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Friday, June 27, 2025

Piparo mud volcano about to blow

by

2104 days ago
20190922
An aerial view of the Piparo mud volcano.

An aerial view of the Piparo mud volcano.

RAD­HI­CA DE SIL­VA

rad­hi­ca.sookraj@guardian.co.tt

Se­nior geo­sci­en­tist Xavier Moo­nan is ad­vis­ing cit­i­zens not to ven­ture near the Pi­paro mud vol­cano as drone sur­veys in­di­cate it is about to blow.

Moo­nan and his team toured the vol­cano on Sun­day morn­ing, hours af­ter res­i­dents re­port­ed see­ing fis­sures and cracks around the area. Sev­er­al homes suf­fered ex­ten­sive dam­age.

"We just drone sur­veyed the mud vol­cano. We should ad­vise peo­ple to not ven­ture on­to it at least. It looks like it may blow very soon. We are see­ing up to two feet of mo­tion on some frac­tures," he said.

In May, the geo­sci­en­tist re­port­ed in­ter­est­ing changes on the sur­face and sub­sur­face of the vol­canic vents which erupt­ed on Feb­ru­ary 22, 1997, dis­plac­ing 31 fam­i­lies and killing live­stock and birds.

Dur­ing the erup­tion, thick warm liq­uid mud spewed up to 200 feet in the air. The ex­panse of vol­canic dirt-cov­ered an area of 2.5 km.

Moo­nan said it was the first mud vol­cano erup­tion in the world which re­sult­ed in the dis­place­ment of lives and dam­age to in­fra­struc­ture.

Chair­man of the Cou­va/Tabaquite/Tal­paro Re­gion­al Cor­po­ra­tion Hen­ry Awong said in a re­cent in­ter­view that they are con­tin­u­ing to mon­i­tor the vol­cano and have put sys­tems in place in the event of an erup­tion. How­ev­er, he not­ed that the cor­po­ra­tion can­not re­spond di­rect­ly be­cause of lim­it­ed re­sources.

"We have oth­er re­spon­si­ble agen­cies which can as­sist in that op­er­a­tion, " Awong said.

In the past few months, the Pi­paro Com­mu­ni­ty Emer­gency Re­sponse Team has been get­ting res­i­dents pre­pared if the vol­cano blows.


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