Documentary : The Saturday the Sky Rained Fire and Ash : Day became night. Quakes rocked the land. People ran from the choking grime. Even for a reporter who knows disaster, an eruption of Mt. Pinatubo was plenty scary.

It had been raining mud, giant gritty splotches of gray mud, for more than an hour when an ominous roar suddenly sounded and the wooden City Hall rumbled and shook. Heide Patio went to the window of her office, peered out and turned back.

“It’s erupting again,” she said anxiously.

It was about 2:30 p.m. Saturday, June 15. We had driven here, two hours north of Manila, to monitor Mt. Pinatubo’s increasingly violent, weeklong series of eruptions. Angeles is only about 10 miles east of the volcano and it seemed a good place to check for damage. To make matters worse, a typhoon had slammed ashore that morning, flooding much of the area.

Just outside the city, I had stopped the car before crossing an endangered highway bridge. Fed by the floods, the river below was rising fast in a raging brown torrent filled with trees, parts of houses and debris. Half an hour after we nervously sped across, the huge bridge gave way, washing a truck, a jitney and two cars downstream.

Angeles itself was clogged with refugees. Cars, bicycles and a stream of dump trucks inched along, filled with mud-caked families huddling under tarps and umbrellas. Men and boys, clothes and faces coated in grime, clung to the sides. The whites of their eyes, wide with fear, showed their only color. Under skies dark as twilight, they looked like creatures from a science-fiction movie.

City Hall was lit by candles. Upstairs, Patio, head of the city’s social welfare department, was explaining that barrios were being evacuated along the rivers.

“We’re just praying it doesn’t come to worse,” she said. “This is the first time we’ve seen a calamity like this. We tell people to keep praying.”

Then came the roar. I went downstairs and was amazed. The rain and wind had stopped. Instead, a fierce hail of sand and golf-ball sized pumice was pouring down, clattering off cars and tin roofs. Soon the sky literally turned pitch-black. The sour stench of sulfur filled the air.

Holding a flashlight and umbrella overhead, I tried interviewing refugees, but few wanted to talk. “We must leave,” one mud-caked man shouted above the din. “The rivers are getting too high.” As the falling grit grew heavier, another man uttered the obvious: “It’s like the end of the world.”

I was with my wife, Maggy, and a friend, both radio reporters. We decided we’d seen enough. We scraped an inch of rocks and ash off the windshield, and pulled into the traffic. I told my driver, Bong Abongan, to take the MacArthur Highway, the only road leading south with no bridges.

The two-lane road was gridlocked with four lanes of fleeing traffic. The hail of small rocks banged our Toyota sedan’s roof and hood, and thick ash quickly overwhelmed the windshield wipers. When we ran out of water, we tried using Coca-Cola and then, finally, San Miguel beer to keep the windshield clear. Nothing worked.

Finally, Bong donned a gas mask I’d brought back from the Gulf War, stuck a baseball cap and Manila Hotel towel on his head and drove with his head out the window. I tied a red bandanna over my nose and mouth and a hood over my cap and tried to help from the passenger side. Later, I took the gas mask and drove.

By 4 p.m., the hard rain of gravel had given way to a steady whoosh of coarse dry sand falling from the sky. Already 3 inches thick, it crunched and crackled underfoot, like fresh snow. Hundreds hiked miserably along the roadside, often barefoot, clutching children and infants wrapped in ragged towels.

Conditions quickly grew worse. Each few minutes, the road heaved and swayed from volcano-driven earthquakes, shaking the car. Tall, leafy acacia trees along the road cracked like rifle shots in the dark as limbs broke, blocking traffic further. Otherwise the air was silent and warm, almost steamy.

Suddenly the midnight-dark sky exploded with strange orange streaks of horizontal lightning and booming thunderclaps. Every so often, the sky blazed bright red and rumbled from new eruptions. The hellish display lasted for hours as we crawled along the nightmarish road.

I got out and walked several times. An ambulance sat stalled in traffic, its red lights flashing through the gloom. A Dodge dump truck of refugees had lost its headlights as well as its windshield wipers. So a boy sat forlornly on the cab, pelted by the volcanic debris as he held an umbrella over the windshield and aimed a flashlight at the road ahead.

“Where is it safe? Where should we go?” asked Ron Maniti, 24, as he drove his wife and three crying children on a mud-splattered motorcycle. I had no answer.

A group of mud-caked women, cowering with their children on another truck bed, tried to pray as they lurched along. “I pray to God, I pray to God,” sobbed Rahina Ramirez, 46.

Another man, a dentist, stood in a grit-encrusted pith helmet. “I think I’m closer to God now,” he said softly. “And I expect him to be closer to me.”

