The Last Days of St. Pierre: The Volcanic Disaster That Claimed 30,000 Lives [Hardcover]

Asked to name the greatest volcanic disasters in history, most people would probably offer up Mt Vesuvius and the destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum; they might also volunteer the explosion of Krakatoa or the even more recent eruption of Mt. St Helens. Mt Pelee and St Pierre are usually only vaguely recalled, which is remakable given the sheer size of the human tragedy.

Zebrowski's book does a marvelous job of taking the reader back to 1902, when scientists understood far less than they do now about what volcanos can do. The series of eruptions at Mt Pelee were triggered by the rise of a huge bulge of magma from the subduction zone beneath the Lesser Antilles. These forces set off Mt La Soufriere on the island of St Vincent, where pyroclastic flows and lahars killed two thousand people the day before St Pierre was destroyed; the rising magma also erupted in an undersea volcano at a spot called Kick 'em Jenny.

Zebrowski describes the weeks leading to the eruption of Mt Pelee and how the local inhabitants and French bureacracy struggled to understand what they were up against. The blame for the disaster is often laid at the feet of Louis Mouttet, the governor of Martinique, but it is difficult to imagine what else he could have done. At the time, scientists thought of volcanic eruptions in terms of slow moving rivers of lava rather than swift and deadly pyrolastic flows and lahars. If Mouttet had tried to evacuate St. Pierre, he would have had very little support; even if he had succeeded, he would have created an enormous refugee crisis.

Zebrowski explains what life in St Pierre was like before the disaster, how Martinique's inhabitants coped with the increasingly dangerous volcano in their midst, what happened to the city and its people when the volcano erupted and afterward, how the French government handled (or failed to handle) the aftermath of the disaster, and how a courageous group of scientists and journalists explored the still-erupting volcano to understand what had happened. Zebrowski has chosen a rich canvas for a gripping tale, and he makes the most of it in this well-written book.

The author has done a marvelous job of bringing alive characters that have been dead for a century. Fundamentally, however, this book is about ignorance-- how a lack of knowledge of natural geological processes led to some egregiously erroneous political decisions that sealed the terrible fate of 30,000 humans on the island of Martinique in 1902.

The author, however, does not insult the reader's intelligence, and your conclusions from this fascinating book will be your own.