It was a coincidence of geography. On May 8, 1902, the beautiful city of St. Pierre, Martinique, known as the Paris of the Caribbean, happened to be in the killing path of a searingly hot volcanic hurricane that swept down the flank of Mount Pelee and killed 29,000 people. And it was a circumstance of timing that the city was in the process of election campaigning. It was an atmosphere doubly charged with election politics and a volcano that had been acting up for a couple of months. People were ambivalent about leaving: on the one hand, they wanted to support their candidate, but on the other, the explosions, rumblings, and sulfurous smell of the volcano frightened many, some of whom chose to leave the area. And yet, there were some curious people who came to St. Pierre from other towns and villages to watch the eruption. In 1902 volcanologists had a very rudimentary knowledge about volcanic processes and did not know that volcanic hurricanes (pyroclastic flows: pyro = "fire"; clastic = "broken") existed. Hence this eruption made Mount Pelee the greatest killer volcano of the twentieth century. If the precatastrophic volcanic activity then shown by Mount Pelee were to occur today, modern volcanologists, having gained ninety years of cumulative experience since the 1902 eruption, would very likely urge immediate evacuation of the city regardless of other circumstances.
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khan
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Jul 12, 2010 08:05 AM
