On May 22, 2021, a fissure opened on the southern flank of Nyiragongo, about ten kilometers north of Goma. Lava advanced towards the city, the capital of the North Kivu province in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The eruption caught the population by surprise in the early evening, with no official alert having been issued. In the following days, repeated earthquakes exacerbated the panic and complicated the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people.
Nyiragongo Lateral Fissure: A Difficult Mechanism to Anticipate
Most volcanic monitoring scenarios rely on detecting a rise of magma through the central conduit beneath the summit crater. The 2021 eruption did not follow this pattern. Lava emerged from a fissure on the southern flank of the volcano, a lateral mechanism that the existing instruments failed to detect in time.
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A study published in Nature by an international team of researchers concluded that this eruption could not have been predicted with the available data. The Goma Volcanological Observatory (OVG), which normally monitors Nyiragongo, had been without internet access for several months. Without real-time data transmission, analyzing even weak precursor signals became impossible.
This case raises a question that goes beyond Nyiragongo alone: when an active volcano can produce a eruption without clear precursor signals, civil preparedness becomes the last safety net. To understand in detail the eruption of the Nyiragongo volcano in Congo, one must look beyond geology and examine what malfunctioned in the human chain.
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Alert System in Goma: The Failures of May 2021
The lack of alert is not just a technical problem. It results from an accumulation of failures that, taken separately, seemed manageable, but when combined left the population without reliable information at the critical moment.
- The OVG had been operating without internet connection for about seven months before the eruption, preventing it from transmitting and analyzing seismic data in real-time.
- Official communication was described as chaotic by several observers: evacuation instructions arrived late, and the Congolese national radio and television (RTNC) did not relay the information in the first hours.
- An audit of the monitoring system, announced after the previous eruption in 2002, had never been completed according to local sources.
- Residents largely initiated their own evacuation, causing crowd movements towards the Rwandan border and the towns of Sake and Bukavu, with fatal accidents related to the panic.
According to a provisional report from the Congolese government, lava affected at least 17 villages. The Red Cross of the DRC reported the destruction of approximately 2,400 residential buildings and the death of 32 people. About 450,000 people were evacuated in the days following the eruption.
Persistent Seismicity After the Lava Flow
The eruption itself lasted only a few hours, but the subsequent seismic crisis prolonged the emergency for several days. Earthquakes reaching a magnitude of 5.1 were recorded, some originating from the Kivu Lake area. The government then announced that seismicity and ground deformation data indicated the presence of magma beneath the urban area of Goma, maintaining a high risk of a new eruption.
Fissures appeared in several neighborhoods of the city, notably in Majengo, Mabanga North and South, Bujovu, and Murara. This sequence made the decision to return particularly delicate for displaced families.
Humanitarian Crisis After the Nyiragongo Eruption: Beyond Immediate Damage
Two months after the eruption, the situation remained critical for thousands of families. Lava flows had devastated agricultural fields and homes in the city of Goma and the Nyiragongo territory. Most displaced people returned to their neighborhoods, but many still lived in improvised sites or with host families.
UNICEF documented the destruction of more than 3,500 houses, 7 schools, and 4 health centers. Nearly 200,000 people were deprived of access to drinking water after the destruction of the city’s main reservoir. Approximately 234,000 people were displaced in the days following the eruption, mainly towards Sake, Minova, and Rutshuru.
Prolonged Vulnerability of Displaced Populations
Field returns from the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) in the Mujoga and Mugerwa areas describe persistent precarious conditions. Several destroyed schools had not been rebuilt, leaving teachers without income and children without access to education. Ongoing needs included shelter, water, health, and protection for children separated from their families.
This prolonged humanitarian crisis illustrates a recurring pattern: the return of displaced people does not mean the end of vulnerability. Without rebuilt basic infrastructure, returning families live in conditions that are sometimes worse than before the eruption, on land weakened by fissures and residual seismicity.
Preparing Goma for the Next Eruption of Nyiragongo
The reconstitution of the lava lake at the summit of Nyiragongo or a return to seemingly calm activity does not eliminate the risk of a new lateral fissure. Recent volcanological sources emphasize that the “return to normal” remains a misleading notion for this type of volcano.
The central problem is no longer the geological understanding of Nyiragongo, which is relatively well documented. It is the operational capacity to transform scientific data into concrete action on the ground: alert transmission, information dissemination, orderly evacuation, and long-term care for the displaced.
Restoring continuous monitoring of the OVG, with a reliable connection and regularly tested communication protocols, is the minimum requirement. The available data do not allow for concluding that these gaps have been filled since 2021. The city of Goma continues to grow at the foot of a volcano that has demonstrated its ability to erupt without exploitable warning, in a region of North Kivu already marked by decades of conflict and instability.