Johannes Fagner is fishing. He enjoys the idyll, then he returns to a small village on the west coast of the Canary Island of La Palma. Then the inferno breaks loose. It starts to boom in a deafening manner. Fagner cannot see what is going on, only suspects that something will happen, something extraordinary. The 51-year-old, who emigrated from Oberhaching to La Palma three years ago, immediately jumps into his car and drives to his house in Todoque in the province of Santa Cruz, where you can hardly stand the noise: “It was so brutally loud , it crashed unbelievably, and then I saw the rising lava fountain nearby, “he said on the phone, describing the worst minutes of his life: the unnatural darkness, the rumbling of the earth, the noise:” I was terrified . “
He frantically packs up the most important documents, passport, bank card, driver’s license, and rescues his three kittens, who are just over eight weeks old – the mother animal died shortly after they were born because it had eaten laid out rat poison. Fagner even manages to mount the trailer on his car, he takes a picture from the wall and throws a few books about bees on the loading area, then nothing can stop him.
“If I were in the situation again now, I would probably act differently and take other things with me than the junk,” he says. But this fear that a lava rain would set in or rocks would fall was simply too great. And so he drove off and left practically all of his belongings behind: personal items, clothing, also his beekeeping equipment and all the tools to prepare the honey and make wax. And of course his bee colonies; Fagner had recently started to breed queens. All in all, his utensils for beekeeping and honey processing alone were worth a good 50,000 euros.
The eruption of the volcano Cumbre Vieja on La Palma.
(Photo: Getty Images)
It was September 19th when the Cumbre Vieja volcano erupted, and it has still not stopped raging and upsetting the lives of the islanders. In the meantime, around 7,000 Palmeiros have had to leave their homes, more than 1,800 buildings have been destroyed, and almost every family is directly or indirectly affected by the disaster. The lava, which is more than 1000 degrees Celsius, affected an area of 680 hectares, which corresponds to around 950 football fields.
When Johannes Fagner received a photo from a neighbor the day after the outbreak, it became clear how dramatic the effects are: “The lava where my house stood was seven meters high, the police had cordoned everything off. ” In the meantime, the hot rock mass has built up over 20 meters high at this point. “Everything is completely gone, the cement gets so hot that everything in the house, regardless of whether it is wood or plastic, simply burns up.”
Fagner on his beehive in Oberhaching before he emigrated.
(Photo: Claus Schunk)
For Fagner, the consequences of the accident are fatal: his house had no insurance cover because the secretary of the broker from whom he bought the building in 2018 had sweated it out due to illness and had to take out a corresponding policy. He has not only lost his place of residence, but is also sitting on a debt of 25,000 euros that he has not yet paid off.
The trained boat builder had once worked in the Rambeck shipyard in Starnberg and later retrained as a systems technician at Siemens. Because of a serious chronic illness, the strong nature boy who grew up on a farm, had crossed the Alps twelve times by bike and swam an estimated 100 times across Lake Starnberg, had to end his professional career.
Born in Wolfratshauser, he built a beekeeping facility in Oberhaching, for which his friend and neighbor, the drinks dealer Klaus Trimmel, provided a thousand square meters of fallow land and sown a meadow of flowers. Fagner produced up to 50 kilograms of honey, which he sold at the weekly markets in Unterhaching and Ottobrunn. In 2018 he took the big step to the Canary Island because the mild climate there made his illness more bearable: “I came here with all my beekeeping equipment, bought the little house and built a life here again.”
After the eruption of the volcano Cumbre Vieja on La Palma, the lava masses pushed onto the house of Johannes Fagner.
(Photo: private)
That is now in ruins, of all people, to whom nature conservation and sustainability are so important, nature is playing such a wicked trick. It was already clear to him that he lived in an endangered area, but nobody could have suspected that something like this would happen: “The last outbreaks were 50 and over 70 years ago, and both took place in the south near San Antonio,” says he.
After his house was destroyed, Fagner first found accommodation in a friend’s apartment in Tazacorte, about ten kilometers away, and now he uses another friend’s holiday home in El Paso, which is further inland. He can stay there until December, which is why he is now hoping to find the cheapest possible rental apartment. Which should not turn out to be easy. After all, there are thousands of homeless people on La Palma after the volcanic eruption. And the 51-year-old only gets a small pension, from which he now has to pay off his debts, buy a new household and a beekeeping equipment. A return to Germany is out of the question for economic reasons. “Life is much cheaper here than at home,” explains Fagner.
The last few weeks had pushed him to the limit, especially psychologically: “I’m usually a great fighter, but I can’t get out of this situation with my health restrictions alone,” he says. That’s why he started a campaign at www.gofundme.com and hopes that old customers and companions from home will remember him and support him with a few euros.
This Monday one of his three little kittens died of an infection, the other two are being treated by the vet. “An accident never comes alone,” says Fagner.