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 When
devastating earthquakes hit her native El Salvador, Ohio University
researcher Dina Lopez answered a government call to help monitor
volcanic activity. Her swift response was rooted in scientific curiosity,
but even more, in a growing concern for her family living there.
Dina
Lopez was 14 when she first felt San Salvador’s terrible tremble.
Waking abruptly in the middle of the night to the sound of shattering
glass, she instinctively took refuge under her bed covers.
The Central American city shifted its massive weight again 21 years
later as Lopez stood in a geothermal energy laboratory where she
worked as a scientist. She braced herself against a countertop as
the seismic wave tore through the one-story building.
“It was about time
for us to have another one,” the Ohio University associate
professor of geological sciences says solemnly of the 1986 earthquake.
“Studies forecast that every 15 years there will be a strong
earthquake in San Salvador. The epicenters are right below the city.
That’s why it’s called the Hammock Valley — the earth
below is always swinging.”
So when her Saturday chores in Athens were interrupted by a Jan.
13 phone call from her brother about El Salvador’s latest earthquake
— the worst in the nation’s history — Lopez was overwhelmed
with concern for her family living there but hardly surprised by
the quake’s timing. She and her husband,
Moris, have nearly 100 relatives in the country. None were injured,
only shaken up by the disaster.
“Most of all, I wanted to be there,” Lopez says, recalling
CNN’s unsettling images of victims being pulled from the rubble.
“It sounds crazy, but I wanted to be there with them.”
She was on a plane to
El Salvador just six days later. Although Lopez was anxious to see
her relatives, her mission was official business. The Salvadoran
government had requested her help in monitoring volcanic activity
in the disaster’s wake. The Massachusetts-sized nation of 6
million, located on numerous faults, is dotted with volcanoes that
officials worried might erupt as a result of the quake.
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| San
Miguel volcano is among those Dina Lopez is helping to monitor
in El Salvador. Researchers worry the volcanoes might erupt
as a result of the recent seismic activity. |
Lopez, whose work as
a hydrogeochemist has involved extensive studies of volcanoes, spent
a week collecting soil gas samples, measuring carbon dioxide levels
in the soil and taking various readings of water-filled calderas,
large land depressions formed by the collapse of a volcano.
The readings were normal,
indicating peace among the volcanic peaks — at least for the
moment.
“We still need to keep observing these areas,” she says.
“With all the activity lately, there’s still a chance
a volcano could reactivate.”
The trip also gave Lopez a look at the extensive devastation caused
by the 7.6-magnitude quake that, in just 36 seconds, killed more
than 800 people, destroyed 278,000 homes and left nearly a million
people homeless. Because the quake was deep, Lopez says, damage
was widespread. Tremors were felt in neighboring Guatemala and Honduras.
“It was very difficult to see all the destruction,” she
says. “Some towns were completely destroyed. You would not
believe the extent of the landslides caused by the earthquake. The
cars parked in the streets — they looked like sheets of paper
that had been crumpled up.”
Salvadorans have had little relief since then. Several more earthquakes,
ranging in magnitude from 3.8 to 6.6, and thousands of aftershocks
have rattled the country, killing hundreds more. With the government
estimating damage at $2 billion, Lopez worries about El Salvador’s
recovery, especially since the rainy season begins late this spring.
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| More
than 800 Salvadorans were killed and nearly a million left homeless
when a massive earthquake rattled the Central American country
earlier this year. |
“The need is so
great and the damage is so horrible,” she says. “The country
is getting some international aid, but it’s not enough. The
people are homeless and will end up building cardboard houses if
they don’t have resources. Now debris has collected in the
waterways. If we don’t do something to prevent flooding and
landslides, more people will die.”
Lopez returned to El Salvador in March to continue her volcano watch
and help researchers examine how the country prepares for and handles
natural disasters, including such storms as Hurricane Mitch, which
pummeled the nation in 1998. These recent cataclysms, along with
a 12-year civil war that dominated the 1980s, have left the country
economically strapped and with limited technology to monitor seismic
and weather patterns. Lopez, who plans to return this summer, is
working with researchers from Spain to acquire seismology equipment
to be placed in volcanoes near San Salvador.
Because Lopez isn’t a volcanologist in a strict sense —
she studies volcanic hydrothermal systems such as springs and geysers
— her Ohio University research is conducted far from volcanoes.
In Athens, she is studying ways to ease acid mine drainage in area
creeks. Minerals produced by acid mine drainage are similar to those
found in acid sulfate waters of volcanoes. She also is examining
Ohio lakes affected by acid mine drainage and El Salvador’s
polluted volcanic calderas.
But having grown up and earned her undergraduate degree in El Salvador,
Lopez understands her people’s plight and wants to use her
expertise, drawn from geology and physics graduate programs at Louisiana
State and Virginia Tech, to help her native country.
Even in Athens, Lopez feels San Salvador’s terrible tremble.
“They sounded so scared,” she says of relatives who called
about the continuing aftershocks. “Their voices were full of
panic. I decided then that I would have to do all I could to help
them prepare for any future eruption.”
Melissa Rake is assistant editor of Ohio Today.
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