15 years on, life returns to Mt. Pinatubo

Life is rapidly returning to Mt. Pinatubo nearly 15 years after it blew its top in an eruption that killed more than 1,500 people and sent a cloud of ash into the atmosphere, cooling world temperatures for years.

At dawn wild roosters crow lustily around Mt. Pinatubo’s summit, affirming the triumph of life over death in a region laid waste by the second largest volcanic eruption of the 20th century.

Fireflies race for the safety of the sparse scrub and tall grass by the crater’s edge, just before the first batch of tourists arrive from an uphill trek, breathless and gasping in awe at the scenery.

Among the group is porter Randy Dumunot, who was 14 when the volcano buried his family’s thatched hut home and their three-hectare farm of rice and tubers, a potato-like vegetable, in the village of Sta. Juliana, about 30 kilometers to the northeast.

The family rebuilt their home after the June 1991 eruption but the farm was no more, permanently covered in lahar, a fine dust of volcanic debris.

"Overnight we turned into P80-a-day landless farm hands," Dumunot, now 29, tells Agence France Presse.

An estimated 500,000 people were made homeless when, after more than four centuries of slumber, Pinatubo erupted so violently that more than five billion cubic meters of ash and debris were ejected from its fiery bowels 30 kilometers into the atmosphere.

Millions of tons of sulfur dioxide shot into the stratosphere, blocked sunlight and cooled the entire Earth by up to 0.6 degrees Celsius for years afterwards.

Over the next six years the volcanic material called "lahar" flowed down nine river channels during the annual wet season, bringing misery to about two million residents in low lying areas over a region covering 4,000 square kilometers.

These clogged major waterways and unleashed floods and mudflows that destroyed homes, farms, roads, bridges and dikes built to defend communities from lahar.

Fifteen years later, property developers in Central Luzon "certified lahar-free" homes to potential buyers.

Sta. Juliana is now experiencing a rebirth as a tourist gateway. Spas and resorts are sprouting up to cater to mountain trekkers, including South Koreans who climb the mountain daily by the dozens during the dry months.

Tourist destination

Lugging an inflatable kayak, a coil of fat rope capable of lifting a two-ton elephant, and a bag of squashed hamburgers, Dumunot now earns an extra P1,000 a week as part of a team of locals who serve as porters and guides to well-heeled visitors drawn to this mountain of death.

"This is a big help," the father of four says. "My brother-in-law, my cousin and my uncle are also porters."

Dumunot hopes he can save enough money to buy a sleeping bag and a tent like the colorful, ultra-light types set up for the night along the crater rim here.

Having none, he and the other porters sleep atop cardboard boxes in the space beneath the crater’s lake view deck.

At Sta. Juliana, visitors rent out battered all-terrain jeeps that barrel up the broad, flat bed of the O’Donnell River for an hour toward Crow Valley, a vast wasteland of volcanic sand and spent shell casings.

The valley had served as a bombing range for the 7th US Air Force, which was driven off for good from its Clark Air Base home to the south of Sta. Juliana during the eruption.

From the valley, the last third of the three-hour hike is through a gently ascending mountain pass, watered by a brook that feeds into O’Donnell. Some now take the climb on horseback, and others even use their own trail bikes.

A few people stay overnight, rappelling down an 80-foot section of the crater wall wearing helmets to protect themselves from the rocks dislodged by the rope. They also bathe or ride canoes at the 2.5-kilometer diameter caldera, a turquoise-colored soup bowl of rain water that has collected through the years to a depth of up to 800 feet.

"There won’t be another eruption in this generation because based on carbon dating samples, previous ones occurred at intervals of hundreds, to thousands, of years," says Jaime Sincioco, a senior scientist at the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology.

"The mudslides are gone. The only problem left is the flooding in the low-lying areas because the rivers that radiate out from the crater are heavily silted," he adds.

Safety concerns

The government opened Pinatubo to the public in the mid-1990s, launching a new form of tourism where visitors were treated to a vision of hell on earth, featuring a moonscape of canyons and deep gullies in uniform grey.

All the plants and the animals that could not run, crawl or fly fast enough were vaporized by the superheated gases from the rim.

Gradually, by the late 1990s, the vegetation, along with songbirds and fireflies, had returned, stabilizing the remnants of the loose volcanic material deposited by the eruption onto the slopes of the Zambales mountain range.

However, the deeply scarred south side of the crater wall remains shorn of plant cover, destabilized by constant landslides that boom across the crater lake like prolonged claps of thunder. The post-blast top of the 1,485-meter mountain remains off limits to climbers.

Sincioco is worried about the rapid pace of development around Pinatubo, fearing that visitors could blunder into their deaths through ignorance or sheer carelessness.

"We actually discourage tourists from venturing into the crater lake," he says. "The crater wall is fractured, so there is a lot of landslide activity there."

Regulators are also critical of the recently opened dirt road on the ridge above Crow Valley, which shortened the climb by about 75 minutes but which officials fear could unsettle the still fragile post-eruption ecosystem.

Sincioco says the new road, built by the local government with the aid of a legislator representing the district, would also cut off the tourism revenue streams to Dapili, an impoverished village at the end of the old trail populated by hunter-gatherer tribesmen called Aetas who were almost wiped out by the eruption.

Local officials were unavailable for comment when AFP visited the area during a holiday weekend.

"When we drafted the (Pinatubo rehabilitation) master plan, we stressed that the road should end at Sta. Juliana," Sincioco says.

"If you allow motor vehicles beyond that area, they displace the (volcanic) deposits and contribute to erosion," he warned. — AFP