Etna erupting for six days, Catania airport closed until Ferragosto

The eruptive activity of Etna, which began on 7 August, continues to almost uninterruptedly block Catania’s Vincenzo Bellini airport, according to the DIRE agency. The latest bulletin from the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology confirms that the effusive activity from the eruptive vents remains well fed and that the ash cloud continues to be oriented towards the south, in the direction of the airport, as also reported by the AGI agency.

The airport management company, Sac, has ordered the extension of the closure of sector B3, with the suspension of arrivals and departures until 2am on 14 August. The toll from the previous days is already heavy: from 8 to 11 August the eruptions caused the cancellation or non-arrival of around 700 flights. In the detail of the most recent operations, fifty departures scheduled from Catania were moved to other airports — thirty-three to Palermo, fourteen to Trapani, three to Comiso — while for arrivals forty flights were diverted to Palermo, twelve to Trapani and five to Comiso.

On the forecasting front, the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology is unable to indicate when the eruption will end. Stefano Branca, director of the institute’s Volcanoes department, explained that monitoring systems make it possible to anticipate the start of an eruption but not to know its end.

The Minister for Civil Protection and Sea Policies, Nello Musumeci, commented on the situation with a remark that shifts attention from the volcano to the infrastructure: “It is not the volcano that is out of place, but the airport.”

The combination of an eruption that has been going on for six days with no signs of abating and an airport that lies beneath the usual trajectory of the ash cloud is producing, in the middle of the summer tourist season, a state of uncertainty that is renewed bulletin after bulletin: the closure has already been extended several times over the course of the week, and the latest extension now sets reopening at no earlier than 2am on 14 August.