‘There’s a volcano in our backyard’: life in the Icelandic town that keeps erupting

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Icelanders are famously hardy, but after a series of volcanic eruptions cracked open 20-metre-deep fissures in Grindavik, the fishing town near the famous Blue Lagoon, residents are asking if they’ll ever be allowed back home

fter four weeks of incessant seismic activity disrupting their sleep, a certain loopiness began to take hold of the longsuffering residents of Grindavík. By 10 November 2023, many people had left this small fishing town on the south-west coast of. Plenty more, though, went about their Friday night plans as usual.

Just over three months later, as we talk in their rented flat in Reykjavík, their fourth temporary home since that night, the memory is difficult to compute. So much so that we are all inexplicably laughing. “I don’t believe what we went through that day,” says Blomsterberg. Looking back now, she can’t help think what a close call it was. “This crack could have opened under the house.”

Sure enough, in March, a couple of weeks after our conversation, orange lava again shot out of the ground – this time from a fissure near Grindavík that was almost two miles long.With Grindavík’s 3,800 residents scattered around the local area and farther afield, the community is trying to hold on in whatever way it can.

The first time I spoke to Pálsdóttir, in November, she described the lion-like roar that had come from under the earth while she cooked dinner for one of her sons and his heavily pregnant wife on the day of the evacuation. The ground outside was moving and the bookcase shaking. As we wait to be approved at the checkpoint, removal trucks pass, going in the opposite direction. “There’s a lot of them now,” says Pálsdóttir.

Up the road, his daughter Nanna Grettisdóttir, 32, is trying to stay positive as she and her husband, Sindri Sigurðarson, 33, dismantle the home they lovingly built together. On 10 November, when everything started falling off the shelves in the local pharmacy where she worked, she had already been feeling seasick from living for days with constant vibrations. She went home and told Sigurðarson: “We need to go.

 

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