From Fire to Ice

Having completed the evacuation of Chaitén, Chilean authorities are unwilling to say when - if ever - its residents might be able to return to the volcano-threatened port on the Carretera Austral (Southern Highway). One government geologist has speculated that a worst-case "Pompeii scenario" is not out of the question and, if that happens, Chaitén could literally be history. Hot ash and pyroclastic flows could set the town on fire and, with no one around fight the blazes, nothing more than foundations might remain.

The volcano has already expelled two cubic kilometers of ash, but the prevailing westerlies have carried most of the material west and southwest, as the accompanying image suggests. A friend from the Argentine provincial capital of Neuquén wrote me that ash reached there Wednesday and it's carrying east into southern Buenos Aires province. Because of the ash clouds, Argentine airlines have postponed flights into the affected areas and, for one night at least, American Airlines postponed departures out of Buenos Aires back to the United States.

One could argue, of course, that Aerolíneas Argentinas often fails to fly in any event, and last week Spain's Marsans group agreed to sell most of the troubled company back to Argentine interests. The Argentine government will acquire about 20 percent of the shares, but most will be in the hands of as yet unidentified local interests. Whether any of this will improve services is open to question.

Meanwhile, Vicki Lansen writes from Futaleufú, which was mostly evacuated earlier this week, that she and her husband have decided to remain for the time being; the bank has reopened, and the Río Futaleufú appears to be running clear, with no evidence of fish kills, but the water supply is suspect. She adds that "Roving bands of young men with long, home-made roof sweepers are menacing the town. Random acts of kindness, fellowship and senses of humor are rampant."

Farther south, on the Argentine side of the Andes, it was announced that the town of El Calafate, gateway to the famous Moreno Glacier, will soon have its own glaciology museum, the Museo de Hielo. Apparently, however, this 2,000-square-meter project will be a privately funded facility that has nothing to do directly with President Cristina Fernández and her husband, ex-President Néstor, who own property in town and habitually spend weekends there.

The Fallout from Chaitén

As Volcán Chaitén continues to smolder, the Chilean government has completed the evacuation of its namesake port. Nicholas La Penna of Chaitur sent me the photo of the initial evacuation, which took place last Saturday, on the Navimag ferry Evangelistas, which was diverted from its southbound itinerary to the Patagonian tourist town of Puerto Natales.

Even as the evacuation ends and Chaitén emits massive clouds of ash (the photograph here also comes from Nicholas La Penna), there are conflicting reports over whether lava flows might breach the crater and descend the Río Blanco into town. The best report I have read is an interview with vulcanologist Alfredo Lahsen in the Santiago daily La Tercera, in which he says that the viscous lava would likely advance no more than five or ten meters per hour. In such a case, it would take at least 40 days to reach the town. A more serious danger, suggests Lahsen, would be forest fires in this lushly wooded area.

There is also a good English language summary of current conditions at Mercopress, in which a Chilean government geologist says any lava flow is unlikely to reach Chaitén, but that hot ash and volcanic bombs could. This could be disastrous in a town whose structures are almost all built of wood - and with no one there to fight any fires.

Meanwhile, Carolina Morgado of the Parque Pumalín conservation project writes me that they have withdrawn all park personnel from the El Amarillo area, which lies directly in the route of the ashfall, but the rest of the park remains fully staffed. The conservative Santiago daily El Mercurio, meanwhile, implies that the eruption indicates an urgent need to complete the Carretera Austral from Hornopirén to Chaitén, as there is no continuous overland connection from mainland Chile except via Argentina.

Such a road is controversial because it would pass through the rugged terrain of Pumalín's almost untouched forests, and the park's founder Douglas Tompkins has been haggling for years with the government over an appropriate route that would minimize environmental damage. That's not all that's at stake, however, as private interests hoping to build massive hydroelectric dams in the southern Aisén region would want to use any such route to run thousands of km of transmission lines to energy-starved Santiago and the copper mines of northern Chile. Such lines would, of course, impact the landscape even more, and be vulnerable to events such as the current eruption. The current event has also proved the limited usefulness of motor vehicles in such emergencies, as many had to be abandoned because their electrical systems failed because of the ashfall.

