Airport monitors eruption aftermath as operations resume

Airport officials were keeping their eyes on the skies while operations have returned to normal Monday following a one-week shutdown due to severe ash fall from St Vincent’s La Soufriere volcano.

Grantley Adams International Airport CEO Hadley Bourne said management is monitoring the situation to ensure the protection of the aerodrome.

“We reopened on the 16th and everything is pretty much normal,”  Bourne told Barbados TODAY. “There is still a continuous monitoring and wetting down to make sure that any ash from the outside or nothing doesn’t re-enter the aerodrome… but we are continually monitoring and cleaning,”

The airport was initially forced to shut down for about a day with a rescheduled reopening on Sunday, April 11 as Barbados tried to address the volcanic fallout that resulted in local meteorologists issuing a small-craft warning while ongoing eruptions spewed heavy plumes into the atmosphere.

But those plans were thwarted as the volcano continued to explode and the thick ash that followed not only intensified but turned into a health and visibility crisis.

Speaking to reporters at the airport last week about the resumption of operations, Prime Minister Mia Mottley declared that Barbados could not afford to have the airport closed any longer, insisting it was necessary to have flights return to the island.

“Our airport has to open back as a matter of urgency and Barbados has been cut off through air transport for the last six days and we cannot continue with that,” she said.

Mottley said then that Vincentian volcanologist Professor Richard Robertson of the University of the West Indies Seismic Research Centre told the administration that the most recent eruption had not been of significant strength. As a result, ash was not propelled sufficiently high enough for it to be a threat to Barbados and a significant portion had gone west instead of east, she added.

“What was said is that the regularity of the eruptions has decreased and the strength of the eruptions has also weakened. With those two things in hand, we believe that we are in a position to really ramp ahead with the clean-up operations,” said the PM.

An earlier plan was to minimise the flow of ash and dust in the airport terminal and on the runway areas and car park.

The Prime Minister had also announced a two-day clean-up of the airport which would involve all the major civil works construction companies, whose trucks raced up and down the ash-laden tarmac in a bid to brush away most of the dust.

“We recognise that the airport, you cannot just deal with the airport terminal, but you have to create a zone around it because the wind is blowing from as far up as Gemswick, down and you going to have dust coming in,” Mottley said then.

She had also promised to mobilise the Ministry of Agriculture to ensure that the fields which would affect the airport, would not only be ploughed but also dampened.

(emmanueljoseph@barbadostoday.bb)