary School.

If there was something that the villagers fear most, he said, it was what they call uson, a local term for the flow of pyroclastic materials.

Nuñez has learned one lesson in the 1993 eruption—nothing, not even his farm, was worth his life. “We don’t have second lives,” he said. Ephraim Aguilar, Inquirer Southern Luzon