Out of the Ashes: After Mount Pinatube nearly buried it, Clark, Air Base bounced back

Airman, Nov, 2001 by Louis A. Arana-Barradas

Tech. Sgt. Raul Baon walked around with a big smile on his face. He couldn't help it. For one thing, he had less than a month left in the Air Force. After 21 years, he knew it was time to retire, leave his job at the photo lab at Clark Air Base, Philippines, and move on.

Plus, he was days away from moving into the new house he was building for his wife and three kids outside Clark, in Angeles City. He was proud of the hard work and sacrifices it took to build it. And since he'd been born in nearby Baguio, his family was not far away.

"I was so looking forward to just doing nothing for a while," he said.

But that wouldn't be the case. Even as he finalized his retirement, there were warning signs that things would go wrong. And they did. On June 12, 1991 - Philippines Independence Day - Mount Pinatubo, a volcano 15 miles from his house, erupted. It had been dormant for 500 years.

"There had been warnings it could erupt, but I was with the skeptics," he said. Just to be safe, he moved his family to his father-in-law's home. But there was a power outage in the town at that time, and no radio or television. With no news, he didn't know what was happening.

On June 15 the world caved in on his dreams, though he didn't know it. Pinatubo exploded with a power two times that of Mount St. Helens' 1980 eruption. The earth shook for eight hours.

It was the second largest volcanic eruption of the 20th century and blasted away a cubic mile off the mountaintop - 1,000 feet off the 5,725-foot peak. Blew out a crater one and one-half miles across and produced an ash cloud that rose 22 miles into the atmosphere and spread out for hundreds of miles. Ash fell as far away as the Indian Ocean, with ash clouds circling the globe.

From the crater, high-speed flows of molten rock, hot ash and gas raced toward Angeles City and Clark - and Baon's home. Luckily the flows stopped short of the base and town.

As if that wasn't enough, Typhoon Yunya - raging just off the northeast Philippines coast - turned inland. Its winds and torrential rains mixed with the ash and created a nightmare. It rained mud and turned the day into night on what locals called "Black Saturday,"

Baon learned what happened the next day. A newspaper picture showed Clark's gate and a lunar landscape behind it. He raced back and found that ash had wrecked his home.

"It was so dark I thought I'd died and gone to hell," he said.

It was hell at Clark and Angeles City. Thick, wet, gritty ash covered everything. Caved in anything on which it landed. Wrecked homes and businesses in Angeles City. At Clark, ash collapsed hangars, homes and the hospital roof. The ash turned lush green landscape gray.

The Air Force had seen the writing on the wall and evacuated some 18,000 people from the base before the big eruption. There was an exodus from Angeles City, too. Still, estimates put the death toll between 350 and 850 people. It displaced tens of thousands of people, including hundreds of American retirees. It affected more than a million people.

Pinatubo continued to erupt on and off through September 1991. Some 1,500 airmen, including Baon, stayed behind to dig Clark out from under the ash. They packed up what they could salvage. Then, in November, the Air Force lowered the Stars and Stripes and gave Clark -- lock, stock and barrel -- back to the Philippines. The next year, the Navy left Subic Bay, some 60 miles south of Clark.

Thus ended a more than 90-year era. And a new one started.

Baon shoveled 20 dump truck loads of ash from his home. He was devastated. Yet giving up wasn't an option, so he set his sights on the future.

"I had no choice but start over again," he said. "We were scared."

The same was true for Angeles City and Clark. Even as ash rained down on them, people swept it away. After the shock of the destruction wore off, people there also started anew.

"What else could we do? Where could we go?" said Juanito Luna, who lost his newly opened store in Angeles City. "We had to dig out from under the ash and rebuild our lives."

That wasn't easy. The Clark cleanup took several years. Today, 10 years after the eruption, there are few signs of he destruction. Things look much like they did before Pinatubo's wrath. There are some signs of ash, but it's overgrown with grass.

Clark is well-groomed and green again. But many former dormitories, work centers, homes and the hospital are nothing but shells. Stark reminders of the looting that took place after the disaster. The lush jungle has reclaimed some of the land.

The American pullout had a huge impact on the area. Some 20,000 base workers lost jobs. Gone was the more than S1 million a day the base poured into the Angeles City economy. That affected hundreds of thousands of Filipinos off base. Many businesses closed. Angeles City's famous nightlife, though not gone, became more subdued.

A new beginning

But Clark didn't just dry up and blow away. Though it and the local economy still aren't thriving, they're holding their own -- despite the Asian-wide economic crunch. Those who predicted the American pullout would cause a collapse of the Angeles City and Philippines economies were wrong, said Ramona Lopez-Ty, a former Philippines undersecretary of tourism.