Volcano Threat Empties Air Base, Clogs Roads : Philippines: Thousands of cars carrying U.S. evacuees head for Subic Bay. But housing there is in short supply.

Carrying belongings for three days but enough fears for a lifetime, nearly 15,000 Americans cleared out of the U.S.-run Clark Air Base here Monday in the shadow of a huge volcano belching thick plumes of dark ash and steam.

Thousands of cars and vans loaded with children and canaries, dogs and duffels inched bumper-to-bumper down a winding two-lane road toward safety at the giant Subic Bay Naval Base on Luzon’s west coast, leaving the giant Clark facility all but deserted.

The 48-mile trip took up to six hours under a blazing sun, leaving both cars and tempers overheated.

“We’re gonna end up like refugees,” fumed Air Force Staff Sgt. Lenny Mastri as he sat in a miles-long traffic jam with his wife and three children. “I’d rather be back home. I’m not worried about the volcano.”

“When the Air Force says move, we move,” said Devata Rivard, whose husband was one of 1,500 U.S. troops left behind to guard Clark, which was originally a cavalry fort and is America’s oldest overseas base. “But I believe the Lord will take care of us.”

U.S. Navy officials at Subic Bay will need all the help they can get. The sudden evacuation from a feared eruption of Mt. Pinatubo literally doubled Subic’s resident population, a base where housing already is in short supply.

“We’ve asked all families to double up,” said Lt. Cmdr. Kevin Mukri, a Subic spokesman. “We’re stuffing people anywhere we can. . . . Basically, anywhere we can put a cot, we are.”

Mukri said that crowding Air Force and Navy personnel, Defense Department contractors, civilian teachers and others into gymnasiums, bachelor quarters and other cramped accommodations clearly will create stress in the hilly seaside base. He said officials may decide to evacuate dependents to the United States if a prolonged stay creates too many problems.

“It’s not ideal by any means,” Mukri said. “It’s the unknown that makes it hard. We don’t know the end date, whether it’s next week or next month.”

Neither do the U.S. Geological Survey and Philippine scientists studying Mt. Pinatubo’s daily tremors and quakes, eruptions and explosions. For the indefinite future, they said, thick magma building up below the 4,795-foot summit is likely to spout pyroplastic flows--a deadly mixture of fiery volcanic fragments and searing gases that sweep along close to the ground at speeds up to 60 miles per hour.

“The volcanic activity could last a few weeks to three years,” said Raymundo Punongbayan, head of the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology, who flew over the volcano Monday. “We’re just in the beginning stage. Stronger eruptions should be expected.”

Punongbayan reported that the volcano, about 60 miles northwest of Manila, erupted on a small scale at 4:45 p.m. Monday, shooting steaming ash and smoke more than two miles high. But the mountain otherwise puffed two plumes of gray ash into the azure sky, and prevailing winds carried the smoke westward away from Clark.

Ed Wolf, a U.S. seismologist, said the volcano is in an advanced stage of eruption. “We’re kind of in an unstable holding pattern,” he told U.S. Armed Forces Television.

A 15-page Air Force evacuation pamphlet, handed out to the evacuees, gave little comfort. It warned that Mt. Pinatubo, which has been dormant for 611 years, is unpredictable and “could explode.”

“If it does, the noise of the explosion would probably be heard throughout Luzon, and possibly in Vietnam,” the pamphlet notes. “The blast (shock waves) could be up to or in excess of 100 miles per hour and carry temperatures from 450 to 1,000 degrees centigrade (about 850 to 1800 degrees Fahrenheit).”

The pamphlet advised evacuees to take a “bug-out kit” with personal papers, three days’ worth of clothes, enough food and water for a day and other emergency goods. But many cars were loaded with bicycles, mattresses and other gear that suggested that few expect to return so soon.

“No problem with me,” Darrell Hankins, an airman from Norfolk, Va., said with a grin as he and a bare-chested buddy worked on their suntans in the noontime traffic jam. “It’s time off!”

Others feared that “economic intruders,” official Air Force jargon for local thieves, will take advantage of the Americans’ absence.

“We took everything we wanted to see again,” said a burly Air Force sergeant whose red pickup truck was heavily loaded with bags and boxes. “We live off base. We think when we get back, everything will be ripped off.”

An Air Force helicopter clattered over the traffic jam, and military police and U.S. Marines patrolled the road to offer assistance and provide security. Communist rebels fighting the Manila government are active in the area, but no incidents were reported.

A hand-lettered sign for Filipino workers, saying “No Work Today,” was tacked to the front gate at Clark after the last convoy of cars left. Military police sped about the base in jeeps.

Not so outside, where 350,000 residents of Angeles City went about their lives. One American, 76-year-old Virgil Kinnamon, a military retiree, appeared amused by the evacuation.

“If you’re inside, you’re not going to get any debris falling on you,” he said at a busy off-base McDonald’s. “Let it come!”

More than 11,000 Filipinos were evacuated over the weekend from three provinces flanking Mt. Pinatubo, but more than 4,200 others arrived in government evacuation centers Monday after word of the American departure spread. Several hundred people from Calumpang village crowded an elementary school in Dolores, several miles north of Clark’s main gate.

“Many people (in the village) didn’t want to go,” said Lapurisima Gomez, a Calumpang official. “But when they heard the Americans are going, they panicked and they want to evacuate too.”

Fears were not eased when the villagers realized their makeshift evacuation center is uncomfortably close to the base the Americans found threatened. “How can we be sure this place is safe?” Gomez asked. “I feel very nervous.”

Dan Daquis, an official from nearby Mabalacat, agreed. “If there’s an eruption, we can’t do anything about it because we don’t have enough vehicles to get out of here,” he said.

Liza Gopez, a government social welfare official, said she doesn’t have enough rice or medicine for the 63 families camped on dusty concrete floors at the Dolores school. “We can only give canned sardines and mackerel,” she said. “So they eat the same food for breakfast, lunch and dinner.”

Out on the highway, a vendor did a brisk business selling icy soda pop to the long line of departing Americans. It seemed an odd start to what appears a long, uncertain summer for thousands of people forced from their homes by an angry volcano.

“The mountain’s going to determine how long this is going to last,” said Kenneth West, an Air Force master sergeant stuck in an non-air-conditioned car in the traffic jam with his wife and four boys. “It’s all up to the volcano now.”

BACKGROUND

The historic eruption of a volcano is a cataclysm of almost unimaginable force. When Italy’s Vesuvius, probably the most famous volcano, erupted in AD 79, it killed 16,000 people and buried the towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Pliny the Younger described “flashes of fire as vivid as lightning and darkness more profound than night.” The four explosions that literally tore Indonesia’s Krakatoa apart on Aug. 27, 1883, could be heard 3,000 miles away and plunged a vast area of the Pacific into darkness for 22 hours. Although Krakatoa was uninhabited, the explosions caused seismic sea waves more than 100 feet high that drowned 36,000 people on the islands of Java and Sumatra. For more on volcanoes, see World Report, Page 6.