It has been over 10 years since Montserrat’s Soufrière Hills volcano dramatically blew its top, but time has largely stood still for the once prosperous Caribbean island. Rob Crossan treads carefully
Paul McCartney is covered in ash. Next to him lie Sting, the Rolling Stones and Dire Straits, their faces smeared with the fossilising effects of dust and neglect. Scattered around the room are technical manuals, microphone stands and insulation padding. Along with this obsolete recording equipment there lies a small pile of papers containing sheet music and album sleeves of the work of these artists, the 1980s gloss on the sleeve of McCartney’s LP now as dry and crinkled as a papyrus scroll.
This is what remains of Beatles’ producer Sir George Martin’s AIR Studio, a luxurious recording facility, complete with adjoining villa and heated swimming pool that looks out onto the sparkling sea and the variegated greens of the Soufrière Hills.
Rock aristocracy swarmed here in the early 1980s to record in what was a halcyon time for this Lilliputian British overseas territory in the West Indies. The island had everything the world-weary jet set was looking for: a tiny fragment of verdant beauty with a strong Irish legacy (Montserrat’s first modern settlers were Catholics fleeing from persecution in nearby St Kitts and as a result of Oliver Cromwell’s regime in 17th-century England), inevitably friendly locals, and a near-perfect year-round climate. Nature has, since then, exacted a cruel and deadly blow to the ‘Emerald Island’ of the Caribbean.
The Soufrière Hills volcano, dormant for centuries, began rumbling in 1995, causing the capital city of Plymouth to be evacuated for a few months. It was on 25 June 1997, however, that it truly awoke, engulfing the southern half of the island with pyroclastic flows (currents of ash and rock that move at speeds of several hundred kilometers an hour), destroying the airport and killing 19 people.
The island’s demands to the UK for further aid money in the months following the eruption were met, though the fiscal package was gift wrapped with scorn by Claire Short, then British Minister for Overseas Development, who famously quipped: ‘They’ll be asking for golden elephants next,’ a statement that provoked huge rancour and is still remembered in the form of tiny elephant trinkets available at many of the island’s shops.
Today, vapour and steam pour out of the volcano like a continuously boiling kettle, with January 2007 seeing a partial collapse of the lava dome – a movement that led to millions tons of mud and ash travelling down the long evacuated Belham River Valley. Home to the island’s golf course, the valley is now a freeway-sized lahar of mud, six-metres deep and containing houses buried up to their rooftops.
Scientists at the Montserrat Volcano Observatory are adamant that any future volcanic activity would only damage the half of the island that is already out of bounds. Montserrat’s 4,000 remaining inhabitants, they say, are perfectly safe, as are any visitors – and, if you are willing to have an active volcano on your doorstep, the advantages of living here are myriad.
For starters, and not surprisingly, this is the cheapest place to buy property in the whole of the Caribbean (a four-bedroom villa with pool can be had for as little as $250,000) and the hills, dense as shag-pile carpet, provide a verdant backdrop. There is very little crime, resorts and casinos are unheard of, and the only reason car horns are used is to greet passing friends. The closest anything comes to ribald is in the tiny wooden shack bars (known as ‘rum shops’) on a Friday evening where you can find the likes of Gary Moore, owner of the Wide Awake bar in Salem village, sleeping on the bar counter as customers leave the correct money for their drinks by his head and help themselves. espite these charms, tourism – essential for an island where almost all light industry was destroyed and the best farmland lies fallow in the exclusion zone – is in deep trouble. Visitor numbers were down to a few thousand for the whole of 2006 and though Montserrat thrives off its reputation as ‘the Caribbean the way it used to be’, without the scorch marks of mass tourism, the perceived scare factor of the volcano along with startling ignorance of the situation has hobbled the island’s cash cow.
‘In Antigua people think we’re living in this hell hole where we need gas masks and can’t see our hands in front of our faces,’ says island taxi driver Charles. It is a sentiment echoed by bed and breakfast owner Shirley who speaks of a report on the US’s Weather Channel, which referred to the ‘uninhabited island of Montserrat’. The US Department of State recently released a statement advising Americans to ‘strongly consider the risks’ before holidaying there.
That risk clearly was not considered to apply to the thousands of Montserratians, though, who fled to the US after their homes and villages were destroyed. US authorities decided to revoke their ‘Temporary Protective Status’ visas, as the volcanic situation could no longer be considered temporary. With almost 100 people still living in shelters a decade after the first eruption on the island, the prospect of Montserrat having to cope with returning locals who have nowhere to live is still a threat. he lack of a ferry service from nearby Antigua means that tourists and peripatetic locals have no option but to attempt to grab an expensive seat on one of the 18-seater Twin Otters, the largest plane the new Gerald’s Airport’s 600-metre runway can accommodate.
The island’s tourism director, Ernestine Cassell, says she intends to resign her post and leave the island if the boat service is not restored. ‘Tourism as an industry will simply cease to exist if the island’s transport disaster is not solved,’ she says.
Allegations of governmental corruption plague the island with local newspaper the Montserrat Reporter running a column entitled Jus’ Wonderin’, essentially a list of gripes written anonymously by islanders with each allegation starting with the prefix ‘jus’ wonderin’. It generally contains vicious and defamatory statements against those in power.
‘You should see how bad it gets when it’s election time,’ says local forest ranger and tour guide James ‘Scriber’ Daley. Daley is one of the few Montserratians who returned to the island after a short spell in the UK following the total destruction of his village when it was hit by a lateral blast from the volcano in 1997.
‘Many people here feel that the NPLM [New People’s Liberation Movement, part of the coalition government led by Lowell Lewis] is corrupt and that they are paid far too much, but the UK has given us so much money that we are in danger of developing a mentality of dependency. We need to take responsibility for the fact that this island is not recovering quickly enough otherwise we will all continue to suffer.’
The problem, in the eyes of most islanders, is not that the British government has not given Montserrat enough money to rebuild and prosper – Foreign Office figures put the sum at close to $600m – it is that the money that has been sent has been swallowed up by ‘consultants’ or has simply disappeared. This is why, the many disgruntled islanders claim, Monts -errat is still relying on a crumbling temporary harbour at Little Bay that is incapable of docking even the tiniest of cruise ships.
The irony is that while the volcanic disruption increases the size of the island, the economy, along with the hopes for a future, continues to ebb away. It is great news for anyone seeking the ultimate West Indies hideaway, but a disaster for the 4,000 people who cling to the northern end of this island. Quiet for so long, it is not just the volcano that has become restless.
HOW TO GET THERE
British Airways flies from London to Antigua. From there you can continue your journey to Montserrat with Win Air www.ba.com www.fly-winair.com
More information
For more information on visiting Montserrat, including where to stay and what to do, go to www.visitmontserrat.com
