COLUMN ONE : Pinatubo’s Agonizing Aftermath : The eruptions have mostly stopped, but continuing mudflows push the death and destruction toll ever higher. And the future is even grimmer.

It was long past midnight and Conrado Tiamzon was sound asleep when this farming village suddenly shook to the thundering roar of what sounded like “1,000 carabao running at us.”

It was worse than any stampede of water buffalo: a deadly gray torrent of rain-soaked volcanic sand and mud, thick as wet cement, stinking of hot sulfur and rushing faster than a man could run.

For two hours, Tiamzon, his wife and two small children huddled on their tin roof, crying and praying as the flood of smoking mud swirled higher and higher. It didn’t stop until it filled his concrete home, stopping just under the eaves.

“I am sure we will all die there,” the gap-toothed, 36-year-old farmer said, standing near rooftops poking from the mud.

Santa Barbara died instead, its simple homes and fertile fields buried under 10 feet of mud from the Sept. 7 volcanic mudflow that roared 24 miles from the debris-covered slopes of Mt. Pinatubo. It was one of scores of villages and towns in central Luzon that had survived the June 15 volcanic eruption--the biggest the world has seen this century--only to find the aftermath far worse.

Largely ignored by politicians during last month’s fierce debate over the future of U.S. military bases here, Pinatubo’s death and destruction has grown dramatically. Indeed, most of the estimated 875 deaths now blamed on the volcano occurred in the weeks after the June 15 eruption, not in it. The majority of victims, 505 people in all, have perished in crowded, squalid, government-run evacuation camps. Nearly all were members of the primitive Aeta tribes; two-thirds were Aeta children under age 4 who died from disease and malnutrition.

Also, the government says nearly 1.2 million people have now lost their homes, shops, farms or jobs to Pinatubo, double the initial toll. Up to half a million refugees have flooded into Manila, increasing the overcrowded capital’s woes. More than two dozen towns, and more than 200,000 acres of farmland, have been buried. Damage and rehabilitation costs, already in the hundreds of millions of dollars, continue to grow.

And the future is even grimmer.

“Unfortunately, it is going to get worse,” said Raymundo Punongbayan, head of the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology. “We expect major (mudflow) danger for at least five years. So many more towns will be affected.”

Scientists now say Pinatubo’s eruption ejected an astonishing 8 billion cubic meters of ash, sand and rocks, or enough to bury Los Angeles’ 463 square miles nearly 23 feet deep. The volcano has largely stopped erupting, but most of the debris still sits on the upper slopes, threatening to unleash massive, deadly avalanches each time it rains.

So far, after two months of near-daily rainfall, less than 10% of the debris has washed down the eight rivers that drain the mountain. Up to half the rest is expected to roar down in coming rainy seasons. Some areas along the crowded eastern slopes and below may be endangered and uninhabitable for a decade.

Nor can much be done. Officials say it is senseless to rebuild most of the bridges and roads, for example, since massive silting from the mudflows has filled the riverbeds, forcing the water over the banks. Emergency dredging and dikes have fought a losing battle against the power of nature.

“It’s not only a waste of money, it’s a waste of time,” said Bren Guiao, governor of Pampanga province, one of three bearing the brunt of the mudflows.

“No one really knows what to do,” agreed a Western expert who has studied the problem. “It’s an unstable environment. The rivers move with each major rain. We call it the windshield effect. They’re meandering back and forth.”

Thigh-deep muddy water fills the streets of Bacolor, for example, a once-prosperous trading center of 67,000 people 22 miles south of Pinatubo that escaped major damage during the June eruption. In the last month, however, mud has buried some barrios 15 feet deep. Floods have ruined much of the rest, forcing most residents to flee.

“Every time it rains upstream, we get mud and floods here,” said Efren Blanco, a city official. “The town proper has become a river.”

In Bacolor, once the Spanish capital of the Philippines, mud has flooded the 16th-Century cathedral and streets lined with elegant homes built by the friars. Most shops are shuttered and abandoned. Only the top of the pumps at a Caltex gas station are visible in the mud. Soupy glop fills the police station and tax office in the sand-bagged municipal hall. Until a path was shoveled clear earlier this week, Mayor Guillermo Balingit had to climb a bamboo ladder to reach his second-floor office.

“Now I am a professional beggar,” Balingit said. “I never asked for anything before. Now I ask help for my town.”

Help isn’t easy to find. An all-out effort to contain the mudflows with structural dams and dikes would cost billions of dollars that the impoverished Philippines doesn’t have. As a result, Balingit has been forced to make Solomon-like decisions, ordering protective dikes built to funnel mud into three already buried barrios. That action sparked repeated protests from villagers armed with guns and machetes, angry that their ancestral land would be sacrificed.

“I cannot blame them,” Balingit said. “But I must decide for the good of the majority.”

