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Barbadians, heeding Govt call, clean up from ashfall

by Sandy Deane
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Barbadians were Monday cleaning up from two days of volcanic ash from St Vincent’s erupting volcano, washing, wiping and brushing from homes to roadways to facilities including the Grantley Adams International Airport, the Queen Elizabeth Hospital and the Bridgetown Port.   

From early morning, and with a little help from rain showers, Barbadians have been using hoses, power washers and brooms to clear away the fine grey dust. Some were also on roofs vigorously trying to clear gutters.

A fresh sprinkling of the sulphur-laden dust came down by mid-morning but not with the intensity of the last two days when gigantic plumes of ash from the La Soufriere volcano blotted out the sun and dumped tons of ash throughout the island but most heavily in the northern parishes.

Home Affairs Minister Wilfred Abrahams who announced the start of the national clean-up campaign today said: “The initial focus would be on cleaning the roads, and large public areas including schools, the airport, the port and Government buildings.”

At the Grantley Adams International Airport, the sprawling facility was almost back in pristine condition Monday morning after being inundated with ash.

Deputy CEO Terry Layne told Barbados TODAY workers who started the massive exercise on Sunday have been working hard to return the gateway to normalcy ahead of its scheduled reopening on Wednesday.

Layne said: “I would like to highlight the work that our custodial team is doing. They have been working throughout all yesterday and into this morning. First removing the build-up that was here yesterday. We had a couple centimetres of build-up, maybe one to two centimetres that build up and made quite the rounds and they did quite a job in removing that.

“On the airside, where the runway is, that is a lot more complex, a lot more surfaces and that is an effort being undertaken by our engineering team who have also done a good job from early this morning in connection with some of our contractors.”

Along the island’s roadways workers were busy on the job.

Barbados TODAY spoke with Asphalt Manager at CO Williams Paul Wilkinson who was hard at work with his team along the ABC highway.

Wilkinson said: “The idea here is not to let all this muck, all of this slush from the ash go into the drains, clog the drains and the wells and the drainage system. So what we are doing, we are going up against the barrier, sweeping it in heaps, manually taking it up and we have about 30 labourers, five bobcats and three dump trucks working in tandem.”

For only the third time in the last 119 years, Barbadians were brushing away a thick film of volcanic ash from the active volcano in the neighbouring Windward island, located 159 kilometres (99 miles) to the west.

The clean-up has evoked memories of the last major eruption on Good Friday 1979. There were no casualties on either island.

But experts have been comparing the latest eruption and fallout with the May 1902 blast that claimed 1,680 lives and virtually wiped out St Vincent’s indigenous Carib community on the island’s northwest coast.   

Further north where the island bore the brunt of the ashfall, Wendell Boyce of Mile & Quarter, St Peter, told Barbados TODAY he started his clean up around 6 a.m. He said there was a lot of ash in the roof guttering and the grainy substance was everywhere. But with Boyce’s memories of the Good Friday 1979 ashfall from La Soufriere, he put last weekend’s as the worst.

Boyce said: “[Back in 1979] I was at church and when we came out of church we saw this black ash, so we were wondering where did this come from. Then we learnt that the volcano belch off ash.

“This time it is worst, but in all things give God thanks. Once you got life, you will always survive. My thing was to get rid of the heavy stuff so that when you have to clean again, you won’t have much to clean.

Over at Checker Hall, St Lucy, Othneil Scantlebury agreed that the island was more heavily affected by ashfall this time around.

He told Barbados TODAY: “I was on my way to town driving a Transport Board bus and about 3’clock on Prospect Road, it got dark that particular time and I explained to passengers.

“But the dust was much lighter than this one here now I used some there for some filing and within about three hours it was hard… so the dust in 1979 was much better for plants than this one now. This one is much heavier than in 1979.”
(sandydeane@barbadostoday.bb)

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