In Mt. Pinatubo’s Wake, Buried Dreams and Lives : Disaster: As volcano comes to life yet again, rivers of mud threaten villages and weary Filipinos lose hope.

Amid the gray devastation, the buried homes, smashed schools and ravaged lives here, someone has daubed these words in red on a broken stucco wall: “Tabun Goodby We Will Return Again.”

It’s not likely. Sixteen months after Mt. Pinatubo blew its top in one of the worst eruptions of the century, the now-infamous volcano is again spewing destruction and death across central Luzon, burying rural villages like this one, wiping out bridges and dams and choking vast swaths of once-rich farmland in a steaming slurry of concrete-thick mud, ash and sand.

“Last year I lost my farm to the volcano,” said Juan Garcia, a 52-year-old farmer who dug slowly for whatever he could find in a roofless house filled to the door tops with packed mud. “This year my house. My furniture. My refrigerator. My clothes. No more.”

He bent his thin shoulder to his shovel, digging into the rubble that once was his two-bedroom home. “Now I don’t have any work,” he said, tears filling his eyes. “Now I don’t have anything anymore.”

Each time a heavy rain falls, as it does regularly from June through October, torrents of roiling sulfurous mud roar off Pinatubo’s steep slopes and down into seven river systems that channel the deadly debris and floodwaters into densely populated parts of three provinces. A heavy lahar , as the mudflow is termed, can carry boulders, trucks, logs and concrete buildings.

Two dozen rock-filled dams built since last year to stem the flow have now been abandoned, overcome by the thundering onslaught of water, rocks and mud. Now miles of huge dikes and continued dredging are planned, but no one knows if they will work any better.

“Some areas just cannot be protected or saved,” warned Raymundo Punongbayan, head of the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology. He said at least 50 low-lying villages are at immediate risk from the volcano, and dozens more could be affected over the next five years.

It has already begun. The latest rains, and six passing typhoons this year, caused fierce flash floods and mudflows that have inundated thousands of homes, killed at least 50 people and displaced or affected nearly 1 million others, civil defense officials said. The latest casualties bring Pinatubo’s death toll to more than 900.

Up to 50,000 survivors now clog 77 evacuation centers in schools, churches, aircraft hangars and tent cities. Other impromptu camps are less formal. One squalid collection of bamboo and plastic shelters, for example, clings to a muddy hillside under a huge statue of the Virgin Mary. Area residents dump trash nearby, and the camp is known as Our Lady of the Garbage Dump.

The refugee numbers grow each week. For example, about 117 families were evacuated last month to a cluster of empty buildings at Clark Air Base, the giant facility abandoned by the U.S. Air Force after last year’s June 15 eruption.

All had fled from the nearby barrio of Dolores; the name, fittingly, means “sorrows.” Dolores is now mostly buried, leaving only a church steeple, broken walls and treetops poking above the packed mud. Streets are at rooftop level.

The evacuees joined 5,000 others already crowded into a hangar-like warehouse and former office building. Inside, destitute families are separated by hanging laundry, cardboard and plastic sheets. Medical care, water and food are available, but conditions are hardly comfortable.

“I have nothing to go home to,” said Lea Lumanlan, trying to quiet two crying infants amid the huge building’s constant din. “Everything is gone.”

Social workers lead thrice-daily “stress debriefings” to help the stunned survivors cope with the loss.

“The desperation, the loss of their homes, the loss of their livelihood--that is the problem,” said Pet Balibalos, who helps run the center. “Now they have the lack of privacy, the loss of hope.”

Hope already is gone elsewhere at Clark. After the Americans left, the once-busy base was looted of everything from hospital equipment to jet fuel, street lights to doorknobs. Now, except for evacuees and a detail of Philippine soldiers, it is eerily empty, a gray moonscape of mud-filled roads and ruined buildings.

Tall weeds grow from rooftops, runways are covered in ash, and abandoned cars sit half-buried in the muck. Hundreds of U.S.-built homes have been stripped bare; toilets and plumbing were torn out, light fixtures and windows removed, wires ripped from punched-out walls.

Dormant for six centuries, Pinatubo erupted with increasing fury last year. The monstrous June 15 explosion pumped ash high into the atmosphere and is believed to have changed world weather patterns, even cooling off the global warming trend.

Pinatubo began erupting again this July 14 and has now built a lava dome 1,200 feet long and 950 feet wide. It sits inside a crater more than a mile across and nearly 2,000 feet deep where once the mountain summit stood. Hundreds of tremors a day deep inside the volcano indicate that molten rock is again forcing its way to the surface.

“If it continues, we can expect another explosive eruption,” said volcanologist Jaime Sinsioco, who works in a converted Clark office filled with computers and seismic recorders and a telescope trained on the still-smoking volcano. “But we cannot yet say when it will erupt again.”

The job was hampered further when thieves stole two of seven monitoring stations placed on the volcano’s slopes. Frequent blackouts add further problems. Now teams of soldiers, called the “ lahar brigade,” fire assault rifles and use radios to warn villagers when mudflows are approaching, although how many can hear the shots over the thundering lahar is questionable.

On Sept. 21, Pinatubo shot a plume of gray ash and steam more than 11 miles high, once again turning the morning sky black as night, dusting Manila, 50 miles to the south, with gray grit and forcing the cancellation of flights at the international airport.

Worse, the eruption deposited thousands more tons of debris on the slopes, adding to the estimated 7 billion to 10 billion cubic meters of rock, pumice and ash ejected last year. So far, scientists estimate that only about 20% of the debris has washed down. Avalanches may continue eight to 10 years on the volcano’s western side and five to eight years on the east, Punongbayan said.

“It’s a terrible job I have, telling people what may happen,” he added. “I don’t enjoy it at all.”

The Philippine Congress recently approved $400 million for new construction works, resettlement of displaced families and livelihood projects for Pinatubo’s victims. One project has men, women and children filling sacks with pumice from the lahar ; each sack is sold for about 20 cents and the pumice used to stone-wash denim jeans for export.

Gatalino T. Domingo, mayor of Mabalacat, said officials are negotiating for land to resettle more than 4,800 families evacuated from his lahar- stricken town. “We hope to resettle people in six months,” he said. “It’s impossible to go back.”

That’s clear in Tabun, a barrio of Mabalacat. The once-prosperous village had sturdy, concrete homes and neat gardens built with money sent by family members working in the Middle East. Now only ruins remain, the result of a 12-foot-high lahar that hit Aug. 29. Eight people died; the rest were evacuated by dump truck.

On a recent afternoon, a handful of men used sledgehammers, crowbars and shovels to salvage window frames and roofing materials from the rubble. “My possessions and clothes I cannot find,” said Rufino Payab, a 56-year-old blacksmith, who pulled tin roofing from his half-buried house. “Even my tools are buried. So I cannot work.”

The Santos Ventura Elementary School is buried to its green roof; even the concrete sign on top is half-buried. A poster from the school library, “Wake Up With Good Books,” floats in a puddle. A faded, framed wedding picture hangs in a nearby tree. So does a bed frame.

Nearby, Felix and Gabriela Quezon, both 66, sat staring silently at the three-bedroom home they shared with 10 children and grandchildren. Now mud fills the home to the eaves. Bits of muddy clothes, broken toys and melted phonograph records litter the ground.

“We thought we would die,” Gabriela Quezon said in a sad, flat voice as she recounted her escape. “Maybe it’s better we die. We don’t have anything anymore. Everything is lost. Everything.”