2024-07-05 10:11:00
Sicily’s Catania airport announced it would be closed on Friday due to the eruption of Mount Etna, Europe’s largest active volcano. The end of his ashes up in the airspace.
‘The runway is unusable due to significant volcanic ash fall. Therefore, arrivals and departures are suspended,’ the airport management company announced in a press release. Flights should resume at 3.00 pm local time, she estimated.
Peaking at 3,324 meters, Etna has erupted several times over the past 500,000 years. For the past few days, its central crater has been spewing lava flows and ash clouds affecting Catania airport, which lies below.
The ash plumes reached a height of 4.5 kilometers, the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV) said Thursday on X (ex-Twitter). Images posted on social media on Friday showed streets in central Catania covered in thick layers of black ash, causing traffic delays.
The Italian authorities have also issued a red alert for another volcano, Stromboli, which dominates an island of the same name in the Aeolian archipelago (north of Sicily), whose eruption caused significant clouds of ash.
This volcano, whose summit rises to 920 meters and the base 2000 meters below the sea, is one of the few in the world that shows almost continuous activity, according to the INGV. Millions of passengers pass through Catania International Airport every year, which serves eastern Sicily, one of Italy’s most popular tourist destinations.
/ATS
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