Column: 30 years later, lessons of love and loss from Mount Pinatubo

Never underestimate the power of Nature nor the power of love.

That’s what I learned 30 years ago. On June 15, 1991, Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines unleashed its power, the biggest volcanic eruption in 100 years. It pushed the end of two huge overseas U.S. military bases and killed more than 840 people.

I was the Philippines bureau chief for Pacific Stars and Stripes. The thought often occurred to me that Pinatubo’s force made military weapons seem like toys. We were up against an unmatched force — 24 hours of murky darkness, orange flashes, powerful booms, trembling earth, rumbling mud flows slamming into homes as Pinatubo spewed.

Those were tough times for U.S. military communities there. The 1987 murders of two airmen and an Air Force retiree outside Clark Air Base by the Communist New People’s Army were the beginning of base lockdowns. At least 10 Americans died in what appeared to be anti-U.S. attacks. The Philippine Senate wanted U.S. bases out. There were coup attempts against President Cory Aquino.

One morning in April 1991, from my kitchen window I saw thin smoke curling above a mountain nine miles behind Clark. Pinatubo had been dormant 400-500 years. But the smoke increased, volcanologists arrived and we waited.

Forty-eight hours before the major eruption was imminent, Clark families packed their cars and evacuated to Naval Station Subic Bay, some leaving behind pets, thinking they would return shortly. They never did.

Filipinos pondered if they should move to shelters. Some lived along riverbeds where deadly pyroclastic flows and thick mud streams called lahars would roll down from the mountainside at high speeds, burying or incinerating anything in their path.

Pinatubo blew at the same time Typhoon Yunya came ashore, spreading ash beyond Clark to Subic, then pushing it back as thick murk that darkened the bases.

I was reporting outside Clark. As I started to head toward Manila to file my story, my driver Virgilio got out of the car. His family remained in their home by a river bed. We both turned around. With roads buried in ash, he navigated by instinct and fear to reach his barrio outside Clark.

The dark streets were eerily empty except for the murky shape of two men near our car. I felt sudden panic of being buried in ash and mud like people of Pompeii. Virgilio disappeared into the darkness, finally returning with his wife, children and pregnant sister. As we plowed slowly through the streets, we squeezed in young and elderly trying to escape.

That’s when a man pushed a crying baby through my jammed window into my arms and disappeared. I was shocked and unsure what to do, stunned by the fear and absolute love that could make someone drop a baby in a stranger’s lap in hopes of saving the child. Virgilio advised me to leave the baby with the elderly women in our backseat. I hoped the child would be reunited with family. I would never know.

That day of darkness was followed by many days covering in Pinatubo’s aftermath. When hazy sunlight returned, the vision seemed unreal: everything ash gray, trees bent to the ground, homes collapsed, people trudging toward ghost-like villages. I flew with volcanologists on Marine helicopters, landing on Pinatubo’s still steaming slopes and flying over the crater that eventually formed a lake — a tourist destination today.

The U.S. Air Force pulled out of Clark by year’s end. The Navy dug out Subic Bay but handed it back to the Philippines at the end of 1992.

I returned in the late 1990s, reporting for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. Villages remained buried in mud that would eventually become fertile farmland — Nature’s way.

As with Pinatubo, we always need to be watching, monitoring Earth’s signs — preparing, repairing, preventing suffering and destruction if we can — but knowing we can never ignore or overpower Nature, nor underestimate the power of love.

Susan Kreifels is media program manager at the East-West Center in Honolulu. She spent more than 20 years as a journalist based in Asia and the Pacific islands.