HERVE BAR, Goma | Friday
TENS of thousands of residents of Goma had fled their homes late on Thursday and vast areas of the town were set ablaze by lava flows from an erupting volcano.
“Goma is burning,” shouted a driver in a line of vehicles who had just arrived at the border with Rwanda a few kilometres from the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) town.
Rwandan authorities have opened up the border at Gisenye but a huge jam had formed where most of Goma’s estimated 350 000 residents were trying to get in.
Mount Nyiragongo, which lies some 10 kilometres north of Goma, erupted at 5:00 am, and as the lava began destroying dozens of homes in its path on the outskirts of town, a large crowd began leaving in late afternoon.
Residents of the nearby Majengo district had evacuated their homes earlier.
Witnesses said Goma had been cut in two by the lava but it was unclear if there were casualties.
“Twenty or 25 kilometres in front of me, everything is on fire,” said Peter Horntby, an officer with the United Nations Monuc observer mission in the DRC, from Gisenye airport.
Horntby said he would not be leaving until 250 UN peacekeepers from Morocco based in Goma had been accounted for. Some had arrived at the border, but most were stuck with others fleeing, he said.
At around 8:15 pm, a river of lava was 500 metres away from Monuc’s headquarters.
Rwandan radio said most of the refugees were being directed toward Gisenye’s sports stadium, but many were continuing on foot to higher ground, an AFP reporter said.
It was the first eruption of Mount Nyiragongo since 1977, when lava flows killed almost 2 000 people in less than half an hour.
Goma is in a part of the DRC controlled by rebel forces. Witnesses said prisoners had tried to escape from the town jail as chaos erupted and that gunshots were heard in the area.
The town is controlled by the Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD), a Rwandan-backed rebel group that has been fighting the Kinshasa government since 1998.
Earlier on Thursday, the RCD had told Goma residents to wait for broadcast instructions, but in the evening the radio was playing nothing but a tape of music, repeated endlessly.
Although Mount Nyiragongo was not spewing clouds of ash the night sky was a deep red.
The lava from the eruption was coming not from its summit but from cracks on three of its flanks, producing three molten rivers.
One of these rivers later split into two fingers, one heading towards the airport and the other towards northern residential areas.
On January 10, 1977, almost 2 000 people were killed in less than 30 minutes when Nyiragongo erupted, producing a 1 000-metre-wide river of molten rock that moved at up to 100 kilometres per hour.
The flow reached the northern edge of Goma, incinerating everything in its path, sparing only a lucky few who had fled to high ground.
It came to a halt some 1 500 metres from the town centre.
Nyiragongo is one of about a dozen volcano’s making up the Virunga range. Another of these, Nyamuragira, is also active.
Nyiragongo showed activity in 1982, 1994 and February 2001, without producing a lava flow.
It has attracted generations of vulcanologists to its molten lava lake, the level of which rises and falls according to seismic activity. – AFP