Mayon - Perfect Symmetry

For most, Mayon is just a name without context or meaning, and even if they were told that it is the name of a volcano in the Philippines, perhaps few would be any the wiser as to why it is so special. "Where are you going"? they say. "To Mayan volcano on Luzon". Their faces show a certain bewildered curiosity. "Why"? is inevitable the next question. Why indeed? Why travel so far to see a volcano? There are plenty nearer to home, steaming summits oozing with molten rock and history—why not go to one of these? The fact that I have frequently, to many of them, is no answer. At times it's just easier to say I'm addicted, but that still does not explain Mayon.

Lagaspi airport could scarcely have been closer to the volcano, a kilometre or so of asphalt surrounded by rice fields, palms and the sprawl of suburbia. Lush hills that we seemed to have brushed seconds before landing, undulated across the horizon, faded by the humid air. It could have been a thousand places were it not for the view to the north. Here the land was pulled up like a giant elastic sheet stretched taught to a focused point that pricked the sky.

Mayon has arguably the most perfect symmetry of any volcano, its curving form steepens, seemingly in defiance of gravity, to the very top where slow-motion drifts of vapour trail away to the west. Mayon is also one of the Philippine's most active volcanoes— it had erupted less than a year ago, prompting the evacuation of thousands. Mayon had calmed somewhat since then, but it was still monitored by PHIVOLCS (Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology) round the clock. I had arranged to stay at their Lignon Hill Observatory, less than a kilometre away from the airport. It was one of the few occasions that I had had the luxury of being met at any port of call by my own escort. Alejo Vibe Baloloy was one of five science research analysts based at the observatory and within ten minutes of landing I was at his side, bumping along in an open Jeep welded with brackets to accommodate the island's only correlated spectrometer (COSPEC). PHIVOLCS used the COSPEC to measure Mayon's emissions. At quiet times it exhaled about 700 tons of sulphur dioxide a day—but this could jump to 12000 tons or more during periods of unrest.

The station was perched on the side of a wooded parasitic cone that overlooked the airport on one side and Mayon on the other. The building itself was roomy with a large reception area set up for meetings and educational talks—it was also where the staff ate amongst panels of photographs, technical charts and monitoring equipment. The buildings upper level was devoted to monitoring the volcano, with banks of seismographs delicately jittering away to the slightest twitch or vibration. Computers, heaps of graphs, shelves of books and records, even a telescope trained on Mayon's smoking summit—they were the stoking trade of anyone wanting to get the low-down on a volcano. The men and women working here were by their own admission passionate people—devotees of a continual inquisitor—they all took their turn on a rolling rota to live, eat and sleep with Mayon. This was babysitting on a grand scale, with at least one member of staff poised and ready at all times for the slightest burp or jitter, ready to see and interpret, to judge and inform and when needed, to worn.

On two sides, the monitoring room was walled by inclined, tinted glass with doors that opened out onto a wide balcony overlooking the station's garden. Beyond, Mayon with its unmistakable profile swept up from a curving sea of verdant rice fields, plantations and woodland to steep dendritic swathes of ash and lava. Mayon's pinnacle was often masked by cloud and today was no exception—its smoking crown peered every now and then between the nomadic cumulus. Few balconies had such a view, and inevitably, despite being given a comfortable bedroom for the week, I ended each evening drifting off to sleep beneath the stars and darkening silhouette of Mayon.

Rafael Toledo—known to his friends as Pops—has spent more than 34 years working for PHIVOLCS and its predecessor COMVOL the Commission For Volcanology. To date he's climbed Mayon 29 times, often in gassy conditions. In his younger days Pops would climb from the old observatory, a third of the way up Mayon, to the top in around four hours—it was high on the volcano, Pops remarked as we chatted through one of his shifts, that he felt happiest. Nowadays most of the monitoring is done via remote sensing, but seismographs still need to be attached either by wires or transmitter to seismometers in the field, and placing these can be a tricky, sometimes dangerous business. Some of the PHIVOLCS staff had placed a seismometer high on Mayon during last year's activity at considerable risk to themselves, and as it turned out, to the seismometer. After the volcano had calmed down a little, they went back up to retrieve the remote sensor only to find that it had been battered by volcanic bombs.

"That's nature" explained Eduardo Laguerta PHIVOLCS senior research specialist at Mayon "you can never be certain with a volcano." A point well made by some of his colleagues who arrived the next day from their centre of operations in Manila. They had joined Eduardo in order to monitor another volcano called Bulusan; Eduardo had worked on this volcano for a six year stint that had begun with a bang. Just two days after Ed's arrival the volcano had erupted. Now the volcano was beginning to show signs of disquiet, enough to prompt PHIVOLCS to send a team to investigate.

