I was fully prepared to like La Catastrophe: The Eruption of Mount Pelée, the Worst Volcanic Disaster of the 20th Century by Alwyn Scarth and I did: just not as much as I hoped. Scarth is a Professor of Geography in Scotland has written several books about volcanoes and volcanic eruptions. In La Catastrophe he looks at the French colony of Martinique immediately before during and after deadly eruption of 1902. Scarth does a nice job discussing the social / racial divide on the island, particular as it pertained to the eruption and its aftermath. Scarth also makes very clear how, at the time, very little was known of the mechanics volcanoes; anyone on Martinique making predictions about the eruption was indulging in ill-informed guesswork. Certainly, the powers that be on the island had no reason to think that the city of Saint-Pierre and 26,000 people would be wiped out in a matter of minutes by a pyroclastic flow on May 8th.

Scarth does a particularly fine job explaining the development of the eruption and the warning signs that no one understood. Unfortunately, much of this information is presented in sidebars. Initially, I like the use of sidebars, but came to find them annoying as they disrupted the flow of the narrative. Much of the information they included could have been integrated into the main text.

Also, Scarth, for undisclosed reasons, chooses to use the French term nuée ardente (incandescent or glowing cloud) in place of the more common pyroclastic flow. Granted, he may have decided to use the French phrase while discussing the Mount Pelée eruption of 1902 because it was the term popularized after the disaster; the preferred modern term pyroclastic flow came into usage later. What I fail to understand, however, is why a professor who works in Great Britain and is writing for the Oxford University Press in English, never once uses the term pyroclastic flow nor explains that it and nuée ardente are one and the same. Why potentially confuse the reader?

In addition, Scarth points out that his conclusions about the actions of the local government throughout the eruption counter those of others who have written on the topic. Certainly, his conclusions seem reasonable, but the lack of footnotes, endnotes or parenthetical citations makes it difficult for the reader to make his or her own evaluation of his sources. There is a bibliography, but it is difficult to connect fact to source.

La Catastrophe is a good, if flawed, overview of the deadliest volcanic disaster of the 20th century.