Meanwhile, in Futaleufú, buses have taken most remaining residents across the border into Argentina, and will soon cross the border into Chile via the Cardenal Samoré pass, north of the city of Bariloche (a friend there, by the way, writes me that there is a big ash cloud to the south/southeast). From Futaleufú, Vicki Lansen writes that rain has reduced the four inches of ash to a "clay slurry." The Buenos Aires daily Clarín reports that ash clouds have passed over the southern Buenos Aires province beach resorts of Mar del Plata and Necochea.

In fact, it seems that the government and private response to the emergency has been remarkably effective, and it's hard to imagine that a winding mountain road through almost impossibly steep terrain on the Chilean side of the border would have improved it. What would help is an improved ferry system - it was good fortune that ferries were in port and nearby when the event began - and better integration with Argentine Patagonia.

The Evacuation of Chaitén and Futaleufú

Since my previous entry, I've had word from residents in Chaitén and Futaleufú about conditions in the aftermath of last Friday's eruption, which continues. According to Nicholas La Penna, of the Chaitur travel agency in Chaitén, it was fortunate that the ferry Alejandrina, which links Chaitén to the mainland city of Puerto Montt, was in port at the time, so the town's evacuation went smoothly; they had help from the Puerto Edén, which was diverted from its more southerly Patagonian route, and naval vessels. About 4,000 evacuees went either to Puerto Montt or to Quellón, on the island of Chiloé.

From the boat, according to Nicholas, the view was stunning: "As we left Chaiten late in the afternoon, the scale of the event became clearer, the town in a shower of ash, hazy, the whole northern section, smokey and the gigantic column of volcanic ash growing, then another eruption of fresh material, darker and denser. Later from the ship, when night fell, we saw the volcano become a lightning light show. I counted at one point an average of 45 seconds between flashes of lights, most of them white, a few were red/orange." Contrast that with the clear skies in the photograph above, taken just outside Chaitén last summer.

Futaleufú, being more isolated (three hours by road from Chaitén but barely an hour from the Argentine city of Esquel), has had a more difficult evacuation, but buses are due to take several hundred residents to Puerto Montt via Argentina. Meanwhile, according to Vicki Lansen, who lives there, "we had three days of darkness, almost four inches of ash, and water contamination ... being cut off from the rest of Chile, lack of supplemental animal feed is devastating ... This morning a drizzle of rain and the sky is clearing of floating ash. We are out helping neighbors clear awnings, roofs and sidewalks. Everyone left in Futa is pitching in and getting things cleared up."

Meanwhile, across the border in Argentina, flights into the airport at Esquel have been halted until the skies clear, and authorities are recommending that residents leave their homes only when necessary. School has been suspended there and in nearby Trevelin and other communities.

If there's a silver lining in this cloud of ash, it's that the eruption is taking place at the beginning of winter, and that the frequent rains should wash much of the ash away. Livestock will suffer, but the tourist industry, on which Chaitén and Futaleufú increasingly depend, will have several months to recover - the season does not really start until October and doesn't get into full swing until December or even January. How long the evacuation will last is open to question, though - when Volcán Hudson blew in August 1991, it continued into October - but with luck rafters and kayakers will be descending the mighty "Fu" later this year.

Ash Falling on Alerces

In August 1991, Chilean Patagonia's 1,935-meter Volcán Hudson spewed an ashfall of more than five cubic kilometers that carried into the South Atlantic Ocean and even across the Pacific to Australia. In the immediate area, around the Aisén region town of Chile Chico and its Argentine neighbor Los Antiguos, more than 1.5 meters of ash accumulated in some spots. It fouled the water, ruined crops, killed livestock that could not reach forage, and drowned forests of southern beech such as the one depicted here along the Río Murta.

Farther north in Chilean Patagonia, where the narrow endemic alerce (false larch) is the signature tree species, a similar event is forcing at least a partial evacuation of the port of Chaitén (population about 4,000). According to the Smithsonian Institution's Global Volcanism Program, the town's namesake volcano, an 1,122-meter peak only about ten km away on the edge of the Parque Pumalín conservation project, is spewing plumes of ash up to 55,000 feet above sea level. Fortunately there is no snow on the volcano - because the peak drains toward the town of Chaitén, there would be serious flood danger. The caldera, though, does have two small lakes that could drain if the caldera were breached.

