CONGO VOLCANO - 'Kills dozens' - latest photos added

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BBC

Congo volcano 'kills dozens'

Goma people were caught out by the fast-flowing lava

Dozens of people are thought to have been killed as a river of molten rock poured from a volcano in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

United Nations officials estimate that 45 people have died in the 24 hours since red hot lava began pouring out of Mount Nyiragongo down through the eastern town of Goma and on into Lake Kivu, which straddles the Rwandan border.

This is going to be a human catastrophe

UN official Hundreds of thousands of people in the Goma area - a part of the country controlled by rebel forces - were forced to flee into Rwanda to escape the lava flow.

"This is going to be a human catastrophe," said an official from a contingent of UN ceasefire observers deployed in the eastern Congolese city of more than half a million.

"We have to find them shelter, put them up in camps. There's no electricity, no running water."

Eyewitnesses said huge areas of the town were ablaze after the lava cut a swathe of destruction 50 metres (yards) wide through the town, destroying buildings and setting off explosions at power plants and fuel stores.

As dawn broke, rescuers dug out corpses from hardening lava that had engulfed entire houses.

Parts of the runway at Goma airport have disappeared beneath the smoking tide.

In the nearby town of Gisenyi, just across the border in Rwanda, displaced people lined the sides of the roads overnight, lying down to sleep anywhere they could find a patch of ground.

Military sources in Gisenyi said the number of people who had fled across the border into Rwanda could be as high as 300,000.

The World Food Programme says it is standing by to provide any emergency supplies required.

Looting

A Congolese officer told the BBC's Helen Vesperini that Congolese troops had started looting in Goma, but Rwandan soldiers were trying to restrain them.

"There are some buildings still standing, but there are certainly no people around," he said.

The flow of lava is now said to have stopped after reaching Lake Kivu on the border.

Clouds of white smoke are hanging over the area and continued earth tremors are keeping alive fears of another eruption.

Desolation

The 3,469-metre (11,380 foot) Nyiragongo volcano is one of eight scattered along the borders of Rwanda, Congo and Uganda, and is only about 10 kilometres (six miles) from Goma.

The region is dense with tropical forests and home to rare mountain gorillas, which inhabit the slopes of the mostly dormant volcanoes.

The eruption adds to the woes of Goma's large refugee population

Goma itself is a poor town sandwiched between Mount Nyiragongo and the shores of Lake Kivu, whose population has been swelled by thousands of civilians who have fled the region's many conflicts.

Lys Holdoway, a spokeswoman for the charity Oxfam which has a team in Goma, told BBC News Online on Thursday there were fears that debris from the volcano could cause the lake to turn acidic, endangering people as they cross it to escape.

On 10 January 1977, almost 2,000 people were killed in less than 30 minutes when Nyiragongo erupted, producing a 1,000-metre wide river of molten rock that reached the northern edge of Goma, incinerating everything in its path.

-- Anonymous, January 18, 2002

Answers

...but...but...there were "no injuries reported"...

-- Anonymous, January 18, 2002

I just can't fathom the devastation lava flows cause, I watched discovery or History Channel once about volcanoes in Hawaii,and a family watched their whole life go up.

-- Anonymous, January 18, 2002

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