Professor Richard Robertson, head of the La Soufriere monitoring, while speaking on radio earlier today, continued to urge Vincentians not to hike up La Soufriere at this time. Warning that the dangers of so have been compounded by recent rainfall.
“I think people can see—you don’t even have to go on the volcano to see the effects of the rains; you saw it in South Rivers, you saw it in Arnos Vale. So you can imagine in areas where you have more sediment, if you have the same amount of rain, you’re going to have more potentially damaging water coming through. So you need to stay out of the areas which could be flooded, which could be affected by rains; so the valleys, low lying areas, if you’re having rain, especially on the volcano, you need to stay out of them.
And certainly the summit of the volcano, as I keep saying is not a safe place to go hiking because, apart from the fact that you might have hot spots in the volcano itself, it’s unlikely people would get to them, but it’s really a very difficult and dangerous hike to get up there because of the nature of the terrain; those are areas to avoid, going forward.” He said.
