On 8 May 1902, Mount Pelée volcano, on the Caribbean island of Martinique, violently erupted and literally blew its top. The eruption killed nearly 30,000 people within minutes and wiped the coastal city of St. Pierre off the map. It was the most devastating and deadliest volcanic disaster of the 20th century. Montagne Pelée, Bald Mountain in French, was a 4,500-foot peak on the north side of Martinique island. At its foot, just four miles away, sat the bustling port city of Saint Pierre, “The Paris of the Caribbean.”
The 1902 eruption followed three-centuries of Mt. Pelée dormancy. Warning signs of an impending eruption began a month earlier. On 2 April 1902, gas and steam vents were first spotted by islanders on the peak. The public showed little concern however. Three weeks later, on 23 April, the first tremors were felt across the island. Mount Pelée spouted out a cloud of black ash.
Clara Prentis, wife of U.S. Consul Thomas Prentis, wrote a letter to her sister in Massachusetts. The rear windows of their residence faced the volcano, just a few miles away. She described how everyone in the city was on ‘alert,’ fearing that Mt. Pelée might “burst forth and destroy the whole island!” Their failure to heed the warnings and evacuate would doom her entire family—including two young daughters, Louise and Christiana. Thomas Prentis was posted to Martinique after he sought an assignment in a tropical setting for health reasons. The French island was an important commercial hub. Significant American and French financial interests included sugar and rum.
There were other warning signs of impending disaster.
First came waves of black centipedes and red ants, scrabbling down the scrubby slopes of Mount Pelée. They ran across roads and train tracks, attacking workers in sugar cane fields and even invading local houses. Then the snakes began to escape. Hundreds twisted down the volcano’s flanks, headed across the Martinique countryside. Residents called it a biblical plague. but they did not equate it with the volcano’s new activity.
On 2 May, the pre-eruption became even more intense and active. Over the next few days, St. Pierre was rocked by more tremors, showered in volcanic ash, and enveloped in clouds of sulfurous gas. These nightmarish conditions deteriorated even further when horses, pigs, and dogs whimpered as biting ants crawled up their legs. An estimated 50 people, mostly children, died from venomous snake bites. The older residents of St. Pierre had memories of previous ‘puny eruptions’ from the volcano that resulted in minimal damage. These memories provided a false sense of security in their minds.
As the pre-eruption intensified, water in Mt. Pelee’s crater lake was heated to near boiling. On 5 May, the crater’s rim gave way, sending a flood of scalding water down into the River Blanche. The hot water generated a massive mud flow with a speed nearing 100 kpm, burying everything in its path. At the mouth of the river, north of St. Pierre, it crushed a Guérin rum distillery, killing 23 workmen. When the mudflow hit the sea, it created a three-meter-high tsunami, flooding the low-lying areas along the St. Pierre waterfront.
Meanwhile, the island was in the midst of general elections.
Socialists were poised to take control from conservative politicians. St. Pierre was the center of the island’s conservative votes, so the governor put off evacuation discussions until after 11 May. Caught up in the midst of an important election, residents of Saint Pierre failed to heed the volcano’s warnings and evacuate. Residents mistakenly believed the only danger was from lava flow. So that if slow moving lava threatened them, they would have plenty of time to flee to safety. In fact, some curious residents came from elsewhere on the island just to view the volcano’s action, even with falling ash beginning to clog the surrounding roads.
Living in St. Pierre nevertheless became increasingly stressful, with many considering leaving for Fort-de-France on the opposite side of the island. On the day of the mudflow, conservative Governor Louis Mouttet received a report from a committee of city leaders who climbed the peak to assess the danger. The only “scientist” in the group was a local high school teacher. Their report stated “There is nothing in the activity of Mt. Pelée that warrants a departure from St. Pierre. The safety of the city is completely assured.”
The committee failed to realize the potential danger from a large notch cut into the side of the volcano crater. The notch was like a colossal arrow pointing directly at St. Pierre, four miles below. The governor made the report public and it eased the people’s fears. Conservative city officials were anxious that voters remain in the city to cast their ballots on 11 May. Local authorities ignored the simmering dangers atop Mount Pelée.
The only people with enough money to leave the island were the wealthy ‘Progressive Party’ of Governor Mouttet. He convinced the editor of the daily newspaper Les Colonies to downplay the danger of the volcano, and encourage people to remain. Governor Mouttet went so far as to send troops to the Fort-de-France road, with orders to turn back families trying to leave! Based on the calming articles in Les Colonies, many people in fact flocked to St. Pierre, thinking it was the safer place.
The population ballooned to about 28,000 as the cataclysmic eruption neared.
On 7 May, activity on Mount Pelée increased dramatically with the blasts at the peak significantly stronger. Overnight, several strong tremors and clouds of hot gases with temperatures more than 3,000 degrees F spilled out of the mountain top.
When one thinks of volcanic eruptions, Hawaiian images of molten lava come to mind. But what doomed the city of St. Pierre was a deadly pyroclastic flow, much like Mount St. Helens in the U.S. Composed of hot ash, rock and gases, it erupts from the volcano with tremendous power and speed, flattening everything in its path. When the end finally come for the humans and animals, it was a horrific, agonizing, death.
