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Montserrat: An Island Under Siege by Kathy Svitil |
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In the early morning hours of December 26, 1997, the residents of the island of Montserrat, a British colony in the Leeward Islands of the eastern Caribbean, were treated to a belated -- and unwelcome -- Christmas surprise. At about 3 a.m. that day -- a British holiday known as Boxing Day -- the island's Soufriere Hills volcano violently exploded. The eruption of the volcano, located on the southern part of the island, caused the collapse of a lava dome that had been steadily building in the volcano's crater for over two months. The collapse caused an avalanche of volcanic debris to descend on the surrounding villages, which, in turn, triggered a small tsunami in the waters off shore. An ash cloud, which reached some 47,000 feet into the air, temporarily darkened, and eventually blanketed, much of the 40-square-mile island.
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Despite its destructiveness, the Boxing Day event -- the world's worst volcanic explosion in years -- took no lives. That's because, four months earlier, the southern two-thirds of the island had been declared off-limits, and more than half the island's 11,000 residents evacuated, after earlier eruptions had rocked the colony. On June 25, 1997, after two years of precursory swelling and shaking, Soufriere Hills had uncorked a particularly damaging pyroclastic flow -- a fiery cloud of ash, gas, and rock -- that had killed at least ten residents and destroyed nine villages. And, in early August, another eruption had devastated the capital city of Plymouth. |
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