page_title: Rabaul
section_title: 1994 eruption
hierarchical_section_title: Rabaul / History / 1994 eruption
caption_attribution_description: Aftermath of Mount Vulcan eruption, Rabaul, PNG, 1994.
context_page_description: Rabaul is a township in East New Britain province, on the island of New Britain, in the country of Papua New Guinea. It lies about 600 kilometres to the east of the island of New Guinea. Rabaul was the provincial capital and most important settlement in the province until it was destroyed in 1994 by falling ash from a volcanic eruption in its harbor.
  During the eruption ash was sent thousands of metres into the air, and the subsequent rain of ash caused 80% of the buildings in Rabaul to collapse. After the eruption the capital was moved to Kokopo, about 20 kilometres away. Rabaul is continually threatened by volcanic activity because it is on the edge of the Rabaul caldera, a flooded caldera of a large pyroclastic shield.
  Rabaul was planned and built around the harbor area known as Simpsonhafen during the German New Guinea administration which controlled the region between 1884 and formally through 1919. From 1910 Rabaul was the headquarters of German New Guinea until it was captured by the British Empire during the early days of World War I. It became the capital of the Australian mandated Territory of New Guinea until 1937, when it was first destroyed by a volcano.
context_section_description: In 1983 and 1984 the town was ready for evacuation when the volcanoes started to heat up. Nothing happened until 19 September 1994, when again Tavurvur and Vulcan erupted, destroying the airport and covering most of the town with heavy ashfall. There were only 19 hours of warning, but the city and most nearby villages were evacuated before the eruption. Five people were killed—one of them by lightning from the eruptive column. The planning and evacuation drills helped keep the death toll low. Most of the buildings in the south-eastern half of Rabaul collapsed due to the weight of ash on their roofs.
  The last eruption and continuing low and modest levels of activity, prompted moving the provincial capital to Kokopo, the former German Herbertshöhe. Nonetheless, Rabaul is slowly rebuilding in the danger zone. Vulcan has remained quiet since 1994, but eruptions from Tavurvur, small and large, occur intermittently, with the most recent of note being on 29 August 2014. A government vulcanological observatory was established on the northern ridge of Rabaul caldera in the 1950s. A team maintains its crucial watch over the town and the volcanoes today. It also has responsibility for monitoring other volcanoes on New Britain and nearby islands.
caption: Aftermath of the 1994 volcanic eruption in Rabaul
exif: {"Image ImageDescription": "Aftermath of volcano eruption, Rabaul, PNG, 2009. Photo: AusAID", "Image ExifOffset": "2186", "Image XPTitle": "[65, 0, 102, 0, 116, 0, 101, 0, 114, 0, 109, 0, 97, 0, 116, 0, 104, 0, 32, 0, ... ]", "Image Padding": "[]", "EXIF Padding": "[]"}