Word: montserrat
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Several times a week, a nerve-shattering siren reverberates across the island of Montserrat. It is an urgent warning for people to drop whatever they are doing and head north. But there is not much farther north to go, and the terror among local residents is palpable. The Caribbean island's volcano, belching, smoking, fuming for two years now, is giving hints of a cataclysmic blow, as the dark, telltale cloud of white-hot debris shoots high into the sky. "It's the first thing you see when you wake up and the last thing you see when...
After slumbering for four centuries, Montserrat's volcano awakened two years ago with a vengeance, gradually rendering all but a third of the 39-sq.-mi. British colony uninhabitable. Two-thirds of the population of 12,000 have fled, and thousands more have abandoned their homes, often with little but the clothes on their back, for overcrowded shelters in the comparatively safe northern region. Plymouth, the capital, has been reduced to rubble. The airport is closed, and the only access to the island is by ferry or helicopter...
Under the growing pressure of subterranean steam against the mountain's molten core, the volcano's cap could eventually blow out entirely. Montserrat, not much more than a slender arc of farm and beach land surrounding the volcano, could virtually disappear. More likely, the mountain may keep on belching for months or years, slowly smothering the little island. Already it is a paradise lost for its citizens as fewer than 4,000 cling to their homeland. "If everyone leaves," says Radio Montserrat general manager Rose Willock, who lost her home a month ago, "Montserrat will become just another island that...
Many people still don't want to leave. Some, fearing they will never be able to return, cannot quite believe their old life is gone. Others refuse to budge until the government compensates them for their losses. Montserrat officials asked the British government to pay evacuees $14,800 for each head of household, $11,111 for each additional adult and $7,407 for each child, but islanders complain that even this is not enough to make a fresh start in a foreign land. Many are getting bills for mortgages on homes that no longer exist, and their debts are mounting...
...governor promised the crowd he would talk to London. Keep on talking, Frank, but soon there may not be a Montserrat to talk about...