On May 8, 1902, this natural disaster wiped out the town of St. Pierre and was perhaps the deadliest event in the Western Hemisphere during the past 100 years. What was it and where did it happen?
All-in-all, the Western Hemisphere has gotten off rather easy in terms of fatalities from natural disasters when compared with the Eastern Hemisphere. While it's true that the Eastern Hemisphere has more land, more importantly, it has more people - a lot more. The land surface of the Western Hemisphere is comprised of the Americas and a small portion of Europe and Africa as well as Greenland and half of Antarctica. This accounts for a little more than 1/3 of the world's land but only about 16% of the world's population. Thus, for instance, a major typhoon in China or cyclone in India will likely effect more people than a hurricane in North America.
Since interior areas of continents are relatively sparsely populated compared to coastal areas, and since volcanoes, hurricanes and earthquakes tend to impact continental edges as opposed to continental shields, many disasters, and consequently, most fatalities occur in the vicinity of where most people live. For example, in places like Bangladesh, which is one of the most densely populated nations in the world, people who live near the Bay of Bengal are vulnerable to cyclones that routinely result in coastal flooding and massive loss of life. As recently as 1970, more than 300,000 people were killed by a strong cyclone, and just 11 years ago, another cyclone was responsible for up to 130,000 deaths! In 1931, the flooding of the Yangtze River in China may have caused more than 3 million deaths - from both the flooding and the starvation that followed.
The death toll from earthquakes has also claimed tens of thousands of lives this century in China, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. The most devastating earthquake in modern times occurred in northeastern China in July of 1976. A powerful shaker, 8.3 on the Richter scale, rocked the city of Tangshan, killing approximately 240,000 people.
Interestingly, our planet's most violent storms, tornadoes, are for the most part, a North America phenomenon. However, their small size and relatively short path has kept them from being the biggest killers. In terms of single events, even though tornadoes, hurricanes, floods and earthquakes have caused many deaths in the Western Hemisphere, volcanic eruptions have taken the most lives.
An eruption of the Nevado del Ruiz volcano in west central Colombia in November of 1985, killed more than 23,000 people in the city of Armero. The upper portion of the volcano is glaciated, and the heat of the eruption melted about 10 percent of the volcano's ice cover, producing a devastating mudflow that inundated Armero. In addition, just 2 1/2 years ago, massive landslides, triggered by torrential rains, killed between 20,000 and 30,000 people in Venezuela.
The deadliest volcanic eruption of the century and perhaps the deadliest disaster in the Western Hemisphere since 1900 occurred on the Caribbean island of Martinique - the northern most Windward Island of the Lesser Antilles. Martinique is part of a volcanic arc of islands, formed by the subduction of the North American Plate beneath the Caribbean Plate. When Pelee erupted on May 8, 1902, the coastal town of St. Pierre, about 5 miles (8 km) to the south of the Pelee, was virtually obliterated.
In the spring of 1902, Pelee's benevolent behavior began to change. It started to hiss and groan, and finally, on May 8, it erupted. The approximately 29,000 inhabitants of St. Pierre were killed by an incandescent, high-velocity ash flow, sometimes referred to as a nuees ardente (glowing clouds). Superheated gas and steaming volcanic ash poured out of the cone of Pelee and sped down its flanks. Within minutes, the poisonous cloud enveloped and incinerated St. Pierre. This is the same kind of eruption that buried Pompeii in 79 A.D.
Pelee is a stratovolcano made mainly of pyroclastic rocks. It's thought that a lava spine formed in a vent in crater, effectively plugging it. Eventually, the pressure of magmatic gases was sufficient to break the plug, resulting in the destructive eruption. When it erupted, it's contents weren't ejected into the upper atmosphere as was the case of more powerful eruptions such as Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 or El Chicon in Mexico in 1983. Rather, much of the mass of the ejecta plunged back to the surface.
Although there had been warnings that an eruption might be eminent for a number of weeks, once it went off, the townspeople of St. Pierre didn't have a chance to escape. Red clouds of death moving down-slope at speeds of an estimated 100 miles per hour suffocated St. Pierre, which was the largest city on Martinique at the turn of the last century and was known as the "Paris of the West Indies." These clouds were so thick and dense that very little sunlight could be transmitted through them - an noon, it looked like midnight.
As
a footnote to what happened on May 8, 1902 in St. Pierre, it's reported
that only one person survived Pelee's fury; a prisoner in a basement cell.
Sometimes good things happen to bad people. Actually, the prisoner was
in jail for a minor charge, but without a doubt, the underground cell
saved his life. For what it's worth, supposedly he later toured with the
Barnum and Bailey Circus as a "miracle man."