Residents defy order to flee from volcano

BILBAO, Ecuador — In normal times, Luis Egas would have risen before dawn to tend livestock or fields of potatoes and onions.

But as the sun rose Saturday, all he could do was survey his village, laid waste by a volcanic eruption that spewed incandescent rock, showers of ash, and rivers of molten lava.

"We never thought Tungurahua would awake like this," Egas said of the volcano — whose name means "throat of fire" in the local Quichua language.

Authorities said Saturday that three people had died from the 19-hour eruption, which ended Thursday before dawn, and that two others were feared killed. Another 30 people who had been listed as missing had been located alive.

Egas and a few others remain in Bilbao, defying a standing government order to leave the "red zone," and warnings from experts that, though calm for now, the Tungurahua volcano could be poised to erupt again.

Jose Grijalva, director of Ecuador's Civil Defense, said 3,000 people were evacuated under an emergency order immediately before and during the eruption, but many of them have returned.

Bilbao is one five areas, mostly on the volcano's western slope, where people are forbidden, he said. Nearly all of its 500 inhabitants fled to makeshift shelters in churches and schools in villages farther from the volcano.

Egas remained with his parents.

"We feared a big eruption, but not of this magnitude," he said, looking at yard-deep drifts of volcanic ash that had caved in rooftops, and at the still-hot pyroclastic flows — superheated material that shoots down the sides of volcanos like a fiery avalanche at up to 190 mph.

About 80 percent of Bilbao's adobe brick homes were destroyed.

"We are afraid, but we cannot leave our belongings, what little we have," Egas said. A few yards away, volcanic steam rose off an ash-contaminated creek that had supplied the community's irrigation water.

The eruption affected about 30,000 people, many of them poor Quichua-speaking Indians, in three highland provinces, officials said.

Police Capt. Jorge Ubidia said Saturday in Cotalo that he believed everyone should leave the volcano's slopes.

"The problem is that people don't want to leave, and we don't know if we should take them out by force," he told The Associated Press, peering up at the volcano, shrouded in clouds. "We're very frightened."