They had arrived from Manila the day after I had and that evening we sat at the front of the observatory, drinking beers and talking shop. Among them were the two men who'd set up and retrieved the battered seismometer from Mayon. They recalled how nervous they had been at the time, but they had been lucky. Others had not been so fortunate. In 1991 just weeks before Pinatubo's Jun paroxysm, two of the PHIVOLCS staff had been working on the volcano when a precursory eruption began. A huge pyroclastic flow had rushed down a valley parallel to the ridge they were now fleeing upon; to their alarm, the flow overtook them below. Usually pyroclastic flows hug the terrain following contours of the land as they descend. It is out of these turbulent masses of scorching gas, rocks and ash that surge clouds usually billow up into the air. It is this phenomena—above all others—that volcanologist fear the most. A surge cloud is just as deadly as a pyroclastic flow, nearly as fast and notoriously unpredictable. A point tragically reinforced to those in the profession when Katia and Maurice Kraft were killed by a surge on the flanks of Mount Unzen, in Japan. It was a sad irony, remarked Eduardo, that in the days leading up to Pinatubo's huge paroxysm, it was the Kraft's video on volcanic hazards that had helped to save so many lives. "We had spent the days leading up to the eruption monitoring the volcano" explained Ed, "And in the evenings we had visited all the communities in the Clarks area, showing the Kraft's video and explaining the risks". The husband and wife team perished less than two weeks before Pinatubo's big show.

Predicting and explaining risks to local communities and advising the authorities was now part of Eduardo's role on Mayon, skills that had been tested to the full only last year during Mayon's most recent eruption. "If we evacuate too soon with no following increase in activity, people will soon want to return to their Barangay (village). Too late, and we risk fatalities" PHIVOLCS had ordered the evacuation of some thirty thousand people, from high risk areas close to the volcano and known routes of pyroclastic flows. Mayon erupted soon after had let go, sending rapid pulses of hot rock and ash rattling down its sides. Most people had moved willingly to designated evacuation districts, but even with the danger looming unmistakably above, some had had to be forced to move by the military. The media had been a big help, singing PHIVOLCS praises and contributing to an operation that had proved the organisations worth. If only nature could always be so obliging!

One of Mayon's more benevolent qualities was its potential for geothermic power. I had read a promotional pamphlet published by one of the companies that was exploiting this resource. It extolled the virtues of the Bacon-Manito Geothermal Production Field, waxing lyrical about the "environmentally friendly nature and profitability of this geologically volatile place". Yet when I visited one of the fields at Tiwi, just north of Mayon, I found that little of the reported wealth gleaned from the ground had percolated to the local community. Rusting pipes threaded and crisscrossed between boreholes, generators and condensers. Everywhere I looked steam billowed and spurted, flavouring the damp air with the quintessential volcanic odour of hydrogen sulphide—rotten eggs. People lived amongst the pipes and service tracks though few were to be seen. A pair of boys walked towards me only to run off through a screeching jet of steam that was clearly cooler than it appeared. A few moments later a young woman walked towards me with a curious, cautious gait, her face twisted with a toothless, slightly manic smile. She remained a distant shadow for much of the time, as I wandered between steaming valves and strange blackened constructions, drenched with a constant flow of hot water. Volcanoes are in many ways the sweat glands of the Earth—here, humans had simply lent a hand. After all this was cheap energy for a country struggling to find its feet in an increasingly polarised world, but inequality was here too. Many were complaining about the cost of energy, arguing that the government and corporations were charging too much for the power gleaned from beneath their own land—power that was largely conveyed to Metro Manila's thirsty commercial district.

There were however, still some benefits of the volcano that could be had for free. Mayon's slopes were cut by swathes of lahar—water mobilised ash and rock that had been washed from Mayon's shoulders. Some had reached nearly to the coast and it was on one of these at Padang Lagaspi, that I met Jonel, Alex and Nikki Gravito. The boys and their father Diomedes, were on the lahar sieving golf ball sized rocks to sell as aggregate. This was not a case of child labour, as all three lads attended the local school, nor did Diomedes work the lahar for a living. This was a case of free money, albeit a pittance for the effort. The lahar was near his land and home, a home he had been glad to leave when his community had been one of those evacuated for a month last year. His wife Nelly had been glad to leave too. Later while sitting in their dark bamboo home, with her five children and parents huddled round, she talked proudly about her children, and how afraid she had been for them when Mayon had began erupting again. "We love the volcano though," remarked Diomedes as he shacked a little bottle toped with a burning wick for light, "it is a creation of God".

God or nature? Volcanoes can be the embodiment of both. They are without doubt dynamic, seeming at times malevolent and yet with their gifts of fertility, of heat and stone, they can be monstrous too. Both traits can occasion reverence and curiosity, but Mayon will always remain itself regardless.