Mt. Mayon displaced 86,000 people homeless

The volcano, located in the Albay province of central Philippines, first spewed ash on Saturday afternoon –  followed by a further five-minute eruption on Sunday morning.

And another eruption could be imminent according to the Philippines’ chief volcanologist Renato Solidum.

He warned on Monday of a possible hazardous eruption at Mount Mayon “within weeks or even within days”, as magma continued to pile up at the summit of the Southeast Asian country’s most active volcano.

And he said raising the alert to level 4, under which the danger zone would be expanded, depended on how Mayon behaved in the next few hours.

Mayon is in coconut-growing Albay province, about 210 miles south-east of Manila. With its near-perfect cone, it is popular with climbers and tourists but has erupted about 50 times in the last 500 years, sometimes violently.

In 2013, an ash eruption killed five climbers who had ventured near the summit despite warnings. Mayon’s first recorded eruption was in 1616 and the most destructive, in 1814, killed 1,200 people and buried the town of Cagsawa in volcanic mud.

The Philippines lies in the so-called Ring of Fire, a line of seismic faults surrounding the Pacific Ocean where earthquakes and volcanic activity are common.

In 1991, Mount Pinatubo in the northern Philippines exploded in one of the biggest volcanic eruptions of the 20th century, killing about 800 people.