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Montserratians in Zone B Evacuated
Brades, Montserrat, December 12 (WINN)- Heightened activity at the Montserrat volcano in the past few days, has led to the night-time evacuation of areas on the edges of the safe zone.
Dr. Paul Cole, Director of the Montserrat Volcano Observatory (MVO), spoke to WINN on Friday and explained that they have had a high level of activity and pyroclastic flows which are travelling, from time to time, down the northwestern parts of the volcano which is the area known as Tyers Ghaut. It leads into the Belham Valley where there were people living.
“For this reason,” Dr. Cole said, “these pyroclastic flows have gotten larger, we have decided to increase the alert level, or the hazard level to level four which means that residents of Zone B cannot sleep in their houses, they only have daytime access. Activity is staying at a relatively constant level. We have pyroclastic flows going in other directions on the northern side of the volcano so they’re not only going down Tyers Ghaut.”
Looking east up the Dyer's River valley (between Tyers Ghaut and the Belham valley) from above St Georges Hill. The light grey pale coloured deposit is a pyroclastic flow deposit formed at 6:40 am on 10th December 2009. The flow traveled northwest down Tyers Ghaut. The main flow came to rest below Dyers village, however a narrow fine grained flow continued another 400 m to the west end of Lees village. (Photo Courtesy of Greg Scott of Caribbean Helicopters taken from the Montserrat Volcano Observatory (MVO) website)
Consequently, the Director of the MVO and his team decided that the level of risk to people in Zone B was unacceptable during night time as it was impossible to predict with limited visibility which direction the pyroclasitc flows were going.
Dr. Cole said that for the time being, the activity was not escalating. He added that the furthest the pyroclastic flows had reached was about 3.5 kilometers down the valley, whereas, the sea was at about 8 kilometers. “You can see they have another 4.5 kilometers to travel before they reach the sea. But, of course, we have to have a margin of safety. We cannot allow pyroclastic flows to come within 1 kilometer of where people live, it would be far too close. So at this point we’ve decided that the level of risk is far too high and we decided to raise the hazard level,” Dr. Cole said.
An MVO update on Friday for activities over the past week stated that there have been 957 rockfall signals, 207 long period events, 3 volcano tectonic and 106 hybrid earthquakes recorded. Activity has continued in cycles although these cycles have become more irregular in time in the last few days.
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