Under the Volcano

By MARK FINEMAN

June 6, 1997 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

SAN PEDRO BENITO JUAREZ, Mexico —

Jaime Romero Aguirre is building a house at the base of one of the biggest, most potentially deadly volcanoes on the globe. His new home is a simple concrete affair, but a big step up from the rickety thatched hut nearby.

“A lot of people here are building new houses,” Romero said as he and his crew stacked cinder blocks into mortar one recent afternoon in this endangered little village. “But it’s not for protection against an eruption. It’s just to improve our lives. It’s an investment in the future.”

Investing here, in the shadow of Popocatepetl? Pouring hard-earned pesos into new homes at a time when the 17,887-foot, snowcapped behemoth that the Aztecs dubbed “Smoking Mountain” has been showering this and dozens of other nearby villages with ash and fire for weeks?

It’s the rough equivalent of building a mansion on the San Andreas fault.

And yet, Romero just shrugged and laughed.

“We trust Don Gregorio. He is inside the mountain. He knows everything, and he will warn us,” Romero said of the saint that he and thousands of villagers believe lives in the core of the active volcano. “We have asked him, ‘Should we go, or should we stay?’ And he has said nothing. So, we stay. We live. We laugh. Life goes on as normal.”

So much for fear and loathing just six miles from the crater of a volcano that scientists say could smother up to 350,000 people in this and many other small villages under mud, ash and pyroclastic flows, if and when “Popo” blows. Here, 600 families--indeed, thousands of others in this most-threatened region just a few hours’ drive from the nation’s capital--live with faith and laughter in the face of an abstract science (volcanology) that calculates their possible fates.

Meantime, most folks in San Pedro insist they are all but untouched by the ash plumes, fire showers and tremors that have marked the months since Popocatepetl rumbled back to life in 1994.

That year, Maria Elena Baustida heeded an official evacuation alert and fled the concrete house she shares with her three young daughters on a hillside within easy sight of Popo. She stayed with relatives for eight or nine days. But then she returned home--and plans to stay put.

“I’m not afraid here,” she said. “Besides, where am I to go?”

Yes, she conceded, “I do think there will be a major eruption someday, but we’ll be fine.”

Scientists tracking Popo’s small eruptions and seismic activity say villages like San Pedro, southeast of the volcano’s cone, are at greatest risk--a reality that state officials say they have spent months trying to impress upon the villagers.

But each day, San Pedro residents ignore the government’s posted evacuation plans, its educational fliers and even its most recent “yellow alert.”

Scores of peasants tend fields in which they sowed their annual corn crop in April; their harvest is not due until December.

The 357 children at Nicholas Bravo Primary School file in and out of classes, oblivious to the new yellow flag flying overhead and to the smoking crater that towers over them.

And officials like Angel Rojas Perez, the village chief, spend far more time resolving pothole problems in San Pedro’s pitted, stone streets than they do talking on the disaster-alert cellular telephone that state officials recently installed in a tiny office here.

In contrast to the pastoral calm in places like San Pedro, the headquarters of the government’s disaster-prevention and disaster-alert centers are bustling. State and federal officials say they are taking elaborate steps to monitor Popo, to prepare evacuation routes, and to warn and educate local villagers about what will happen if the mountain blows.

Officials in the state of Puebla, which includes San Pedro and the volcano, boast of having invested vast sums to widen roads, deploy new army posts, distribute fliers with evacuation route specifics, and install high-tech cellular communication systems in dozens of villages like San Pedro, which lack even basic telephone service.

At Mexico City’s National Autonomous University of Mexico, scientists--who have access to the latest satellite pictures of Popo--have set up a volcano “war room” linked to radar scanners, television cameras and seismic sensors.

“There is also a scientific group of 20 people from the university and the National Center for Disaster Prevention that includes engineers, volcanologists, seismologists, geochemists and others,” said Roberto Quaas, one of the center’s chief engineers. “We are constantly monitoring the volcano and making decisions and recommendations to civil authorities on when they should evacuate.”

Mexican and U.S. scientists who have been studying Popo say they believe the possibility of an imminent eruption is remote. But they also concede that volcanic eruptions, like earthquakes, are almost impossible to predict with accuracy. They add that they believe that Popo has had a major eruption every 1,000 years--the most recent one in AD 822--and that, historically speaking, the mountain appears overdue.

Last month, after a marked increase in seismic activity here that included three small eruptions, scientists recommended the yellow alert. State and federal officials have met at the highest levels to make final each detail of an elaborate evacuation plan for those at greatest risk.

