VOLCANO ACTIVE AGAIN

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 929, 24 March 1930, Page 16

VOLCANO ACTIVE AGAIN

APPALLING CALAMITY RECALLED SINISTER MOUNT PELEE News that Mount Felee is again in eruption, recalls the most appalling j of volcanic calamities and the instruc- i tire history of that mountain (writes j Professor J. W. Gregory in the “Man- | Chester Guardian”). Its notoriety j dates from 1902, when it destroyed ; _ St. Pierre, the capital of the French j ji! colonj- of Martinique. Minor j eruptions had happened on parts of „ the mountain in 1762 and 1851, but " there was no record of any activity around the quiet tarn that occupied the summit. No special anxiety was | occasioned when, on April 25, 1902. 1 a vent began to discharge steam and dust. The eruption became more powerful, but so little alarm was felt that an excursion to the summit of Mount Pelee from St. Pierre to see what was happening was arranged for Sunday, May 8. At 7.50 on that morning a terrific explosion tore a rent on the southern slope of the mountain and discharged from it a cloud of incandescent volcanic dust and superheated steam which swept like an avalanche, at the speed of between one and two miles a minute, upon St. Pierre. All walls across the path of the avalanche were overthrown, the ruins were set on fire, and the population, amounting to bet'ween 80,000 and 40,000, were instantly killed, either by the hot blast of a temperature of about l,ooodeg. F. or the accompanying asphyxiation. The only survivors in the town were two convicts sheltered in a deep dungeon in the local gaol. One Ship Afloat All the ships in the harbour were sunk except one, the Rod dam, which was farther out than the rest, so that the volcanic cloud that reached it had cooled down; the material was still sufficiently hot to set fire to cotton and any greasy fabrics, but not to wool. The swell whipped up by the blast broke the anchor chain and the Roddam backed out to sea, and carried news of the disaster to the next island. St. Lucia. The explosion was heard SOO miles away in Venezuela, and the dust travelled so far that it occasioned brilliant sunset glows in England, Germany and China. The explosion had opened a vertical outlet, so that the eruption continued upward and for some time discharged material at the rate of 8,000,000 cubic feet a minute. In the later stages of the eruption a pillar of rock 800 feet high w-as pushed upward out of the neck of the volcano, as a cork might be forced out of a bottle. Probably it had been the resistance of this solid plug of rock that prevented the normal upward escape of the volcanic material. Hence the explosion was directed as from a nozzle directly on to the doomed town of St. Pierre. This catastrophe was one event in a series of changes that from time to iime affect Central America and the West Indies. On April 17-18, a week before the beginning of the eruption of Mount Pelee, a terrific earthquake devastated Quezaltenango, the commercial capital of Guatemala; this shock was probably due to a subsidence of the crust on the western part ot the West Indian area. The resulting pressure on the plastic material beneath was relieved through the volcanic fissure that runs through the chain of volcanic islands between the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic. The relief was effected at first by the preliminary discharge through Mount Pelee; then on May 7 by a powerful eruption of the Souffriere, or Sulphur Mountain, in the island of St. Vincent, where the local Caribs, the aboriginal inhabitants of the West Indies, were all destroyed and the district devastated; and finally on May 8 by the holocaust at Mount Pelee. Cause of Eruption The same general sequence of events happened In ISI2 at the previous great eruption of the Souffriere. An earthquake on March 26 on the southern side of the Caribbean depression overthrew Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, and killed 10,000 of i the inhabitants; the Souffriere burst into eruption on April 27. As in 1902, _ a subsidence on one side of the Caribbean Sea, attended by a violent earth-1 quake, was followed by a volcanic eruption on the eastern fissure. This explanation of the cause of the eruptions along the Mount PeleeSt. Vincent line is reassuring on the present occasion, for the new outbreak may be taken as a late stage of a similar series of events. Early in 1929 (January 17) Cumana, a city on the coast of Venezuela, about 200 miles east of Caracas, was destroyed by an earthquake which was fortunately, much milder than those which on October 21, 1766, caused the loss there of 30 lives and on December 14, 1797, overthrew the city and killed 16,000 of its inhabitants. In 1929, the preliminary earthquake having been milder than those which heralded the eruptions of 1812 and 1902, the interval was longer, and it was not till November 22 that Mount Pelee began its latest eruption. According to the meagre Information received, a column of dust and steam was then thrown up to the height of 12,000 feet and —unlike the 1902 eruption—a stream of lava w r as discharged. It has flowed toward St. Pierre, where it can do comparatively little damage, for only a few people have taken up their residence among the ruins of that ill-fated town.