Ash cloud?
The islanders' daily lives were disturbed by the temporary closing of a vital road tunnel. There have also been evacuations from homes in potentially hazardous areas.
For some, the worst of it has been the impact on the tourist trade.
"The TV and papers dramatise everything," says Maximo Rodriguez, chatting in a near-empty bar in La Restinga. "It scares people off. People should come. How often do you get the chance to witness this?" he asks.
On the north side of the island, in La Frontera, the owners of the Tasca La Cantina bar, Jose Antonio Padron Perez and his wife Maria Fonte Armas, say they are similarly fed up.
"We get walking groups from northern Europe throughout the winter season. Everyone cancelled. But real life isn't as dramatic as the press say. We are all aware of volcanic activity. These are volcanic islands!"
El Hierro has more than 500 open-sky cones, making it the most volcanic of all the Canary Islands, and this may be why so many Herrenos say they are unperturbed. Carmen says her children's paintings of volcanoes are colourful and fun, not dark and sinister.
Dr Joachim Gottsmann, a volcanologist at Bristol University in the UK, who leads a European Commission-funded volcano study, says there is no obvious or impending prospect of an Iceland-style "ash cloud" developing in the Canaries.
"Right now, the eruption south of El Hierro is really a submarine eruption only," he says. But he adds that this could change at any minute.
So a cloud of uncertainty does hang over the heads of the islanders. They would like the fuss to subside - or at least for more tourists to come to the island to witness volcanic evolution for themselves.
Listen to more on this story, and see aerial photos of the effects of the underwater eruption, at PRI's The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, Public Radio International, and WGBH in Boston.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15917740