We awoke the morning of 15 June at 0830 and saw that it was still pitch dark outside. We could hear what sounded like mud falling on the roof with the occasional clatter of something heavier larger pieces of ash. My wife and I decided to hunker down in our apartment for as long as we could.
We ventured out for fresh batteries, candles, and canned foods a little later in the morning. The smell of sulfur was heavy in the air and bright orange lightning was flashing in the distance. It was like looking into the depths of Hell. At the time, I thought the orange lightning was caused by electrical charge created during the eruption. Unfortunately, I have not been able to find evidence to support this theory. Instead, I learned that orange lightning is caused by a large amount of particulate (dust, volcanic, ash, etc.) in the air, and with all the ash flying through the air, the lightning was very orange.
The ash that fell covered an area of almost 1500 square miles in depths of 4 to 10 inches. It was like a blizzard of beach sand mixed with rocks and instant concrete mix. The weight of the ash was significantly increased with the rain that was falling from what had been a full-strength typhoon a few days before, Typhoon Yunya. It had been downgraded to a tropical storm just before the eruption, but was still strong enough to alter the wind patterns that had been carrying the ash from earlier eruptions over the South China Sea.
To the best of my recollection, Typhoon Yunya was barely mentioned at the time; the volcano took precedence over other natural disasters in that general area and our news sources were limited. In my "collector's edition" set of Pacific Stars and Stripes, the first mention of the typhoon was on 16 June, the day after the storm. Without the rain, the destructiveness of the ash fall would have been much less severe.
As the afternoon wore on in our apartment, I watched an electrical conduit that ran from a cupboard above our kitchen sink to the ceiling. About every thirty minutes, I would shine the flashlight on it. When I began, the conduit was fairly straight, but after four to five hours, it was bent in a U-shape with the opening to the left. The wet ash was slowly taking its toll on the roof.
A while later, the roof of our neighbor's apartment collapsed. Luckily, no one was injured. Shortly after their roof caved in, the overhang at the front of our apartment building crashed down. Many buildings were collapsing from the added weight, including the nearby marketplace that had recently been built but not yet opened. The panic was beginning to intensify. My wife held a crucifix in her hands and kept reminding me that Olongapo was built on land reclaimed from the sea and was about to fall back into the water as part of God's wrath. Panic grew.
