From golf course to volcanic desert

This is the Belham River valley: it used to be Montserrat’s premiere golf course. Expensive houses lined its periphery. An area overlooking the valley is called Happy Hill. Truly paradise for the wealthy expats who lived in the area. The Soufriere Hills Volcano (in the background of this photo) changed all that.

Volcanic debris carried down by rainstorms, have created an almost lunar like landscape.  To cross the valley, you need to be comfortable driving off road, following dusty tracks. But these can change on a daily basis. I was flagged down by a digger driver half way across. “Hey man, I’ve been digging out this section of the deposits, go back 50 yards and take that faint track”.

Why had he been digging out the volcanic debris that now covers the floor of the valley? Well, Montserrat now has a thriving export industry of sand and aggregates suitable for making concrete. Every day, huge sand trucks travel up and down the narrow roads to the port of Little Bay and tip this volcanic debris onto barges which are towed across to Antigua. Some stays on the island to make concrete blocks. “Where there’s muck, there’s brass” as they used to say in Yorkshire.

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This is just one of the stories that informs my talk Montserrat – volcano in paradise