The airspace around Etna has been reopened and the Catania airport (Sicily, southern Italy) is operational again 24 hours after flights were suspended due to a new eruption of the volcano, releasing a shower of ash that has already has dispersed, authorities said.
The activity of Etna, the most active in Europe, forced to block both takeoffs and landings at the aerodrome on Monday: departures were suspended and arrivals diverted to the airports of Palermo, Trapani and Comiso. The first plane left, after the break, at 6:24 local time (4:24 GMT), with a slight delay, bound for Prague, while the first to land was a flight from Malta at 7:20 (5:20 GMT). .
Although initially the suspension on Monday was announced until 1:00 p.m. local time (11:00 GMT), then it had to be extended until 8:00 p.m. (6:00 p.m. GMT) and finally until 06:00 a.m. (04:00 GMT) today, in the middle of the tourist season.
The closure has caused chaos among users, who already suffered the closure of the aerodrome for three weeks last July as a result of a large fire that broke out in the main terminal of the building. It also coincides with the start of the holidays on August 15, a holiday known in Italy as “Ferragosto”, when the island of Sicily became one of the favorite destinations for Italians and foreigners, especially in summer.
The airport was closed due to ash that fell on the runways on Sunday night after the eruption of Mount Etna, which “turned into a lava fountain”, producing an eruptive cloud dispersed by southerly winds, in addition to a diversion of the lava flow to the south of the crater at an altitude of 2,800 meters, according to the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV). While last night “an impulsive explosive event could be observed in the southeast crater that produced a humble volcanic cloud quickly dispersed by the winds.”
The INGV explained that these eruptive episodes are a typical phenomenon of the recent activity of Etna and usually cover the Sicilian cities around it with ash. The last one had taken place in May. From 1977 to the present there have been hundreds of episodes similar to the current one, including the exceptional sequence of 66 between January and August 2000 and some 50 between 2011 and 2013.
