Evacuated on November 11, Grindavik residents were able to return home on Thursday for a brief inspection of the site, taking advantage of a lull in volcanic activity.
The inhabitants of the Icelandic municipality of Grindavik, evacuated since November 11 due to the threat of volcanic eruption, were able to return home on Thursday thanks to a calmer situation.
The eruption, which began Monday evening just three kilometers from the town, opened a 4 kilometer crackprojecting jets of bright orange lava into the Icelandic sky until Wednesday.
During a surveillance flight Thursday morning, “no volcanic activity was observed and there appears to be no activity in the craters,” the Icelandic Meteorological Office (IMO) said Thursday in 1:42 p.m. GMT.
“Volcanic activity appears to have stopped late at night or early in the morning. Despite this, it is possible for lava to flow under the lava mantle in lava tubes and it is therefore not not possible to say that the rash is over“, IMO adds.
The authorities authorized the 4,000 inhabitants of the small fishing port to return home between 7:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m.
They were evacuated on November 11 after a series of earthquakes considered to be a warning of an eruption.
Emergency services were present in the city on Thursday, in case an emergency evacuation was necessary.
The streets of Grindavik were still largely deserted Thursday morning and only a few Christmas decorations lit up the abandoned houses, according to an AFP journalist on site.
Staff from the Thorfish fishing company were back on the premises, trying to recover the catch taken just before the eruption.
“They’re trying to package them and prepare them so they don’t get damaged and then clean everything up by Christmas,” Jon Emil, purchasing manager at Thorfish.
A “very different” Christmas
The authorities consider the town still too dangerous to be inhabited, and no one will be able to return to their homes by Christmas.
Christmas this year will be “different, very different”, notes Bergsteinn Olafsson, a 59-year-old municipal employee, to AFP. “But when you have your family, everything is fine.”
For David Arnason, a 50-year-old former fisherman from Grindavik, the future looks very bleak.
The situation “is quite scary. My children don’t want to come back,” he told AFP.
Ironically, he himself was born in 1973 on the Icelandic island of Heimaey, two weeks before an eruption which led to the evacuation of homes on the island.
In Grindavik, he owns his house.
“We can’t pay both the house loan and a rental, it’s impossible. We will have to come back. Nobody wants to buy our house, we can’t sell it,” he adds.
Sigurdur Oli Porleifsson, an employee in the fishing industry and father of four children, will never return home.
“We have a house here but it is going to be demolished because it is in ruins,” he said.
“It’s very sad, it’s a historic house in the city,” adds Porleifsson, “but you can’t live here, not in these houses,” adds the father of four.
Iceland experiences intense volcanic activity with 33 volcanic systems considered active.
Until the March 2021 eruption, the Reykjanes Peninsulasouth of the capital Reykjavik, had been spared from eruptions during eight centuries.
Since then, there have been three others, in August 2022 and July 2023 and this Monday evening, a sign, for volcanologists, of a resumption of volcanic activity In the region.