Meet the Icelandic hotel owner who refused to leave evacuated town even as volcano set to erupt

Ólaf Benedikt Arnberg Þórðarson, 72, has lived in the quiet, Icelandic fishing port of Grindavik since 1968. The whole town was ordered to evacuate in November after the region was hit with hundreds of tremors. The former sea captain and his wife began staying overnight in the weeks that followed so they could refurbish Hotel Grindavik and their Brúin restaurant for when the tourists eventually return. But mere hours before the volcano finally erupted on Monday, 18 December two policewomen spotted Mr Þórðarson and presented him with an arrest warrant if he did not leave the town.

“ I told them I wasn’t going anywhere,” Mr Þórðarson told The Independent. "They were polite, but they started to get more annoyed. “As she [the police officer] put on leather gloves and threatened me with arrest, she said, ‘We’re leaving now, but we’ll be back’.” The hotelier claims the police told him other locals would be barred from returning to Grindavik if he did not comply. 

“So we just left’, he said. “The police chased us east with flashing lights after us. It was just so ridiculous.” Mr Þórðarson was fortunate because that night lava of around 1,200 degrees Celsius began pouring out of a fissure about 4 kilometres long.

The Icelandic Meteorological Office estimated that hundreds of cubic metres of lava per second flowed out in the first two hours though fortunately it flowed north away from Grindavik. Just three days after the eruption Mr Þórðarson insists he wants the town to reopen, attracting media attention and becoming a local folk hero for defying state orders. “I didn’t want to leave,” he says on a break from trying to revitalise his hotel in town. “This government is crazy. I have a factory here, my family live here.

“I want to say ‘Look everybody it is ok’,” the former fishing captain said. “This is my hometown, it’s a beautiful day yet we cannot stay.” “I know so many people who want to rebuild and make Grindavik even better,” he continued. Grindavik doesn’t need any help it just needs people back. We need normal thinking from the government. “People are always asking why there are no people here. There is no lava here. We are very pleased the lava turns to rock quickly and we are safe.”

Visitors are now allowed into the town at 7am but are still under strict orders to evacuate again by 4pm. Úlfar Lúðvíksson, police chief in the region, said: “Many things have changed in the eruption area. Watching the eruption today is completely different than on Monday night. There have been changes there, hopefully positive.” Suðurnesj police have been approached for comment.