Again according to the Smithsonian, Chaitén's last known eruption was 7,420 B.C., plus or minus 75 years, so this was unexpected. Early reports, in fact, were that the eruption came from snow-covered Michimahuida, pictured here; an eruption on Michimahuida - the last was in 1835 - could cause major snowmelt and flooding.

Meanwhile, the prevailing westerlies are carrying ash toward the town of Futaleufú, Chile's whitewater rafting capital, and across the border into the Argentine city of Esquel (which canceled school classes yesterday), east of Los Alerces National Park. According to one Internet newsgroup report, some Futaleufú residents were wakened repeatedly by tremors during the night, and went outside to find the town covered by what appeared to be snow but, on closer inspection, was ash. There are photos of the town online at the Chile forum All Chile.

UPDATE: As of early Saturday evening, Chilean time, Chris Spelius of the Expediciones Chile kayaking and rafting company tells me that his wife is trapped in their Futaleufú house with the windows taped, without water and with diminishing food supplies. According to Chris, "No vehicles are moving as the volcano dust conducts electricity and ruins the alternators. There are about 50 vehicles abandoned on the road between Chaiten and Futaleufú ... " The border crossing to Argentina is open, but "but no one wants to take a vehicle since most vehicles do not last 30 miles in the dust."

How much does that book cost?

Last Thursday, April 24, was the first day of the 34th Feria del Libro, Buenos Aires's wildly popular annual book fair, where hundreds of publishers promote thousands of new books and hundreds of thousands of Porteños browse the offerings over two weeks. Occupying more than 45,000 square meters of display space in the Palermo fairgrounds, it's one of the city's signature events, with personal appearances by authors from throughout the Spanish-speaking world and beyond. The biggest English-speaking names this year are novelist/journalist Tom Wolfe and social critic Naomi Klein, who has also made a documentary film about grassroots responses to Argentina's economic and political meltdown of 2002. The fair will continue until May 12 (the photo above is from last year's event).

In marginally related news, the governor of Salta province has demanded that the publisher responsible for a school atlas that shows the Falkland Islands (Malvinas to Argentines) under British control reprint the 30,000 books rather than cover the offending map with an adhesive overlay. If, as was reported earlier, the total cost of the books was US$2.3 million, this means that the provincial school system paid about US$77 per copy. The provincial education minister lost her job over the atlas scandal but, if those statistics are correct, she deserved it even more if she, or someone else in her department, really laid out that kind of money for such a small run of a fifth-grade text.

Mapping Gaffes

In 1997, the Argentine province of Chubut published a tourist brochure that, because of a cartographic error, showed the town of Los Antiguos, in neighboring Santa Cruz province, as part of Chile (Los Antiguos is only a few kilometers from the border). Responding to protests from the Santa Cruz legislature, Chubut recalled tens of thousands of maps at a cost of roughly US$100,000.

Something similar happened last week when the northern province of Salta distributed a fifth-grade atlas that shows the British-governed Falkland Islands, which Argentina claims as the Malvinas, under their English language nomenclature. According to the Buenos Aires daily Clarín, the publisher in question - whose editorial director is a former university rector in Salta - defended the book, saying the entire map of the South American continent (see the pertinent section in the illustration above) appears in English. They could, he suggested, add an addendum to show students that this is "how the Anglo-Saxon world sees us."

Apparently, however, the book was never approved by the former Instituto Geográfico Nacional, the government agency that zealously defends Argentina's borders from dangers such as guidebooks that might make similar "mistakes" - no matter the language in which they appear. Not unique to Argentina, this is a legacy of the era when the military were responsible for mapping the borders of the newly independent South American countries, and many disputes have lingered into the recent past. In 1978, for instance, Argentina and Chile nearly went to war over three small islands in the Beagle Channel of the Tierra del Fuego archipelago.

Placing explanatory stickers on the offending map would be the simplest solution. If that's not acceptable, the cash-starved province may have to dump US$2.3 million worth of atlases into the recycling bin.

