It is a night that the Gomatrachians will remember for a long time.
On May 22, around 6 p.m., the sky was set ablaze.
Carrying everything in its path, the lava rushes down the side of Mount Nyiragongo.
Panicked, tens of thousands of people run to seek refuge in neighboring Rwanda and in Sake, 30 kilometers to the west.
A night of horror that awakens the painful memories of the 2002 eruption, which claimed the lives of more than 3,000 people.
This time, a dozen villages were destroyed but the lava miraculously stopped at the city gates, a few hundred meters from the airport. For experts, however, the danger is far from over. All are categorical: the dreaded catastrophe will happen one day. Goma and its almost two million inhabitants are doomed.
In this report, our correspondents Clément Bonnerot and Juliette Dubois wanted to take the measure of the threat hanging over the city. A danger that does not come only from the volcano, one of the most dangerous on the planet, but also from Lake Kivu, which contains in its depths immense quantities of potentially dangerous gas if an eruption allows them to rise to the surface. At the Goma Volcanological Observatory (OVG), researchers are doing their utmost to predict and prevent risks. But the OVG is sorely lacking in resources, in addition to being undermined by suspicions of corruption and embezzlement.
If the disaster seems inevitable, the authorities are now planning to relocate part of the city of Goma.
A titanic project which has not yet been quantified.
It remains to convince the inhabitants to leave the lands they have occupied for centuries.
The city of Goma, at the foot of the Nyiragongo volcano © Clément Bonnerot / France24
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