Mount Pelee wins.
This is an incredibly interesting book that shows the absolute foolishness of man even when total destruction is staring him directly in the face. I picked the book up a couple of years ago in a used book sale for 25 cents and it's definitely worth every penny, even if the pennies were made from pure gold, coated in platinum and encrusted with diamonds. A brief summary since the book is quite old and unknown: on May 8th, 1902 Mount Pelee which dominates the beautiful island of Martinique erupted in one of the biggest eruptions in history killing 30 thousand people.
The authors have written the book in the form of fiction following the threads of many characters and examining their interactions and how each one deals with the impending disaster. And yet this book is entirely factual, the authors took a considerable amount of effort to interview hundreds of people to determine what actually happened and how this loss of life could have been avoided. There is a limitation on the content though as the story is dominated by the perspectives of those who survived the eruption, but there is a large amount of content extracted from personal diaries and notebooks that were recovered.
Reading this book is like watching a car accident in slow motion, or watching Titanic. The whole time I was reading I just wanted to grab the people and tell them to run and flee for safety. I can't even imagine the amount of frustration the people who actually were doing these things and trying to get people to run out of the city were feeling. Amazingly the sign of the destruction was a long time coming, people could have survived quite easily even if they only had a few hours to run out of the city. They were given 8 days! After the Tsunami everybody knows that if you see the ocean recede, you run as fast as you can towards high ground. Well, if the massive volcano that is your island starts throwing out ash that covers the entire sky, you get the hell the out of there. And what happened instead? People flocked to the major city that was closest to the volcano's crater!
Amazing isn't it? And it's not just ash that was one of the dire warning signs. There are a host of incredible natural phenomenon that are detailed in the book, including massive land slides, a giant tidal wave, and an invasion of snakes, spiders, and foot-long centipedes. It's amazing that despite all of this, people trust the authorities so much that they listen to the propaganda that's posted in the local paper. The total and absolute detachment from reality the local authorities have is quite astonishing. These people get so caught up in their own little world of petty politics and power struggles they are completely oblivious to the awesome force of nature that can wipe them out in seconds, like nothing.
One of the parts of the book that I thoroughly enjoyed was the description of the voodoo people as they come to get sacrifices for their rituals to ward off the volcano's fury. I know absolutely nothing about the voodoo cult/religion so I didn't know it was so deadly and can involve so much murder. I also didn't know it isn't appreciated by a majority of the caribbean population and is instead looked at with great fear from the majority of people.
The effects of natural disasters, especially one that is as well documented as this, usually involve a load of human errors. Maybe a lot of the real stories of catastrophe read like this book, but this tale is definitely one that's worth reading.
