Philippines’ Mount Kanlaon erupts sending hundreds to shelters, as homes blanketed in ash

A plume of hot ash and gases up to three kilometres (1.8 miles) high forced residents to seek shelter after a volcano in the Philippines erupted on Monday.

There were no immediate reports of casualties in the latest explosion of Mount Kanlaon, on central Negros Island, but authorities shut schools and imposed a nighttime curfew after several villages were hit by ashfalls that clouded the visibility of motorists and sparked health concerns.

“It sounded like a cannon,” Mayor Jose Chubasco Cardenas of Canlaon city, which lies southeast of the volcano, told Associated Press by telephone. “There have been quiet eruptions before, but this was one very loud.”

Disaster-response officials raised the danger level around Kanlaon due to “a greater risk of hazardous volcanic activity” and ordered villagers within a six-kilometre (3.7-mile) radius of the crater to be evacuated.

About 100 people had fled to emergency shelters in Canlaon by nightfall after the midafternoon volcanic eruption, Cardenas said. The number of displaced people could reach more than 2,000 due to stronger prospects of more eruption, he added.

The Philippines’ Institute of Volcanology and Seismology said the eruption had caused a pyroclastic density current – a superhot stream of ash, debris and rocks that can incinerate anything in its path.