But as a handful of Mexican army soldiers milled around San Pedro’s village plaza one recent afternoon, there was hardly a sense of urgency here or in any of the neighboring communities. Instead, most residents were like Jaime Romero--complacent, serene and filled with faith in their own warning system--St. Don Gregorio.

The faith in him is old and represents a mishmash of Roman Catholicism and native beliefs that date back more than 10 centuries. Indeed, the annual worship rituals for him are rooted in the region’s Mesoamerican, Toltec tradition, said Julio Glockner, author of the book “The Sacred Volcanoes” and researcher at the Autonomous University of Puebla.

Once a year, Glockner said, scores of villagers from San Pedro and other villages march up the volcano’s slopes to deliver offerings. “Often they bring mole sauce, and they sacrifice a turkey and leave it in front of the opening of the volcano, where two crosses always stand,” he said. “Other things they leave there are tequila, cigars and clothing.”

He noted that residents also have left “a hat, a cape, an Aztec war costume and a business suit with a white shirt and tie” in the belief that St. Gregorio wants them.

While it may be unscientific or even illogical to put such weight in religious rites when dealing with as awesome a force as a volcano, it is also true that a saint can seem sensible compared with the government’s technical fliers and elaborate evacuation plans.

“There is very little clarity” among the villagers “on how a volcano works,” Glockner said. “Scientists and future rescue workers need to give clear explanations to the people about what a volcano is. It can’t be too technical. Explanations based in nature would work well. For example, they could compare the volcano to a pot of beans over a fire.”

In the absence of such explanations, he said, myth persists. Even government surveillance helicopters and airplanes that cruise the cone have been misunderstood: “People think they throw things into the volcano to provoke it,” Glockner said.

This is what Mateo Castillo Hernandez, a peasant farmer, said he believes.

As he and his wife, Marcelina, spread manure on a corn crop, Castillo said he believes the ash and fire that recently showered his San Pedro fields are a response to the airborne provocation: “It’s like God pulling our ears, scolding us a little and telling us to think over our lives.”

Although Castillo, 56, said he, too, believes that St. Gregorio will respond to the offerings that San Pedro’s villagers delivered to the mountain during their sacred festival last March, he showed more fear than most others here: For the first time, he said, he was tending fields of another landowner. His own two acres are higher up on the mountain “and I was too afraid to work up there this year,” he said. “So I lent the land to another who had less fear.”

But when asked whether he and his family had studied the government evacuation plans and eruption warnings, Castillo laughed. “No. Neither has my wife nor son. The few people in town who have a truck are preparing it to get out of town fast. But it’s no good. There won’t be time. If the mountain explodes, it’ll be on us in a second. And only Don Gregorio knows for sure when that will be.”

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FACTS ABOUT POPOCATEPETL

* The name: Smoking Mountain, in the language of the Aztecs.

* Location: 50 miles east of Mexico City.

* Height: 17,887 feet, making it one of the tallest volcanoes in the world.

* People at risk: 350,000 within six miles; more than 20 million within a 62-mile radius.

* Frequency of eruptions: Scientists believe it has had a major eruption every 1,000 years--the most recent one in AD 822, which means it’s overdue.

Sources: Los Angeles Times, Reuters News Service

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How a Volcano Works

1. Subduction zone: Over millions of years, a slab of one tectonic plate dives under another, carrying sediments filled with water and minerals.

2. Plate melts: Cool subduction crust is gradually squeezed and heated until it melts, creating a light, buoyant magma, which begins to rise upward.

3. Magma chamber: The buoyant magma collects in a chamber or series of chambers.

4. Volcanic eruption: Pressure builds, forcing magma to erupt as lava or pyroclastic materials--superheated rocks and gases--either at the summit or on the volcano’s flanks

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How Popo Compares

Volcanologists measure the amount of magma--erupted lava and volcanic ash--to determine the size of a volcano. Small eruptions occur much more frequently than larger ones.

Yellowstone and Toba

Size: Over 1,000 cubic kilometers (km3)

Occurs: Once every 100,000 years

Tambora, 1815

Size: 100 to 1,000 km3

Occurs: Once every 10,000 years

Krakatau, 1883

Size: 10 to 100 km3

Occurs: Once every 1,000 years

Pinatubo, 1991 and Katmal, 1912

Size: 1 to 10 km3

Occurs: Once every 100 years