Mount Pinatubo

Volcano, western Luzon, Philippines. Located about 55 mi (90 km) northwest of Manila, it rose to a height of about 4,800 ft (1,460 m) before its eruption in 1991 (for the first time in 600 years). Its explosions produced a column of smoke and ash more than 19 mi (30 km) high and left some 100,000 people homeless and 300 dead. The ashfalls forced the evacuation and eventual closing of a nearby U.S. Air Force base. The eruption was one of the largest of the 20th century.

Mount Pinatubo is an active stratovolcano located on the island of Luzon in the Philippines, at the intersection of the borders of the provinces of Zambales, Tarlac, and Pampanga. Ancestral Pinatubo was a stratovolcano made of andesite and dacite. Before 1991, the mountain was inconspicuous and heavily eroded. It was covered in dense forest which supported a population of several thousand indigenous people, the Aeta, who had fled to the mountains from the lowlands when the Spanish conquered the Philippines in 1565.

The volcano's eruption in June 1991, more than 490 years after the last known eruptive activity,[1] produced the second largest[2] terrestrial eruption of the 20th century. Successful predictions of the onset of the climactic eruption led to the evacuation of tens of thousands of people from the surrounding areas, saving many lives, but as the surrounding areas were severely damaged by pyroclastic flows, ash deposits, and later, lahars caused by rainwater remobilising earlier volcanic deposits, thousands of houses were destroyed.