Signs Just Before The Eruption

Well I could remember, we were training to be tour guides and there was this guy from the south who was an old guy, and he was ready take tourists up to the waterfall, up to see the Soufriere where you could put an egg into those boiling springs or cracks and you would get back an egg already been cooked. And he used to come to the workshops and he usually did say the volcano is boiling like a boiled … and we would laugh. We would laugh after him, but he spent more time in that valley than most of us did, so he actually knew what was going on, when we did … the thing is, with nature you have to pay attention and you have to listen to her, and she was sending a message but most of us were deaf to what she was saying. But this guy was actually here and he was saying, ‘he is bawling like a bull’ and we were saying he’s talking nonsense, but he was right.

– Montserrat Resident, 2019

Then when I think it gets serious is when one year I remember I went to St Patricks, they had fun St Patricks day, and several of us went up in a truck, up to the Soufrière, but when we got there it was like the road goes down and then it comes out in a roundabout, and then you come back up, so when the truck about to go down, we realise that the road had dropped. So the truck couldn’t go down. ‘cause once it go down it wouldn’t be coming back because the road drop. And it dropped so far that you would leave the truck hanging. And that’s when everybody was start to worrying about whether it was sinking or what was going on, and then it was like the talk, people start talking.

– Montserrat Resident, 2019

Maybe another few months to nearly a year after my father went to his ground up in [….] and one morning he came back and then he was saying to my mother, ‘Something is going on up there. I don’t understand what I’m hearing.’ And then he left and he went back the afternoon, they normally go up twice in the day just to look for the animals. When he came back the evening, he said, ‘The sound is getting more and more.’ And then one morning he went up and he said he heard this thing like a jumbo jet, the sound that he said he’s hearing is the sound like … he remember when the Pan Am jet had crashed at Chances Peak. He said here something sounds similar to that. And he came back down and he was just frantic about what he was hearing.

– Montserrat Resident, 2019