He has already decided to move the town onto high ground farther north, where the government is seeking to buy or take 2,500 acres. In all, said Gov. Guiao, 400,000 Pampanga residents must be relocated.

“This is the worst calamity of our history,” he said. “It means new roads, schools, chapels, markets. Where will these people live? How can we create employment?”

Tens of thousands of people have built shantytowns and makeshift tent camps along raised roads, often without medical care or relief goods. More than 150,000 others are still crammed into government-run evacuation centers. Conditions vary widely.

The largest center in Bacolor, for example, has 6,038 people encamped in classrooms at the Don Honorio Ventura College of Arts and Trades. It is one of the better camps, with regular visits from doctors and daily relief rations of donated rice and canned goods.

Eleven families are crammed into classroom No. 206, their floor space defined by lines of hanging laundry and rows of chairs. On one wall hangs a small sign, “God Bless Our Home,” the only thing Rosita Macabulos, her husband and their six children were able to save from their mud-buried home.

“The kids get sick here,” she said. “Most of them have fever and coughs.”

The future is not promising. College officials have announced they will evict the evacuees soon, ostensibly to resume classes in the half-abandoned town. The evacuees have been told only that they will be moved to tents somewhere else.

“Everyone has to leave. . . , “ said Catalina Dumaicos, a government social worker at the school. “We don’t know where they will go.”

Mariano Suniga, a burly 59-year-old tailor from Santa Inez, stands outside, hoping for answers. His wife has been in the hospital since mud buried their barrio in mid-July. “She is in shock,” he said. “She became too nervous from the mud.”

A drive around the volcano’s southern slopes shows reeds and undergrowth already thick and green on the gray ash deposits. In some areas, sugar cane grows tall and lush. Farther west, into Zambales province, farmers have plowed the cinders under and planted verdant rice paddies. Laughing schoolchildren in blue uniforms crowd the road. Life for many is returning to normal.

But elsewhere, devastation reigns.

In Porac, for example, a town of 68,000 only 13 miles from the volcano, heavy ash fall from the June eruption destroyed 80% of the area’s crops and nearly 2,000 homes, said Vice Mayor Exequiel Gamboa.

“Then it became worse from the mud,” he said. “All the houses along the riverbank were devastated.” Forty people were killed.

The mudflow washed out the main highway bridge over the Pasig-Potero River. When there is no rain, visitors can ford the knee-deep stream. When the water rises, however, the only way across is on a tiny cart that dangles from a cable strung across the deep canyon of packed sand and mud.

A few miles north, on the slopes of the still-steaming volcano, is a hillside cluster of tents, thatched huts and tin-and-cardboard shanties. It is an evacuation center for 2,424 Aetas, the tiny, dark-skinned tribal people descended from the original inhabitants of the Philippines. The Eagles’ “Hotel California” blares from a camp loudspeaker as a gray drizzle falls.

Long ignored or discriminated against by the outside world, the Aetas lived on the slopes of the long-dormant volcano that is the center of their cosmology. Many hunted with bows and arrows or raised root crops in isolated camps in the mountain’s rugged hills and deep valleys.

Forced down from the mountain by the eruption, the Aetas have suffered the most from Pinatubo. Until a public outcry led to an immunization campaign, hundreds of infants succumbed to epidemics of measles, diarrhea and pneumonia in the cramped, waterlogged camps. The Aeta death rate has fallen in the last two weeks, but is still many times higher than that of lowland Filipinos. Awful as it is, government officials say that may be normal for the Aetas.

“Before, no one minded when they would die,” said Gov. Guiao. “But in the camps, they are exposed to modern medicine. So many lives have been saved.”

Philippine and foreign doctors have set up well-stocked clinics in the major camps but still despair of breaking down behavior patterns and communication barriers that have led to more than 400 Aeta deaths.

At least 80 Aetas have died in this camp, some from malnutrition because they refused to eat the food provided as emergency rations. Many would not eat canned sardines. Some ate instant noodles uncooked from the package. In the camp clinic, an old woman held a dull-eyed, emaciated 5-month-old girl, an intravenous drip feeding into her stick-like arm. The girl’s mother died of measles, and the doctors found her starving to death.

“They don’t trust the health workers,” said Dr. Manny Voulgaropoulous of the U.S. Agency for International Development. “They’re suspicious of modern medicine and don’t let their children take it. And when their children have diarrhea, they tend to hide them.”

The Aetas say they would rather rely on the herbal medicines now buried under the mud and ash that cover the smoke-wreathed volcano.

Officials want to build dikes to funnel future onslaughts into the mostly buried and abandoned village to save other less-damaged barrios. But Tiamzon and a dozen of his neighbors say they won’t leave.

“This is the land of the father of my father,” he said quietly. “So we will not leave. We will die here.”