LEGAZPI CITY—Mt. Mayon was quiet on Thursday after spitting ashes into the air three times on Wednesday that covered nine villages in Albay, but disaster officials have been preparing in case it erupts.
The volcano shot up a kilometer-high ash plume on Tuesday, prompting hundreds of nearby residents to evacuate in case it blows again.
Chief state volcanologist Renato Solidum said the alert level remained the same at Mayon, the country’s most active volcano, but that if magma continued to rise below the glowing crater, there could be another eruption within weeks.
In the town of Daraga on the southern slope of the mountain, Mayor Cicero Triunfante ordered the early evacuation of more than 300 residents in the village of Matnog on fears it might be in the path of superheated volcanic debris called pyrocastic flow.
Elsewhere, officials distributed wireless public address systems to more than 700 villages and town officials to help them make emergency evacuation announcements if necessary, said provincial disaster officer Cedric Daep.
He said mass evacuations would be ordered once the Philippine Institute of Volcanology raised the alert level to the next higher level. About 30,000 people were evacuated when Mayon last erupted in 2006.
Mayon’s most violent eruption, in 1814, killed more than 1,200 people and buried a town in mud. A 1993 eruption killed 79 people.
Typhoon-triggered mudslides near the mountain in 2006 buried entire villages, killing more than 1,000 people.
The Philippines is in the “Pacific Ring of Fire,” where volcanic activity and earthquakes are common. Mar S. Arguelles
