Goma was thrown into panic on Saturday evening as Mount Nyiragongo, one of the world's most active and dangerous volcanoes erupted.
Army spokesman Guillaume Njike said 13 were killed fleeing the disaster, including nine in a traffic accident and four who tried to escape Munzenze prison in Goma.
A Reuters reporter saw two people killed by the initial eruption in a village north of Goma, and witnesses spoke of dead and missing relatives.
Haunted by memories of an eruption in 2002 that killed 250 people and left 120,000 homeless, residents fled on foot with their belongings, some towards the nearby border with Rwanda.
The eruption was caused when fractures opened in the volcano's side, causing lava flows in various directions.
As the sun rose on Sunday a smouldering black gash about half a mile wide could be seen on the outskirts of Goma, where the lava had cooled to rubble.
It was three storeys high at some points, engulfing even large buildings and sending smoke into the grey morning sky.
Residents in the Buhene district sorted through the mangled white remains of tin roofs or lifted rocks - tiny individual efforts in what will likely be a months-long campaign to restore the zone.
Elsewhere, groups of people posed for photos on the steaming lava.
Ernestine Kabuo, 68, said she had tried to carry her sick husband from their house as the lava approached, but he was too unwell to leave.
"I said to myself, I can't go alone, we've been married for the best and the worst," said Kabuo, walking in a daze and crying, surrounded by buildings swallowed by lava.
"I went back to at least try to get him out but couldn't. I ran away and he got burned inside. I don't know what to do. I curse this day."
The flow towards Goma stopped a few hundred meters from the city limits. The nearby airport was untouched. A separate lava flow that headed east over unpopulated terrain towards Rwanda also appeared to have stopped.
"Local authorities who have been monitoring the eruption overnight report that the lava flow has lost intensity," government spokesman Patrick Muyaya said on Twitter on Sunday.
Volcanologists at the OVG, which monitors Nyiragongo, have struggled to make basic checks regularly since the World Bank cut funding amid embezzlement allegations.
From October 2020 to April, the observatory could not carry out comprehensive seismic checks on the volcano because analysts lacked an internet connection, OVG's scientific director Celestin Kasereka Mahinda told local Radio Okapi on Sunday.
Internet was restored in April thanks to funding from a U.S. partner, he said, but too much time had been lost by that stage.
"As soon as the internet was restored, we had started recording the warning signals, but since we did not have previous data, we thought it was the start of volcanic activity. Hence this surprise."
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