Hunting for wasps and chickens – The ever present threat.

Scriber asked if I wanted to go on and see if we could see more. I was aware of the time (it was past midnight now) and how these guys had gone out of their way to drive me to the other side of the island to see our quarry.  So I thanked them and said no, we should return to our beds.  The visit a success we descended back to the vehicles and I was dropped off at the gate to our villa.  I quietly stole in and went to bed a happy man.

My work time in Montserrat was nearly done – I had a bit of training to complete the next week on one day before flying home, and I was continually making tweaks to all the databases I had created, but Matt and I decided we had to have a little downtime over the weekend.  Geoff had gone back to the UK on the Friday evening so Matt and I decided we would take a drive down to the exclusion zone.

I had noticed a network of poles around the island on which were sirens.  They were used to alert the residents of any harmful volcanic eruption – of course the chance of evacuation when there was a really large discharge from the volcano, but there were also other hazards.  There is a continuous stream of ash and smoke coming from several vents in the Soufriere mountain and small ash falls were regular.  It might settle out as a fine dust, sometimes as a pseudo-snowfall, and had a habit of covering everything.  If that were the end of it people might be OK to cope – get out the brooms and the switches and push it off into the bush or ghut.  But the ash had been belched up from deep below the earth’s crust and was full of noxious chemicals; most abundant of which was sulphur.  The smallest amount of water and the dust turned into acid that ate into everything.  It is particularly fond of tin roofs, and cars.  Left without cleaning, and maybe with a dose of warm Caribbean rain, a car can rot away in just a few weeks.

The early warning system

I woke up a couple of times in our villa and found a film of ash across the veranda.  But more often than not there was a curious smell of bad eggs in the air.  The volcano would fart toxic gases that would blow over the villages.  My lips would capture these molecules and more acid would be created as it mixed with my saliva, leaving me with a tinny slightly painful taste in the mouth.