Iceland volcano: First came the floods, then the smell of rotten eggs

Locals describe volcano's eruption, leaving them evacuated and homeless
New volcanic ash cloud threatens to close British airspace again
Smoke and ash billows from a volcano in Eyjafjallajokull, Iceland
Smoke and ash billows from a volcano in Eyjafjallajokull, Iceland Photograph: Ingolfur Juliusson/Reuters

A phonecall in the dead of night was the first inkling the people living on the Thorvaldseyri farm had that Iceland's glacier-covered Eyjafjallajokull volcano was about to erupt.




"I had a bag ready because of the recent earthquakes in the area and grabbed a few things we might need for a couple of days and we went as quickly as possible," Andrews said from a safe house yesterday. "It is a huge shock to us all and it doesn't seem real at all."




It was such an astonishing sight, her father-in-law, Olafur Eggertson, took a picture of the eruption dwarfing the family's red-roofed farm.

Such was its force that three large holes visible on the glacier turned into a continuous rift running for about a mile and a half through the ice, said Rognvaldur Olafsson, who led the rescue effort for the civil defence authority.

Mercifully, the wind, blowing east, carried the plume of ash away from Reyjkavik, the capital, but across farmland, where it turned day into night as it fell and blotted out the sun. This led to speculation, later played down by experts, that the eruption may have the potential to slow global warming.


"The ash is causing huge disruption to the east of the glacier," Urður Gunnarsdóttir, a press spokeswoman for the foreign ministry, said at lunchtime yesterday. "You can't see anywhere and you can't drive because it is just black, like night."

Erlundur Bjornsson, a sheep farmer 95km (59 miles) east of the volcano, told the Guardian that ash had fallen heavily and it had been "almost totally dark".

"The plume came over my farm a couple of hours ago, but the wind direction has changed slightly and it is very fine here, a grey dust that gets in your eyes," he said. "It covers everything and there is a smell of sulphur in the air."


Shetland residents said the sulphurous smell of rotten eggs was strong by early yesterday morning.

"I noticed a smell in the house and wondered what it was," said Joanne Jamieson, from Sandwick on the southern tip of Mainland, the biggest island in Shetland. "It was coming from the outside, so I opened the door. It was very strong, and I initially thought it was rotting seaweed. I looked down to the beach and actually looked up to see if the sky was falling in."

Jane Matthews, her neighbour, said: "It smelt strongly like rotten eggs, but I didn't put two and two together realising it was coming from Iceland," Initially, I thought maybe it's something to do with my young daughter, or the animals in the field."


Aberdeen airport's duty manager was alerted by Nats, the air navigation service, that its local north-east airspace would be closed. At 1am on Thursday, the closure order was confirmed, affecting more than 100 commercial flights during the day. By 3am, the whole of Scotland became a no- fly zone. Before dawn the Scottish government's civil emergency resilience unit was activated.

By 9.30am air traffic control charts showed that planes were only taking off and landing across southern England. Anywhere north of that, the skies were empty. At 11am Gatwick's busy tarmac apron was at a standstill as airport managers prepared for a national shutdown of British airspace, which began at noon.

Russell Craig, head of communications at Manchester airport, where 45,000 passengers were affected and hundreds of flights were cancelled, said: "It is difficult for passengers to understand because the planes are there and the sky is blue, but it would be dangerous to fly a plane in these conditions."

Small aircraft were able to take off, said Craig, and the airport remained open in case a long-haul plane needed to execute an emergency landing.

By 2.30pm the vast cloud had reached across England, and fears that its fine particles could cause passenger jets to crash caused an unprecedented shutdown of all of Britain's airports. No flights were to be allowed in or out until 7am this morning at the earliest.

This article was amended on 27 April 2010. The original referred to the sulphuric smell of rotten eggs . This has been corrected.