Watching the Piparo volcano

A week ago, the Piparo mud volcano became active again, emitting sulphur gas and cracking concrete paving at nearby homes. In February, the Piparo Youth Alliance held an interfaith surface to mark the last major eruption of the volcano site on February 22, 1997, when the vent spewed hot earth more than a hundred feet into the air, destroying 31 houses and burying cars, cattle, poultry and pets in an avalanche of mud. There were no fatalities. Villagers were roused by a low rumbling that in fifteen minutes became an inexorable flow of creeping hot mud.

Traumatised residents were relocated, and their buried properties were given over to the state. But not everyone left, and there are still homes within a few hundred feet of the site, inhabited by residents who, until last week, believed that the eruption two decades ago was the worst thing they would experience in their lifetime at Piparo. After an earthquake in February 2018, Devil’s Woodyard erupted again, creating a cone of hot mud 100 metres in diameter. Science suggests that a mud volcano follows cycles, erupting once every 25-30 years, but geology often has its own ideas about what happens next.

Yellowstone Park sits in the middle of US state lands in Wyoming, Montana. The park is a popular tourism attraction featuring hot springs and geysers and the site, 20 miles in diameter, sits on top of a super volcano and volcanic caldera which should erupt every 600,000 years. It’s been 640,000 years since the last Yellowstone eruption.

It’s difficult for people to plan their lives around events that take place on geological timelines. So it isn’t surprising to find that residents and visitors to Piparo’s mud volcano are resisting any suggestion that they move.

The Petroleum Geosciences programme at UWI has been studying the Piparo mud volcano since July 2018. Last week, residents were being warned that they should move from the area by a senior geoscientist at Touchstone Exploration, one of the scientists who have been monitoring activity at the mud volcano. Officially, the government is only giving cautious warnings about visiting the site, and on Friday, the ODPM created a community emergency response team at the site.

Balance and common sense, guided by informed advice from seismologists and geologists, should guide the state’s future planning for the Piparo site and the size of any expansion of the exclusion zone for homes in the area.

The risk to life and property must be balanced against the value of the Devil’s Woodyard as an ecotourism site and residential zoning should be informed by scientific analysis in this situation.

But the State must then make an informed judgement call, and not leave the safety of citizens to the whims of nature.