REYKJAVIK: The ongoing volcanic eruption in southwest Iceland reached the port of Grindavik on Sunday where two houses caught on fire, according to surveillance footage broadcast by public television.

The few dozen residents who had returned to Grindavik after an earlier eruption were urgently evacuated overnight Saturday, hours before the latest eruption started.Live video showed fountains of molten rock and smoke spewing from fissures in the ground across a wide area very close to the town of Grindavik.

“No lives are in danger, although infrastructure may be under threat,” Iceland’s President Gudni Johannesson said on social media site X, adding there had been no interruptions to flights.

The eruption began early on Sunday north of the town, which just hours before had been evacuated for the second time since November over fears that an outbreak was imminent amid a swarm of seismic activity, authorities said.

Authorities built barriers of earth and rock in recent weeks to try to prevent lava from reaching Grindavik, some 40km southwest of the capital Reykjavik, but the latest eruption appeared to have penetrated the town’s defences.

“According to the first images from the Coast Guard’s surveillance flig­ht, a crack has opened on both sides of the defences that have begun to be built north of Grindavk,” the Icelandic Meteorological Office IMO said.

Lava was flowing towards the town and had come within an estimated 450 metres (1,500 feet), the IMO said. The nearby geothermal spa Blue Lagoon had closed on Sunday, it said on its website. Based on flow models, it could take the lava a few hours to reach Grindavik if it continued to flow towards the town, an IMO spokesperson told public broadcaster RUV.

“It is of course frightening to see how close this is to the town,” Prime Minister Katrin Jakobsdottir told daily Morgunbladid.

Published in Dawn, January 15th, 2024