The most surveilled place on the planet is not Ukraine or Taiwan. You are on a Canary Island with thousands of sensors pointing to a lethal threat

For almost three months, between September and December 2021, the island of La Palma experienced the eruption longest and most destructive of its recent history. It happened when the Tajogait volcanoand opened the earth in the Cumbre Vieja dorsal and forced the evacuation of thousands of people, buried entire neighborhoods under lava and irreversibly altered the landscape and life of the island, inaugurating a new stage in which the end of the fire did not mean the end of the volcano.

The town that did not stop breathing volcano. In Puerto Naos The lava never arrived, but the volcano did, seeping under streets, garages and foundations in the form of carbon dioxide, an invisible gas that for years kept the neighborhood evacuated and turned daily life into a permanent risk equation.

After the eruption of Tajogaite, the ground continued to exhale CO₂ of magmatic origin, reaching in some points extreme concentrationstypical of a lethal environment, forcing the closure of homes, businesses and beaches while residents learned that the danger no longer burned on the surface, but silently accumulated under their feet.

Thousands of sensors and an experiment. They counted this week in a BBC report that has approached the enclave that the response transformed Puerto Naos into the most guarded place in the world in terms of CO₂, with more than 1,300 sensors distributed throughout homes, streets, streetlights, beaches, garages and hotels, connected to a continuous monitoring system capable of detecting any spike in real time.

This deployment, driven by the CO₂ Alert projectallowed gas to stop being an unpredictable threat and become a measured, interpreted and managed phenomenon, making it possible the progressive return of the neighbors and the reopening of the urban center, always under the premise that normality here only exists as long as the data confirms that the air continues to be breathable.

Living with alarms. For years, life in Puerto Naos was reorganized around the sensorswith garages permanently open for ventilation, closed basements, cordoned off areas and neighbors who learned to live with warning beeps as part of the soundscape.

CO₂, denser than air, accumulated in the low points and it became visible like a diffuse waterfall in narrow courtyards, killing small animals along the way, corroding metals and remembering that the volcano was still active even though it was no longer expelling lava, molding not only the terrain but also psychology and decisions of those who refused to leave their home permanently.

Playa Chica, the pulse. In 2026 the problem is no longer general, but surgical: a small strip in Playa Chica and some specific garages where CO₂ continues to emerge straight from the underground through extremely porous terrain, one described by technicians as a “volcanic Gruyere cheese.”

All the effort is now concentrated there, not so much to bring the town back to life (because it has already returned) but to close the last point where the volcano still sets the pace, remembering along the way that the eruption did not end when the fire ceased, but when the subsoil stopped breathing its last breath.

Extract gas from the earth. The proven solution successfully by experts changes the traditional logic in these situations: instead of ventilating the buildings, the ground has been ventilated, capturing CO₂ underground and conveying it through pipes to controlled expulsion points near the sea, where the gas is quickly dispersed without danger.

Not only that. Tests have shown drastic reductionsgoing from concentrations close to half a million ppm to safe levels. In other words, it has been confirmed that the method works and that the pending challenge is not a conceptual hypothesis, but a technical one, a fine adjustment to avoid load losses and guarantee that the system can operate in a stable and permanent way.

Close the volcano. Puerto Naos it’s already openinhabited and functioning, but closing the volcano means turning this experiment into a complete a definitive infrastructureintegrate the extraction of CO₂ into the urban network and accept that the island will continue to be a “volcano” even when it seems calm.

Perhaps for this reason, no one expects inaugurations or epic endings to what happened, just a silent moment in which Playa Chica leaves to be an exception and the air will once again be just that, demonstrating that on the island of La Palma the volcanic forces not only have shaped the earthbut also the way in which a community has learned to live, monitor and resist over it.

Image | Eduardo RobainaHyperfinch

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