Island Hopping in the South Atlantic

In the mid-1980s, when I spent a year in the Falkland Islands, there were almost no tourists and very few roads of any sort. Even on the two big islands, East and West Falkland, the main means of transportation was the ten-seater Norman-Britten Islander, pictured here landing on a dirt airstrip at Saunders Island. Today, though both main islands have pretty good roads, the Islander remains essential for reaching outlying islands that contain some of the South Atlantic's best wildlife sites.

Over the past several years, the Islands have become popular for their concentrations of penguins, albatrosses, cormorants, elephant seals, sea lions, fur seals, and other fauna. Most visitors arrive by cruise ships - when I was in Stanley last December 7, several ships with more than 4,000 passengers (more than double Stanley's population) were anchored in the outer harbor of Port William (they're too big to enter Stanley's sheltered inner harbor). Many of the visitors, though not all, came ashore to be shuttled to wildlife sites such as Bluff Cove, whose large gentoo penguin colony is easy to reach on a day trip before returning to the ship.

Not to disparage Bluff Cove, but the handful of visitors who fly in for a week or two from the Patagonian city of Punta Arenas, Chile, see the islands more throughly and intimately. They have the option of overnighting at wildlife lodges at fauna-rich sites such as Sea Lion Island and Carcass Island, among others, that are accessible primarily by Islander aircraft (smaller cruise ships do visit Carcass, but only briefly). Until recently, though, tourist traffic has not been a high priority for the Falkland Islands Government Air Service (FIGAS), which exists primarily for the benefit of local residents.

This may soon change. Sean Minto, the new FIGAS general manager, wants to double the number of tourist flights to increase revenues (tourists are not eligible for the subsidized fares that local taxpayers have). If that's the case, more visitors may be enjoying the South Atlantic wildlife, as well as aerial views of the Islands' spectacular shoreline from the Islander. For the time being, though, their numbers will continue to be limited by Argentina's refusal to allow more than a single weekly commercial flight from Punta Arenas, even though LAN Airlines (which needs permission to cross Argentine airspace) would like to increase frequencies. The only other option is an expensive Royal Air Force charter from Brize Norton, in Oxfordshire, via Ascension Island.

Blowing Smoke in Buenos Aires

No, this is not another anti-tobacco screed - rather, smoke has risen to the top of Argentine politics in an unexpected way. For the past week or so, fires in the Paraná delta, set to encourage new pasture growth, have gotten out of control.

Ever since the Pleistocene, of course, humans have used fire to clear brush and rank grasses to encourage game and livestock or prepare land for cultivation. These current fires, though, may have contributed to fatal accidents on the freeway between Buenos Aires and the Paraná river port city of Rosario. They have certainly delayed flights out of Aeroparque, Buenos Aires's domestic airport, and bus departures into and through some of the affected areas. In the stagnant autumn air, the city itself is suffering from settling smoke that has carried elsewhere in Buenos Aires province and also into Entre Ríos and Santa Fe provinces, and even Uruguay.

For weeks now, Argentine farmers and the federal government have been arguing over rising export duties on soybeans; over the past several years, as the government has limited (and occasionally prohibited) beef exports to keep domestic prices low, many farmers have increased their soy acreage at the expense of livestock. This has led to beef shortages and, combined with the new soy duties, farmer-led roadblocks that left urban supermarket shelves nearly empty - some stylish restaurants even had to restrict their menus - and brought rising prices. The fires may represent an effort to improve marginal pasturelands for grazing - however untimely and inadvisable that may be.

The government, meanwhile, has strongly implied that farmers have set fires as a form of political and economic sabotage and has issued search warrants for some properties - even though, as the Buenos Aires Herald points out, much of the public may blame the government for tardiness in responding to the fires. A lack of rain in this normally humid climate has certainly intensified the crisis but, as so often happens in Argentine politics, the default option is a conspiracy theory.

In the interim, air travel in and out of Buenos Aires remains subject to delays. On the ground, because of diminished visibility, police are enforcing slow traffic zones - an overdue measure in a country where reckless driving often seems to be a national sport and enforcement is normally risible.