Thousands flee as volcano erupts in Congo

A river of molten rock poured from a volcano in Congo today, a day after it erupted, killing dozens, swallowing buildings and forcing hundreds of thousands to flee the town of Goma.
U.N. officials estimated 45 people had died in the 24 hours since tongues of red hot lava began forking from Nyiragongo volcano through villages on its slopes, down through Goma itself and into Lake Kivu, which straddles the Rwandan border.
Gaping holes opened up in Goma, normally a settlement of more than 500,000 but now virtually a ghost town, and molten rock reduced roads and buildings to fiery ash.
"The smell of sulphur is everywhere, there are tremors every 10 minutes," said Desire Bukasa, a radio controller for a U.N. agency in Goma.
"I'm trying to work out how to evacuate the town. There are fissures opening up in the town which billow smoke. People are scared."
As fresh plumes of smoke billowed from the top of the 3,469-metre (11,380 foot) volcano, residents said the Rwandan town of Gisenyi across the border was also under threat with magma now only four km (two-and-a-half miles) away.
"People in Gisenyi have closed the shops, even the market. They are just afraid that the same situation could occur in Ginsenyi," said Aloys Bade Habinaza, a Rwandan journalist.
Military sources in Gisenyi said the number of people who had fled to Rwanda could be as high as 300,000.
"This is going to be a human catastrophe," said an official of a contingent of U.N. observers deployed in Goma as part of efforts to end a civil war.
"We have to find them shelter, put them up in camps. There's no electricity, no running water."
Overnight, the horizon was one long stretch of flames and smoke, marked from time to time by a flare in the sky as fuel stations exploded.
As dawn broke on a fire-scarred landscape draped with smoke and mist, rescuers recovered corpses from Goma where lava had engulfed whole houses.
Florian Westphal, a spokesman in Nairobi for the International Committee of the Red Cross, quoted colleagues in Goma as saying access was a big obstacle in relief efforts.
"Our warehouse and workshop garages with seven trucks have been destroyed. The airport is unusable and the port in Goma has been destroyed by an explosion," he said.
"The water company is no longer operational, two out of three pumping stations are out of order."
Streams of lava, in places two metres (six feet) high, continued to snake down Goma's streets on Friday, while parts of the runway at Goma airport had disappeared under the smoking tide.
The eruption is just the latest calamity to befall the lakeside port, which lies at a crossroads for rival armies, refugees and rebels on Congo's border with Rwanda.
The U.N. observers are in Goma and other towns as part of efforts to end a three-year-old war in which Rwanda and Uganda support rebels trying to topple the Kinshasa government, which in turn is backed by Angola, Zimbabwe and Namibia.
The wealthy district of Himbi appeared to have been spared. More hilly than the rest of Goma, its slopes served as a barrier to a lava flow at least two km (1.2 miles) wide.
Kerosene storage facilities at Goma's airport burned for a long time. The United Nations evacuated all its staff from a base near the airport on Thursday.
Nyiragongo volcano is one of eight volcanoes on the borders of Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda, a region dense with tropical forests and home to rare mountain gorillas.
Only two of the volcanoes are active, Nyamuragira, which erupted early last year causing no casualties, and Nyiragongo.
In 1977, scores were killed when a sea of lava burst through fissures in Nyiragongo's flanks at 60 km (40 miles) an hour, which experts said was the fastest lava flow on record.