The sirens of Grindavík sounded this Sunday at four in the morning to warn residents that they had to urgently leave their homes. Hundreds of small earthquakes were an obvious symptom that the intrusion of magma was in the final stretch of the Earth's crust.
Some ninety families – those who had refused to leave despite the warnings – had to pack their bags and leave their home again. Four hours later, the magma reached the surface and produced the second volcanic eruption on the Reykjanes Peninsula in less than a month. The first eruptive fissure opened north of the urban area of Grindavík, next to Hagafell Mountain, and the flows advanced a few hundred meters from the nearest houses. At noon, a second fissure appeared fifty meters from the homes.
Already early yesterday afternoon, the lava came into contact with some buildings in the north of Grindavík, which were engulfed by flames.
During the first minutes of the eruption, live images showed groups of workers rushing to move the heavy machinery that had until then been used to build a large retaining wall northeast of Grindavík. The operation was important, since the area has the best steamrollers in the country, and saving them guaranteed being able to continue fighting against the flows. The defensive line that has been built in the last two weeks has managed to reroute a tongue, directing it towards Highway 43. This road was buried at a quarter to one noon, local time, being the first major infrastructure on the Reykjanes Peninsula that It has been affected by lava since the beginning of the current eruptive cycle, in March 2021.
Another infrastructure that could suffer serious consequences is the water supply line that runs parallel to the road from the Svartsengi geothermal power plant. The mayor of Grindavík, Fannar Jónasson, who in recent weeks had celebrated the construction of a retaining wall in the north of the town, gave up yesterday when he saw that the magma had finally made its way towards the municipality. “It is very sinister to see what is happening. Regarding the new fissure, there is nothing more we can do. We will have to wait and see where the lava goes in the next few hours,” declared Jónasson.
All efforts to fortify the fishing town have been unsuccessful and now one of the keys will be to see if new fissures open and how many days the volcano remains active. On the other hand, the Blue Lagoon has had to evacuate clients from its hotels and has closed the facilities that it had opened a week ago.
For now, Keflavík International Airport continues to operate flights normally. The eruption is not explosive, so there is little ash production. Regarding the toxic gases, in the first hours of activity the wind was favorable and dispersed it towards the south, that is, towards the Atlantic, without having to order any forties, as on other occasions.
Early in the afternoon, the Icelandic news website mbl.is interviewed one of the owners of the houses closest to the volcano, Hlynur Sæberg Helgason. “We just hope that it will be over soon and that we can return home one day. "You have to be optimistic until the opposite turns out," said the neighbor while watching the slow, but constant, passage of the laundry on television.
For its part, national television RÚV also collected the testimony of some of the people evacuated yesterday. Ína Ösp Úlfarsdóttir explained that she woke up with the sound of the siren and that, quickly, she saw that she had received a message on her cell phone ordering immediate evacuation. “I woke up with a jump, I went to call my brother, and I started running to try to do something, but I didn't know what to do, I didn't know how much time we had. We left home after half an hour,” Úlfarsdóttir narrated.
Another neighbor, Haukur Guðberg Einarsson, had decided to spend a night at home with his wife after two months without going. “We wanted to have the feeling of being in Grindavík again,” Einarsson said. “It is very difficult to describe what we feel. We have everything there, we had built our life there and we don't know if we will be able to return.”
On Friday, the search for the worker who had fallen into a crack while working in Grindavík was ended.