The final, tremendous eruption began in the early morning hours of 8 May at around 7:50 AM. A climatic ‘nuée ardente’ (glowing cloud) sent an avalanche of boiling ash into the air and down the mountain side at speeds of 300 miles per hour. The election scheduled for 11 May would never take place. The city of Saint Pierre, and its thousands of trapped residents, were buried within minutes
The volcano erupted with a deafening roar. A large black cloud composed of superheated ash, pumice and gas barreled down the south flank of Mt. Pelée. Its path, directed by the notch at the summit, was straight to the coast. In less than five minutes, the pyroclastic flow struck St. Pierre with hurricane-like force. Victims barely had enough time to run into the streets at the sound of the eruption. They looked towards Mt. Pelee in shock and witnessed the rapidly approaching pyroclastic cloud. Residents barely had time to panic and rush back inside, before the end came.
The pyroclastic flow struck St. Pierre at 8.02 AM.
One-meter-thick masonry walls were blown into rubble. Support girders were mangled into twisted strands of metal. The searing heat of the cloud ignited bonfires in all wooden buildings. Thousands of barrels of rum stored in warehouses exploded, sending rivers of flaming liquid through the streets. Three minutes later, ‘The Paris of the Caribbean’ lay in ruins. Its 28,000 inhabitants burnt and suffocated to death. Virtually everyone died within minutes.
The deadly cloud continued to advanced over the harbor, destroying at least twenty ships at anchor. The blast capsized the steamship Grappler. Its scorching heat set the American sailing ship Roraima ablaze, killing most of her passengers and crew. It had the misfortune of arriving only a few hours before the eruption. Those on board ships could only watch in horror as the cloud rapidly descended on the city of St. Pierre, annihilating everything and everyone.
The Prentis family where amongst the victims. Why didn’t they evacuate when they could? Surely the parents were aware that the volcano posed a threat. On 3 May, Mrs. Prentis wrote to her sister, describing the foul smell of sulphur in the air, the ash emitting from the peak. “Everybody here is afraid,” she wrote. “But my husband assures me that we in no immediate danger.” Thomas Prentis said a U.S. ship sat in the harbor that could whisk them to safety should the situation warrant. Like others, he believed the governor’s report in the press.
There were only two reported survivors – one a prisoner, Louis-Auguste Ciparis, a sailor held in an underground jail cell. The other, Léon Compère-Léandre, a shoemaker at the edge of the city, who survived inside his shop with severe burns. Fifteen ships anchored in the harbor were capsized by the blast. One managed to stay afloat with only half the crew surviving, suffering serious burns. The horrific details were described by Charles Thompson, assistant purser of the Roraima. ‘The fire cloud rolled down upon poor St. Pierre,’ he recalled. ‘The town vanished before our very eyes.’
Testimonies from eyewitness and calculations made on its effects and deposits left behind, led geologists to determine the force of the eruption. A powerful lateral blast (175 meters/second) was accompanied by a pyroclastic flow directed toward the city. The temperature of the flow decreased from about 900°C at the crater to 400°C as it reached poor Saint-Pierre.
The destruction of St. Pierre was complete and unprecedented.
Another ship, the Rodham, managed to sail out of the harbor as pumice and ash rained upon its deck. It headed for the nearby island of St. Lucia, most of its crew dead or dying. The Rodham was met by stunned dock workers who asked the men on the scorched ship where it had come from? ‘From the gates of hell,‘ the weary captain answered.
Only 2 other modern volcanic eruptions have had worse death tolls – Krakatoa in 1883, killing 36,000, and Indonesia’s Tambora in 1815, killing 92,000. But many of those deaths were caused by secondary effects. Tambora destroyed farms throughout the Dutch East Indies, leading to starvation. Krakatoa triggered a tsunami, that drowned of most of its victims. Mount Pelée’s pyroclastic blast, however, was the direct cause of all its deaths.
The United States dispatched two ships, the cruiser Cincinnati and the tug Potomac, to assist with relief efforts. On 20 May, crews managed to recover the charred remains of Thomas Prentis in the ruins of the U.S. consulate building. The remains of his wife and two daughters were never identified.
As the rescue mission continued, Mt. Pelée continued to belch out smoke and ash in smaller explosions. Thomas Prentis’ body was transported to Fort-de-France where he was buried in a local cemetery. Louis-Auguste Ciparis, after surviving four days in his cell, buried beneath layers of ash and covered with burns, had his sentence for assault suspended.
The catastrophe of Mt. Pelée and Saint-Pierre resulted from an severely insufficient knowledge of volcano hazards and eruptions at the time, in particular, a total ignorance of deadly pyroclastic flows. Though major eruptions of Montagne Pelée may be separated by long dormant periods of more than 500 years, a long-term geologic surveillance of the volcano was instituted, as well as adequate plans for a complete evacuation of the surrounding area.