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Landslides kill at least 24 as rains deluge Ecuador capitalEcuador - Thousands affected after floods in 4 provinces
A rain-weakened hillside collapsed in Ecuador's capital, sweeping over homes and a sports field and killing at least 24 people, city officials said Tuesday.
The Quito Security Department said at least 48 more people were injured, while eight houses collapsed and others were damaged when the hillside gave way late Monday. The authorities also reported 12 missing people.
Neighbors joined rescue workers in hunting through the ruins for survivors of the disaster that hit following nearly 24 hours of rainfall.
The storm was pounding outside when Imelda Pacheco said she felt her house move as if an earthquake had struck. Suddenly water and rocks began to pour in through doors and windows and she fled before the building was destroyed.
"I barely had time to grab the hand of my 4-year-old son and I ran to the stairs, to the terrace. Suddenly the walls in front and to the side disappeared," she told The Associated Press.
"We shouted to the neighbors on the first floor, but the water carried away the mother and daughter," she said, standing before the ruins of her home.
"I thought I was going to die with my son. I hugged him strongly and we shook, I think from the cold and the fear.. We barely survived," she added, breaking into tears.
Waves of mud, some 3 meters (10-feet) high, carried vehicles, motorcycles, trash bins and other debris under a heavy rain in the neighborhoods of La Gasca and La Comuna below the slopes of the Ruco Pinchincha mountain.
As the rescue began, police called for silence so cries of those trapped could be heard.
Quito Mayor Santiago Guarderas said the intense rains saturated the soils, setting off the landslide.
Smaller waves of muddy water continued pouring down the ravine Tuesday past weary neighbors trying to move stones, tree trunks and debris. An overturned taxi and other vehicles were partly buried in mud on a sports field.
"I've lost everything. I don't have anything. Everything is over," said 65-year-old Laura Quiñónez, who stood beside an ambulance as her neighbors tried to recover appliances from their destroyed homes.
Hunga-Tonga-Hunga-Hapai volcano, off the coast of the island kingdom of Tonga, awoke in December 2021 and erupted a month later. It generated earthquakes and tsunamis, which reached the coast of Peru on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. A huge cloud of ash has risen about twenty kilometers into the stratosphere.
The sound of the explosion was heard thousands of miles away in Canada's Yukon Territory, and infrasonor waves, which are below the threshold of human hearing, were picked up by instruments around the world.Additionally, the eruption caused massive vibrations in the atmosphere, called atmospheric gravitational waves, which were detected by NASA's Aquadella satellite a few hours later. The captured images show dozens of concentric circles, each of which constitutes a rapidly moving wave.Acoustic-gravitational waves (AGWs) are well known to atmospheric physicists, but they have never been detected so clearly in relation to volcanic eruptions. Generally, the most powerful AGWs are associated with earthquakes, tsunamis, and some man-made events, such as rocket launches or explosions. The smaller waves are caused by a variety of phenomena, such as atmospheric front movements, thunderstorms, geomagnetic storms, solar flares or even diurnal variations in the atmosphere.
The waves generated by the volcano's explosion have gone around the world several times and barometers in various parts of the planet have recorded several peaks (about 1.5 millibars) of pressure increase. In Seattle on the west coast of the United States, the peak was strong enough to dispel traditional local fog, reports the local office of the National Weather Service. In the United Kingdom, about 16,500 kilometers from the Tonga Islands, the first wave was recorded 14 hours after the eruption, which allowed us to determine its speed, which was approximately 330 meters per second. This roughly corresponds to the speed of sound. Subsequent waves were recorded by particularly sensitive barometers for another 24 hours.The initial wave was felt all over the world. All 53 infrasound monitoring stations of the Organization of the Treaty on the Total Ban of Nuclear Tests, located between 1,800 and 18,000 kilometers from the volcano, have picked it up.
For comparison purposes, consider that the atmospheric waves generated by the Chelyabinsk Meteor, which shook the Earth in 2013, were only picked up by half of the network.It is not simply a waveIn theory, a rapid rise of hot air and ash from an erupting volcano to the upper atmosphere could generate large-scale acoustic-gravitational waves. What the scientists observed after the Hunga-Tonga-Hunga-Hapai eruption, however, did not match the pattern. In the images, the oscillations looked like a mixture of waves of different types and sizes.The explosive speed of the eruption was also unusual. Normally, volcanoes produce lava and eject it for days, sometimes weeks. Here it all happened in minutes, the result of a single, violent impulse.It is surprising that 7 days after the eruption the acoustic-gravitational waves were still spreading, spinning around the globe for the tenth time. They have been detected in the infrared range by the geostationary satellites GOES-16 and GOES-17.