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Catherine Bond: Volcano displaces thousands

Bond
CNN's Catherine Bond  


GOMA, Congo (CNN) -- Half of Goma, an eastern Congolese town along the Rwandan border, has been destroyed by a flood of lava from Mount Nyiragongo, one of Africa's most active volcanoes.

CNN's Catherine Bond has been covering the eruption and the plight of the refugees the volcano uprooted. She spoke Saturday with CNN anchor Catherine Callaway.

BOND: Mount Nyiragongo, now that it's done its damage, has stopped spewing lava to the extent that it did on Thursday. Certainly the lava flows on Goma's streets are inching forward, but that's apparently because the molten lava inside the blackened crust occasionally bursts through and pushes the lava flow a few feet down the street at a time. So it's not coming down at the speed that it initially did.

It must have come in pretty fast because we've seen trucks and houses and shops and businesses all engulfed in volcanic rock. People had time to leave and to take a few possessions, but they certainly didn't have time to go and open up the office and get out much of what was -- what else was valuable to them.

Mount Nyiragongo, oddly enough, can't be seen easily from Goma on Saturday. Usually it dominates the city, rather gloomy and foreboding, a large hulk of a mountain behind it. And now, strangely, you can't see it at all.

molten lava
Rivers of lava flow through the streets of Goma, a Congolese town on the Rwandan border. More than 40 people have died since the volcano erupted Thursday.  

CALLAWAY: I know the scene is chaotic there, but what is the latest on how many people have died in this?

BOND: Very little information on that. When we spoke to the Congolese and Rwandan Red Cross [on Saturday] morning, they said 47 was the official number of casualties. But they didn't know whether that was exact or not. We've heard of one person, a woman who said that she felt that her mother had died because her mother had stayed behind in the house when the rest of the family left.

But we haven't bumped into many people who say that they've lost members of their families -- at least not yet. And we haven't been able to talk to people, for example, in rural areas outside the town of Goma, so the story out there could be different.

But we have bumped into a large number of people who've lost their homes. It seems the case that maybe tens of thousands of people have lost their homes, judging by the amount of destruction that's been done to the center of Goma and by the fact that Goma was very densely populated. [There were] a lot of people packed into small rooms and that would account for the very large numbers displaced by this volcanic eruption.

CALLAWAY: We're watching this incredible video of the destruction there; it's just unimaginable. What about the people that are fleeing there and heading toward Rwanda? Any idea of the numbers of people who are leaving?

BOND: Hundreds of thousands are thought to be affected, perhaps as many as 400,000 in the area. We've certainly seen thousands of people, ever-resourceful. They haven't received any help in Gisenyi [in Rwanda] yet. ... There is some talk of some high-protein biscuits being on street corners somewhere, but we've seen very little in the way of emergency response from the aid agencies yet.

The Rwandan authorities have been very orderly and have tried to direct them to refugee camps, out of danger, out of harm's way, out of Gisenyi, which is really almost the same town as Goma; it's just split by the Rwanda-Congo border.

But in fact the Congolese have chosen to put their families onto boats and to send them south across Lake Kivu to the city of Bukavu in the Congo, where they feel that they might find help perhaps from families and friends.



 
 
 
 


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