Guatemalan woman searches for 50 relatives buried by volcanic ash

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Eufemia Garcia watched in horror as Guatemala’s Fuego volcano sent scalding ash and gas surging over her home a week ago, burying her children and grandson among 50 of her extended family. She has been searching for their remains ever since.

At least 110 people died after Fuego erupted last Sunday, pushing fast-moving currents of dust, lava and gas down the volcano’s slopes in its greatest eruption in four decades, and close to 200 more are believed buried beneath the waste.

Local residents and members of Mexico's Tlatelolco Moles rescue team (R) take part in the search for victims in the ash-covered village of San Miguel Los Lotes, June 10, 2018. /VCG Photo

Among them, Garcia believes, her nine siblings and their families as well as her mother, her own grown-up children and a grandson, making her family possibly the hardest hit in a disaster that officials admit was made worse by delays in official warnings.

The hamlet of San Miguel Los Lotes on the lush southern flank of the volcano was almost completely swallowed by several meters of ash, and formal search efforts have been suspended until the still-erupting volcano stabilizes.

Defying the suspension order, each morning, Garcia, 48, leaves the shelter she now sleeps in, grabs a pickaxe or a shovel and heads into the danger zone, where groups of volunteers and other families are digging through ash hardened by rain and sunshine to try and reach their homes below.

Another desperate survivor, Bryan Rivera, is searching for 13 missing relatives. All he has found so far in the dust and desolation is a guitar his 12-year-old sister had loved to play.

Volunteers are seen at the house of Bryan Rivera, who lost 13 members of his family during the eruption of the Fuego volcano, at San Miguel Los Lotes in Escuintla Guatemala June 10, 2018.

She ticks off a list of her missing, including her three children, her mother, her grandson, brothers, sisters, nephews, children of nephews and brothers-in-law, generations of relatives among the clutch of families that settled in Los Lotes in the 1970s.

The only survivors are Garcia and a brother who long ago moved away.

“I’ve looked here in the morgue and in another morgue, but there is no sign of them,” she said, standing in front of a row of coffins at a makeshift mortuary.

“My family is buried. All 50 of them.”

(Cover photo: Eufemia Garcia, 48, who lost 50 members of her family during the eruption of the Fuego volcano, search for her family in San Miguel Los Lotes Escuintla, June 9, 2018. /Reuters photo)

Source(s): Reuters