What you need to know about the “explosion quake” –

Sicilian volcanoes under special surveillance. After the eruptive activity of Etna on Thursday evening, despite the fact that the emission of ash had already stopped on Friday morning, the Crisis Unit ordered the closure of the B2 and B3 airspace sectors of Catania airport for half the day. The runway was in fact unusable due to the copious fall of volcanic ash. Stromboli has also been in full activity since Thursday and, for this reason, the Minister for Civil Protection, Nello Musumeci, defines it as “under special surveillance”. So much so that on Friday morning he convened an Operations Committee chaired by the head of department Fabrizio Curcio. In the followingnoon, the Major Risks Commission was also heard, meeting for an overall assessment of the phenomenon. “I am in close contact with Mayor Riccardo Gullo who is verifying every punctual respect of the obligations foreseen by the Evacuation Plan in cases of emergency”, explains the minister.

Video on this topic

The red alert continues, therefore, as does the monitoring activity with the doubling of the number of firefighters on the island and patrol boats, ships and aircraft of the Coast Guard. Precisely with regard to the situation of Stromboli, currently the most delicate, the president of the Sicily Region, Renato Schifani, explains that he is following «the evolution of the situation in constant contact with the head of our Civil Protection, Salvo Cocina, who, in turn, is in contact with the national Civil Protection, the prefecture of Messina, the mayor of Lipari, the INGV and the other components of the Civil Protection system». The lava flow emitted from the mouth at 510 meters of Stromboli on the Sciara del fuoco, advances but is currently poorly fed and produces episodic rolling along the slope of material that detaches from the lava front. The analysis of the seismograms shows a very low level of activity and no evidence of an explosion quake.