Breaking news: The eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines has dropped 259 meters in height, spewing ten billion tons of lava and spewing more material into the stratosphere than the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa. Because of the ash in the atmosphere, the global temperature dropped by two degrees, and the hole in the ozone layer expanded. A total of 722 people died, some not during the eruption but from the rains and mudslides that followed, with an earthquake recorded at about one per minute.

Relax, it didn’t happen recently, it happened on June 15, 1991. And the people who died were among the few who refused to leave. You know the clichéd scenario, of course, where one person realizes that disaster is coming and desperately fights with everyone else to get them to evacuate the area. Well, at least once it really happened. One man, one man, saved 60,000 people.

He was called a “disaster manager” after he oversaw two disasters: the 1990 Luzon earthquake and the eruption of Mount Pinatubo the following year. Dr. Raymundo Santiago Punongbayan was the director of the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology, in this position in 1991 he with great difficulty convinced the authorities and the residents themselves to evacuate the towns around the volcano, including the American military base!

Although the volcano had been showing signs of life since March, authorities hesitated, suspecting a false alarm. But Punongbayan’s experience told him what was about to happen, and he persisted until he was evacuated, 48 hours before the disaster!

Let’s be honest: the general impression of volcanology is that it deals with counting the dead and assessing the damage after an eruption, each time finding that living near a volcano sucks, which leaves cold (pardon the cynicism of the pun) those who continue to live there, even taking selfies on the crest of the crater, on the background of steam.

In fact, volcanology is a serious and ancient science. The oldest known record of a volcanic eruption is a wall painting dating to around 7000 BC. and found at the Neolithic site of Çatal-Goyük in Anatolia, Turkey. In ancient Greece and the early Roman Empire, volcanoes were considered the lairs of fire gods. In the 5th century BC, Anaxagoras claimed that eruptions were caused by strong winds, an idea that persisted into the 16th century!

Even in antiquity, Plato claimed that in the bowels of the earth flows a huge river of fire Piriflegheton, which feeds all the volcanoes of the world. Aristotle considered underground fire to be the result of wind rubbing against the walls of narrow passages. Lucretius believed that Etna was empty (inside, don’t kid yourself!) and that the fires were caused by – you guessed it – strong winds.

More original — a poet, po! -, Ovidiu believed that the flames were fueled by “fatty food” and the eruptions stopped when the food ran out (Michaela Bilic didn’t think of that either!). Closer to the truth, Vitruvius said that sulfur, alum and bitumen fueled underground fires. Finally, Pliny the Elder noted that earthquakes precede eruptions. He paid for his curiosity about life when he died watching the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79.

His nephew, Pliny the Younger, described in detail the disaster in which his uncle died, giving the first account of the effects of poisonous gases. In 1841, the first volcanological observatory named Vesuvius was built in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The study of radioactivity, begun in 1896, was applied to the theory of plate tectonics and radiometric dating half a century later. Explanations related to fluid dynamics were added, and experimental physics and chemistry, as well as mathematical modeling techniques, became useful for volcanology from 1841.

Since then, volcanologists monitor seismic observations and gas emissions with the help of increasingly powerful instruments, monitor surface deformations and temperature changes, use geodetic methods and satellites. Electrical, gravity, and magnetic observations are also conducted, sudden changes in resistivity are monitored, and stratigraphic and compositional analyzes are conducted.

But above all and together with everything, experience, intuition and feeling also matter. What helped Raymundo Punongbayan save tens of thousands of lives. Unfortunately, not his, as 14 years later he died in a Red Cross helicopter crash on a mission. At that time, he was a member of the National Board of the Philippine Red Cross.

Shortly after noon on April 28, 2005, Punongbayan and eight others died in a helicopter crash in Gabaldon, Nueva Ecija. They were on a reconnaissance mission in the area as part of the government’s disaster preparedness program and were looking for possible resettlement for people left behind by floods and landslides.

Punongbayan was 67 years old and should have enjoyed his retirement in peace. But he could not.

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Photo source: profimediaimages.ro