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Friday, March 29, 2024

A cruise liner is assisting refugees fleeing a fresh eruption from the St. Vincent volcanic eruption.

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After another eruption of volcanic ash from St. Vincent’s La Soufrière mountain a few days ago, a cruise liner rushed to the aid and rescued a trapped party of tourists while the explosions persisted in the background.

The rescue effort comes at the conclusion of a week of outbursts that started on April 9 and had already driven 20 thousand people from their homes.

The Celebrity Reflection, a Royal Caribbean cruise liner, transported 159 guests, comprising 108 trapped American citizens, from the islands to Philipsburg, Dutch Sint Maarten.

The Celebrity Reflection of Royal Caribbean Cruises stopped there in dock of the city, Kingstown, where people with children and teams of Trinity School of Medicine students waited nervously to evacuate the volcanic wrath.

Family members of Covid-19-infected individuals were precluded from trying to board the liner, despite government travel warnings about cruise liners approved by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which also stated that survivors would have to organize their own transportation back to the home country once they were securely off the island.

Nevertheless, hundreds of people were trapped in temporary housing, facing an unstable situation, a scenario aggravated by tainted water resources and the sheer quantity of volcanic ash, which caused the ceilings of their vacant houses to fall.

As per Richard Robertson, principal expert at the University of the West Indies Seismic Research Center, Friday’s blast was “large enough just to punch holes through the sky,” and the column of ash and dust “possibly went up to 8,000 meters [26,000 ft].”

A comparable volcanic outburst in 1902 lasted weeks and resulted in the deaths 1,700 residents, but no fatalities were documented during last week’s outburst, due to earlier alerts that enabled people to flee in plenty of time.

Satellites deployed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Maxar Technologies and NASA, caught the strength of the first explosion as well as the accompanying unusual weather and atmospheric effects.

NOAA’s GOES-16 weather satellite and the Joint Polar Satellite System took time-lapse imagery of the stormy airspace above the mountain as it continued to shoot debris and particles far into the atmosphere, which afterwards poured down on the long-suffering Caribbean island.

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