Saturday, May 29, 2010

VOLCANO ERUPTION! Yes we are all safe and sound after the eruption. On thursday night I thought I heard it raining so I went out on the porch and a Guatemalan said no it's not raining. Well I thought this guy was losing it because it sounded like rain or sleet and it was 70 degrees so it definitly was not sleet. So I put my flip-flops on and went out in the grass and he was right it wasn't raining but it was black sand. It didn't take us long to realize what was going on and were confused because we live 16 miles as the crow flies from the Volcano. The black sand was exactly that black sand, when I picked up a handful and rubbed it around my hands didn't get black. On friday morning we got up to check out the damage. After taking some pictures I decided to start cleaning up here at school. Soon another american started to help . In the pictures the one with the guy shoveling off the red patio is at school were we are curently staying and the picture with the red car in the carport is at our house. After we got done cleaning up the patio and parking area we packed up and headed for our house via the long way to get a closer look at the damage. The other pictures are from the bottom of the hill at Los Humitos and for those of you who don't know where this is it's a road we use fairly often with work teams. They got up to 2 inches of this stuff but it wasn't just sand , they also got fine stone and up to 1 inch stones.The sand and stones stop coming down thursday night and then it started to rain & rain & rain.... Almost everywere the rain was pretty clean but at Los Humitos they got a pretty heavy mud rain as you can see in the pictures. As far as I know only 1 person died from rocks hitting him.Well this is saturday night and it is still raining. We are getting a tropical storm right now that is supposed to dump 12-30 inches of rain. All in all it's pretty interesting right now because the last time this volcano erupted with this much force was 12 years ago even though it erupts pretty often. Oh yea did I forget to mention we had hiked up Pacaya about three weeks ago.