A Volcano At Our Door

Compared to Ticao, the island of my birth, Buhi, the hometown of my father, was the least visited site of my childhood. The times we visited the town corresponded with deaths of certain family members, on my father side.

The infrequency of the trip made this town one exotic site, and all the hills and dales and mountains were all spectacle to be taken in. One of these natural forms was a hill in front of my grandparents' home. By the time we had the periodic visits, the hill was about five meters from the door of the house. My father remembered the hill as towering right in front of their window, a grand mass of earth forming a bookend with Lake Buhi at the other side.

Years of visits and deaths saw the hill retreating further. Rains and wind were the minor cause and quarrying the major. There were years when the ridge of the hill held some birds. For many years, the hill also separated that part of Sta. Elena from the rest of the town. The last time I was there, the hill was gone. Those selling soil and rocks won over the Earth.

A geologist whose paper appears in Buhi Online Magazine has an even more exciting story about this hill. Chris Newhall of the University of Washington in Seattle, talks about the eruptions that created massive landslides around Mt. Asog.  Engaging is how he fuses folklore and science to explain the world around us. For the folklore, Hall uses the story collected by the late Alejo Arce, Sr. about how days of rains engulfed the whole town. A lake formed on top of it. There were also documents from travelers and historians pointing to a great landslide from the volcano.

How was the lake formed then? The geologist proposes that indeed there was a massive landslide. He describes the process of how huge, stadium to kilometer-size pieces of Mt. Asog had slid down to the foot of the mountain and all the way across the valley to the foot of Mt. Malinao. As these huge blocks were sliding down the side of the volcano at speeds between 50 and 100 km/hr, they were banging against each other and disintegrating. Then, out on the valley floor, the material came to rest as a big blanket of soil and rock that reaches from Tambo (north margin), past Sagrada Familia and Barit, and even past San Antonio, San Vicente, and Sta. Justina. The many small hills ("busay" and "apawan") are characteristic of such landslide deposits. The hills are the surviving parts that didn't get completely crushed, and in some quarries you can still see traces of the original layers of the volcano, even though the layers were partly broken apart as the blocks slid."