Volcano menaces with fire and water

The crater-lake of Mount Pinatubo

MANILA, Philippines -- Ten years after raining fire in a huge eruption, the crater of Mount Pinatubo is filling with water that threatens to unleash mass floods and inundate villages.

Philippine officials say the trapped rainwater was rising to dangerous levels and they would have to dig a canal on the slopes to avert a disaster.

Local residents, using picks, shovels and jack hammers, will start the digging work in two weeks to allow the waters to flow down to a river and safely away from thousands of villagers living near the volcano, police commander Colonel Reynaldo Berroya told Reuters.

"This is the first time we are intervening with nature and hopefully the assessments are correct," Berroya said on local radio.

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Up to 20 million cubic meters of water is expected to be released in the breaching operation, Zambales provincial governor Vicente Magsaysay told Manila's ANC television.

More than 800 people were killed when Pinatubo, 110 km (70 miles) northwest of Manila, erupted in 1991.

Last month, geologists commissioned by the British emergency agency Oxfam warned Pinatubo's crater wall was in danger of collapsing and that an avalanche of water and debris could engulf the town of Botolan and its 46,000 inhabitants.

The geologists said the avalanche could result in a catastrophe similar to the one caused by the crater-lake breached on the Casita volcano in Nicaragua in 1998 that buried two villages and killed about 2,000 people.

An aerial view of Mount Pinatubo after it erupted in 1991.

Berroya said the gap between the surface of the crater-lake water and the brim of Pinatubo volcano had narrowed sharply to five meters (16 feet) from 6.5 meters (21 feet) in recent weeks.

"The waters are rising fast at a rate of more or less one meter a month and could rise faster now that the rains have come," he said.

Mount Pinatubo is one of the Philippines' two most closely watched volcanoes.

The other monitored volcano, Mt. Mayon, 330 km (200 miles) southeast of Manila, has been erupting for nearly two weeks, spewing lava and molten rocks, but there have been no casualties.