IAVCEI 2013 Scientific Assembly - July 20 - 24, Kagoshima, Japan
Forecasting Volcanic Activity - Reading and translating the messages of nature for society

3P2_4G-O10

Room A4

Date/Time: July 23 17:30-17:45

Increasing volcanic risk: the case of El Hierro, Canary Island, Spain.
Jose M. Marrero1 , Alicia Garcia2 , Angeles Llinares3 , Ramon Ortiz2 , Manuel Berrocoso4
1Self employed researcher, Spain, 2 Geosciences Institute IGEO, CSIC-UCM. J. Gutierrez Abascal, 2,28006 Madrid, Spain, 3 Department of Soils Science and Geology. University of La Laguna. Tenerife.
Canary Islands., Spain, 4 LAG-Faculty of Sciences, Cadiz University., Spain
E-mail: josemarllin@gmail.com

The El Hierro is the western and smallest island of the Canary archipelago (Spain). On July, 2011 an unrest began
in El Hierro, and on September 10th the first serratian submarine eruption took place near La Restinga, in thesouth of the island. After the eruption, some periods of increased volcanic activity have been detected and the gps
deformation values have not returned to the background level yet.
During the volcanic crisis of El Hierro several problems have been detected in the management process showing aclear degradation in the time response and increasing the economic crisis. Some problems are given by:
The initial strategy adopted by local authorities of the island was wrong. They considered the situation as a
catastrophic event before the eruptions started, so all the efforts were conducted to demand subsides.
When the emergency plans and laws were made, the money issue was avoid of them so actually, each institution
has to pay for its own bills. There is not a special money to manage long emergency operations such a volcaniccrises, because the volcanic crisis was always considered like a short-term natural phenomena, instead of as along-term natural phenomena.
At the beginning of the volcanic crisis, the response of Civil Protection was overreaction. A lot of people were sentfrom Tenerife and Gran Canaria to El Hierro and the cost of the operations was really high. However, during thethird unrest, one of the most important, the reaction was under-reaction.
In all emergencies Civil Protection and authorities always try to minimize the level of risk. A paternalism andover-protection are the usual behavior when they have to communicate to the population whatever kind of
information before the emergency starting.
From a global point, the scientific response was the worst of all statement, event worse than politicians ones. That
it is the main reason that explains the degradation in the response-time.
Some scientific groups have the same problem as Civil Protection and politicians, the paternalism, so they try tominimize the volcanic activity all the time. As a result, they lost credibility with the public. In many times, becauseof the bad quality of the information provided to the public, their professional profile was seriously damage.
But the real problem was the declaration of war between Spanish geologist and physics (geophysics, mathematics,etc). Along the history, the former has been the main actors, specially in Canary Island. But the problem wasthey were specialized in studying the past volcanic history using the petrology and other techniques but they neverworked on monitoring.
Another big problem is the lack of a real scientific committee. In fact the actual scientific committee is controlled byauthorities. They decide who is invited to the meeting and then what kind of information will be use and transmitted
to the population. In this situation, the consensus is really difficult.

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