Volcano Crisis Management at Piton de la Fournaise (La Réunion) during the COVID-19 Lockdown

In March 2020, the coronavirus disease 2019 outbreak was declared a pandemic by the
World Health Organization and became a global health crisis. Authorities worldwide
implemented lockdowns to restrict travel and social exchanges in a global effort to
counter the pandemic. In France, and in French overseas departments, the lockdown
was effective from 17 March to 11 May 2020. It was in this context that the 2–6 April
2020 eruption of Piton de la Fournaise (La Réunion Island, Indian Ocean) took place.
Upon the announcement of the lockdown in France, a reduced activity plan was set
up by the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, which manages the Observatoire
Volcanologique du Piton de la Fournaise (OVPF). The aim was to (1) maintain remote mon-
itoring operations by teleworking and (2) authorize fieldwork only for critical reasons,
such as serious breakdowns of stations or transmission relays. This eruption provided
an opportunity for the observatory to validate its capacity to manage a volcanic crisis
with 100% remotely operated monitoring networks. We thus present the long- and
short-term precursors to the eruption, and the evolution of the eruption recorded using
the real-time monitoring data as communicated to the stakeholders. The data were from
both continuously recording and transmitting field instruments as well as satellites. The
volcano observatory staff remotely managed the volcano crisis with the various stake-
holders based only on these remotely functioning networks. Monitoring duties were also
assured in the absence of ad hoc field investigation of the eruption by observatory staff
or face-to-face communications. The density and reliability of the OVPF networks, com-
bined with satellite observations, allowed for trustworthy instrument-based monitoring
of the eruption and continuity of the OVPF duties in issuing regular updates of volcanic
activity in the context of a double crisis: volcanic and health.