Perched (anbragt) on a hillside, the volcano observatory in Goma, capital of North Kivu province in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), commands a great view of nearby Nyiragongo mountain.
“Goma faces the highest risk any city in the world could face,” said Dario Tedesco, coordinator, project for the prevention and analysis of volcanic hazards in the DRC. The project is based at the Prevention and Analysis of Volcanic Hazard Unit of the UN Office for Project Services (UNOPS), near the observatory.
“We don’t just have volcanoes; we have gas emissions, acid rain, polluted water and endemic fluorosis,” he added. “People are asphyxiated (røgforgiftet) in this region every year, because there are fractures emitting carbon dioxide all over the rift.”
“It is difficult to estimate the number of people who are dying,” Ciraba Mateso, scientific secretary in the department of geophysics at the observatory.
“People who live around here know where the gas is, so they avoid it,” he added. “But there were more deaths when IDPs [internally displaced people] came to this region because they did not know where the gas is.”
Nyiragongo is one of the two active volcanoes in North Kivu. The other, Nyamulagira, erupted on 2 January, spewing lava 10km away and threatening the town of Sake and the Sake-Goma road. Sake is a major source of Goma’s fresh food.
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