Edgardo Lansangan, 34, a watchman who wore a towel on his head, had another view. “It looks like hell,” he said.

Actually, it looked like we were trapped. I had been frightened covering war, and saw more than my share of misery in the recent cyclone in Bangladesh. But I’ve never felt so helpless. Or seen anything so spooky.

It took us 7 1/2 hours to reach Manila, 60 miles away. At home, every room, every stick of furniture, every book was covered with a film of gray ash. I filed my story and collapsed in bed at sunrise. Outside, the yard looked like snow had fallen.

We set out again a few hours later. To be safe, I arranged to convoy with a CBS News van, and loaded the car with extra food and water, surgical masks, ski goggles and a cellular phone. CBS lent me a walkie-talkie to keep in touch. Bong, my driver, took an Iraqi helmet I’d given him.

The eruptions had ended sometime after midnight, and we could see the effects for the first time under ghostly-gray morning clouds. Fields and villages were wastelands, blanketed with gray ash that grew steadily thicker as we drove north. The light was luminescent.

Virtually every tree was broken. Leaves of graceful palms had folded down, like closed umbrellas. Scores of cars were abandoned, caught up to the hubcaps in concrete-like mud. Others had skidded off the ash-slickened roads.

The stream of refugees had become a flood. As wind whipped the ash into choking clouds of grit that blinded the eyes and coated the skin, panicked people packed cars, buses, trucks and buffalo carts. An overloaded Cadillac passed with three men on the hood and four in the trunk. A front-end loader rumbled by with a woman and four children, plus their tattered bags, in the front scoop.

Thousands of others fled on foot or worse: two men, each missing a leg, hobbled along on crutches. Another man slogged through the muck in a wooden wheelchair, stopping every few minutes to catch his breath.

One barely clothed woman walked barefoot, with a baby strapped to her back, leading three children and a pig. Another man carried two chickens. A few carted suitcases, but most people carried nothing but children and umbrellas. Scores sought refuge from the wind, huddling under bridges, hoping to hitch a ride.

Downtown Angeles was buried under six inches of ash. Hundreds of buildings had collapsed under the weight of the soggy debris. Rescue teams searched through twisted rubble for survivors in the ruins of the Philippine Rabbit bus terminal. “I can’t believe what happened to my terminal,” driver Ricardo Crespo, 39, said numbly. “I can’t believe what’s happened to my country.”

Back at City Hall, a haggard looking Mayor Antonio Abad Santos stood with several men armed with submachine guns, commandeering every passing bus and truck to evacuate the devastated city. Sirens blared from emergency vehicles.

“People are panicking,” Santos said wearily. “I am appealing to them to remain calm.”

Farther north, the 200-foot-long Abacan Bridge had collapsed overnight. Now the river had dropped considerably. With no other way out, a steady stream of families--and two men hauling a refrigerator--waded through the knee-deep muddy torrent, holding a wire cable for support. Boys helped them climb the steep, muddy banks, shaking a tin can of coins for donations.

It was already late afternoon, but we wanted to see Clark Air Base, a mile or so on the other side of the river. We waded across in hiking boots. The water was warm and muddy. A passing jeep, and then a pickup truck, took us to the base.

A few barrel-chested Westerners swigged beer outside the indomitable Earthquake McGoon’s bar, as if nothing had happened. But scores of other shops, restaurants and honky-tonks outside the base had collapsed. A few people shoveled ash off rooftops, but most appeared dazed.

Inside Clark, an ash-gray U.S. flag fluttered from a flagpole. About 15,000 Air Force personnel and their families had been evacuated several days before, and the remaining 1,500 had abandoned the base during the eruption. Only 15 Filipino soldiers stayed overnight.

The sprawling base was eerily desolate. Two Filipino soldiers guarded the front gate, but other entrances were unlocked and deserted. Roads, roofs and runways were blanketed with up to six inches of ash, like wet beach sand. It was a barren moonscape.

At the Philippine air force headquarters on base, Brig. Gen. Leopoldo Acot Jr. manned a radio. An aide estimated that 40% of the buildings were damaged or destroyed, including a large double Quonset hut that stood in ruins nearby.

“It’s not like snow, you know,” Acot said, digging his toe in the gray muck when he went outside. “Snow melts and that’s it. This stuff doesn’t.”

As he spoke, an aide politely tapped him on the shoulder. “Excuse me, sir,” he said. “There’s an earthquake.”

Acot paused as the ground briefly rumbled. Gray ash swirled in the air, like snow off a roof. “Yes, an earthquake,” he said calmly. “Now, where was I?”