Volcano in Chile starts to spew lava

More evacuated amid explosions

Although some animals remained yesterday, few people were left in the settlement of Chaiten, Chile, 6 miles from the volcano. The towering plume of ash has reached Argentina. (RAUL BRAVO/AFP/Getty Images)

CHAITEN, Chile - Crackling with explosions, Chile's Chaiten volcano began spitting lava yesterday following its first eruption in thousands of years, and navy warships were deployed to evacuate nearby residents in the southern region of Patagonia.

Chaiten erupted last Friday, sending a towering plume of ash into the sky that has since coated the surrounding area of southern Chile and reached into neighboring Argentina.

The settlement of Chaiten, 6 miles from the volcano, looked like a ghost town yesterday. Aside from a small contingent of navy sailors and a few journalists, only dogs, chickens, and horses remained standing in the ash.

Explosions and loud groaning noises resounded from the crater of the 3,280-foot volcano.

No lava flow has yet been detected down Chaiten's sides, but Chile's National Emergency Office said that the volcano was spitting bits of molten rock and that remaining civilians and troops were being evacuated across a fjord.

"The situation has changed suddenly," national emergency official Rodrigo Rojas said. "Today the volcano is erupting with pyroclastic material on a different scale."

The towering ash cloud was clearly visible from the southern town of Puerto Montt, where many desperate evacuees were being sheltered.

"I am very worried to have left my house, my pet, my animals behind. All I want is for this to be over," said Carola Perez, a 22-year-old housewife evacuated to the town.

The government ordered the evacuation of a 30-mile radius around the volcano - which lies some 760 miles south of the capital, Santiago - including two dozen people who had refused to leave their homes and animals.

Military personnel, police, and journalists were being ferried to join dozens of civilians already aboard warships waiting in the fjord off Chaiten. Around 4,200 people, nearly the whole population of Chaiten, have already been evacuated.

Sparsely populated Patagonia is the southernmost area of Latin America that cuts across Chile and Argentina and is home to towering snow-capped peaks, some of them volcanoes, glaciers, and log cabins, and is a gold mine for dinosaur fossil hunters.

Luis Lara, a government geologist, said that he did not expect a catastrophic collapse of the Chaiten volcano, but that a cloud of dense, very hot material could coat the surrounding area.

"The entire volcano will not [collapse], but the eruptive column could, and that is sufficient material to be displaced down its sides and into areas nearby," he added. "Lava flow would not reach Chaiten, but hot fragments, ash, and gas could."

A second town, Futaleufu, has also been coated with ash and is being evacuated.