A: It struck me as a story that’s been crying out to be told.  Each time I’ve lectured or been interviewed about natural disasters, I’ve gotten questions about the 1902 catastrophe in Martinique; in most instances, questions I couldn’t answer.  During the last 90 years, only one English-language book has been written about the disaster, and that work was woefully incomplete and partially fictionalized.  Today, one can find a great deal of misinformation about the calamity on various web sites. Clearly, it was time for someone to revisit the early sources and set the story straight.

Q: What was it about this story that fascinated you?

A: I think there’s a bit of the young child in each of us scientists: a sense of terror, yet awe, at the mysteries and power of Nature. And when 30,000 people die within a couple of minutes, it certainly ought to get our attention even a century later. 

Q: So this disaster has a lesson to teach us?

A: I prefer not to proselytize. In the book, I try to let the facts speak for themselves, and I leave it to my readers to draw their own conclusions.  In fact, I’ll consider myself to have failed if they don’t.

Q: Apparently there were warning signs that the volcano was active.  Why did so few people heed them?

A: Yes, the warning signs were pretty hard to miss: ashfalls, birds dropping dead from the sky, severed undersea telegraph cables, and lahars that swept women out to sea while washing clothes in the streams, not to mention the earthquakes and an enormous thundering eruption column just four miles from the city.  Some writers have claimed that an irresponsible combination of political hubris and bad science led to those 30,000 deaths.  But the issues weren’t quite that simple.  If, for example, you order an evacuation of the largest city on a small island, where and how do you accommodate all of those refugees?  And how could anyone, in the context of that time and place, have predicted what new tricks the volcano had up its sleeve?  The people looked to their leaders, and their leaders didn’t have a clue of what was to come.  If the volcano had waited another week or two before exploding, maybe the right leadership decisions would have been made.

Q: It wasn’t lava flow that killed the victims, but rather a phenomenon known as a nuée ardente.  What does this mean?  Is this typical in a volcanic explosion?

A: The disaster at St. Pierre was important scientifically in that it led to the first identification, photographs, and systematic study of the phenomenon of the nuée ardente, or pyroclastic surge.  This is an explosively expanding ground-hugging mass of hot gases and ash, incandescent in places, that knocks down buildings, sets the rubble on fire, and does incredibly gruesome things to any human or other living thing in its path.  We now recognize the phenomenon as a major risk during the eruption of any subduction-type volcano — a category that includes all of the volcanoes of the Antilles.

Q: Many of the victims were not on land, but on ships in St. Pierre’s harbor. Why didn’t the water protect them?  And why didn’t the ships have time to sail away?

A: Eighteen ships and hundreds of smaller boats burst into flame and sank during the disaster.  Unlike molten lava, a pyroclastic surge travels nearly as easily over water as it does over land.  It’s also swift — thundering forward at about 120 miles per hour, which is many times faster than any ship even today.  In fact, it was only after the St. Pierre disaster that scholars revisiting accounts of earlier historical eruptions (Krakatoa, for instance) began to understand how volcanic explosions had managed to claim victims many miles away, even across a broad body of water.

Q: Who are the heroes and villains in this story?

A: The misplaced priorities of several individuals certainly aggravated the disaster.  Andreus Hurard, for instance, the editor of St. Pierre’s daily newspaper, confused his own political agenda with the safety of the town’s citizens and paid for that shortsightedness with his own life.  But most of the others, including the new governor and other political officials, the colony’s scientists, its military officers, the foreign diplomats, the businessmen, and the ordinary folk seem to have been overwhelmed by the confusion of the unfolding events.  If I were to name any hero, it would be Father J. Mary, the rum-drinking pastor of the church of Notre Dame d’Delivrande in Morne Rouge, who witnessed the disaster from a distant ridge above St. Pierre, played a major role in post-disaster relief for outlying villagers, hosted visiting scientists and journalists in the aftermath, then saved hundreds of his parishioners while losing his own life in a later pyroclastic surge.

Q: Who was Augustè Ciparis?

A: There was only one survivor from the city itself.  Others survived at St. Pierre’s fringes, and some of those on the ships in the harbor lived to tell their tales.  But Ciparis was smack in the center of the fireball, in solitary confinement in a prison cell that remains standing today.  He was discovered alive several days after the disaster and was taken to Morne Rouge, where Father Mary nursed him back to health.  The circumstances of his miraculous survival were substantiated by the journalist George Kennan and the geoscientist/explorer Angelo Heilprin.  After recovering, Ciparis emigrated to the U.S. to become a sideshow attraction in the Barnum & Bailey Circus, where he exhibited his burn-scarred body under the banner of “The Sole Survivor of St. Pierre.”  Unfortunately, he again got into trouble in the U.S.

Q: Describe your research.  Did you travel to the site?

A: I couldn’t have written the book in good conscience without seeing the place firsthand.  But that’s not where I started.  I began by reading every book and article published about the disaster from 1902 until the present, and I talked to fellow scientists to get their perspectives.  Then my son and I went to Martinique, explored the ruins and rebuilt structures in St. Pierre, climbed the volcano from the same approaches described by the early writers, and tramped over much of the rest of northern Martinique, recognizing of course that some of the geophysical features have changed over the last century.  That experience shed a lot of light on the credibility of the early sources: it became obvious that some of those stories were fabrications while others came fully to life.

Q: Could such a disaster happen again, either in Martinique or elsewhere?

A: Although the city of St. Pierre has been partially rebuilt, its present population is only about one-sixth of that of 1902.  Compared to the rest of the beautiful island of Martinique, one gets an uneasy, temporary feeling about this town, as if its residents are just camping there until the next catastrophe.  Yes, an eruption on the scale of the 1902 cataclysm can not only happen again, but it almost certainly will.  (In fact, there was a mild eruption in 1929 that led to an evacuation of 1,000 residents.)  We humans live on a thin shaky crust of a hot and turbulent planetary interior, which gives rise to volcanism as an ongoing natural process.  Even though we have no equation that will predict the time and place of the next major eruption, we can be fully certain that we have not seen the last.