“Amanda, the owner of what is known as the “crack house” during the eruption of the Tajogaite volcano, has said enough. Next to their house, the earth opened up and lava began to flow at the end of November 2021. The house, miraculously, was saved, but remained half buried by volcanic ash. Since then, it has become an emblematic house, the cover of newspapers and the center of attention of hikers and scientists. Today, tired of the Administrations not giving her a definitive solution to recover her property, she has decided to protest by covering the property with plastic,” reports the website of the Tierra Bonita Association in a statement.
“I’m tired of seeing my house in the media and on social networks as if it were a simple tourist attraction, when I have spent almost three years without anyone from any public organization explaining to me absolutely anything about what is going to happen to my house, that’s why I decided to cover it, because what happened to us is not fair,” Amanda confesses to ElValledeAridane.com (website of the Tierra Bonita association dedicated to informing people affected by this disaster through the book “Other stories of the volcano”). He made these statements this Friday, August 30, the day after a huge piece of plastic was placed to hide the part of the house that was still detached from the volcanic ash.
With this act of protest, Amanda, who has been living with her family for three years in a prefabricated modular house that was temporarily given to her by the Canary Islands government, wants to draw society’s attention to the “injustice” that, in her case, public opinion has committed itself to her in the Public Administration, since she suffers an uncertainty “as painful as the eruption itself.”
“The straw that broke the camel’s back,” says this palm tree born in Tazacorte, was “a recent guided tour of the area in which a group of hikers approached his house, since the guide told them to take the opportunity to take a photo of the famous crack house. Coincidentally, it was there,” explains the website. “I protested to the guide,” says Amanda, “although later I apologized, because I know that the house does not have image rights, but I decided to cover it, considering that everything is bureaucratic problems for me but facilities for other people to enjoy what was my home.
Amanda explains that, although “it may seem incredible, from the public administrations, the only person who contacted her did so just a week ago and was the mayor of El Paso, who confirmed to her that, in the latest decree published by the Canary Islands Government, “It is indicated that her house can be rebuilt and rehabilitated.”
“I don’t want it to be expropriated or left as is for tourist excursions, even if they pay me for it; what I want is to dig it up and rehabilitate it,” says Amanda, who complains that “she still has no access or authorization to carry out these works. It was only at the beginning of this year that he was allowed to visit what was his beloved home again.
“This family has not yet received any help from the Canary Islands government or the state for what happened to their house, because, as Amanda herself acknowledges, they were badly advised; “They have only received donations from individuals and companies.”
Amanda’s house was “an inheritance from her father-in-law and she was finishing extending and renovating it, after the family grew with the birth of another child after a complicated pregnancy, when the volcano erupted into their lives. “They mortgaged the property for this work, a loan that they had to pay with the last savings they had left.”
This victim of Tajogaite admits that “she will no longer be able to live in this building in the short or medium term, due to the instability of the land after the eruption and the lack of access, which constitutes a nuisance for her minor children.” But he wants to recover the use of this property.
“For six years, they had lived in the lower part, a former warehouse, and they were going to open the kitchen, bathroom and bedrooms in the upper part, but their hopes were cut short on that fateful September 19, 2021 after 3:10 p.m.,” the website says.
“Her dramatic experience of the start of the eruption is recounted by Amanda in the book ‘The Other Stories of the Volcano’, where she describes how the earthquakes were getting stronger that morning, but they believed the authorities had told them the volcano was going to move further south.”
“But it was not like that, unexpectedly for them, the eruption started a few hundred meters from their home, without the authorities evacuating them. He tells it like this in the charity book published by I Love The World: “An explosion, smoke, dirt in the air and flames coming out of the mountain. We quickly grabbed the children, got in the car and fled, leaving the keys at the door. We felt that there was nothing more to do, that we had already lost everything. No one can imagine the sacrifice that this represented for us and my in-laws, because they helped us a lot with the house.
In the following weeks, he also suffered “from the uncertainty of not having official information on the state of the house. The first news he had was thanks to the drone images that the production company I Love The World selflessly provided to those affected. In November, when a new eruptive mouth opened in front of his house, he turned to that company again, also in the absence of official information, and found that his house had been left a few meters from the fissure from which new lava was gushing out.”
“For three years, many affected individuals and groups have been complaining about the management of this emergency, the worst disaster in Europe for almost a century, due to the lack of information, the uncertainty about the future of their properties, the lack of participation of victims in decisions that are already affecting the bureaucratic slowness of reconstruction,” he concludes.
