They Buried a Capital City. It's Still the Capital.

🌋 There is one country on Earth where you are not allowed to enter your own capital city. Not because of a war — because it is buried. On 25 June 1997 the Soufrière Hills volcano took twenty-five minutes to sweep the northern side of Montserrat. Nineteen people died. It destroyed the island's only airport. Six weeks later, eighty per cent of the capital, Plymouth, was gone under ash and mud that set with the density of concrete. Two out of every three people on the island left, and about four thousand of them ended up in Britain. And on every official document, Plymouth is still the capital of Montserrat. This is the full story: the Irish settlers of 1632 and the slave uprising that made St Patrick's Day a ten-day holiday here; the decade when George Martin's AIR Studios brought the Rolling Stones, Dire Straits and The Police to an island of eleven thousand people; Hurricane Hugo; the three evacuations of Plymouth; the twenty-five minutes of 25 June 1997; the largest lava dome collapse ever recorded anywhere on Earth; and the country that had to build a replacement capital from nothing in the third of an island nobody had planned to use. ⏱️ CHAPTERS 0:00 🚫 A capital nobody is allowed to enter 1:33 🍀 The island before the volcano 4:12 🎸 The ten years the world came to record here 6:13 🌀 Hurricane Hugo: the first loss 7:28 💨 The mountain wakes up 9:11 ⏳ Living in the waiting room 10:53 ⏱️ Twenty-five minutes 12:26 🏚️ The death of a town 14:12 ✈️ Two thirds of a nation leaves 15:44 🪨 The mountain was not finished 16:31 🏗️ Rebuilding a country from the north 18:49 🗺️ Today 🔔 Subscribe — a new forgotten place every week. 📚 SOURCES "Plymouth, Montserrat" — Wikipedia (settled 1632, St Anthony's church 1636, ~4,000 residents in the town, evacuations 21 Aug 1995 / 1 Dec 1995 / 3 Apr 1996, last legal daytime access 16 June 1997, 25 June 1997, 4-8 August 1997 destroying about 80% of the town, 1.4 m of ash, deposits with the density of concrete, de jure capital, Brades de facto, Little Bay, fewer than 1,200 residents in 1997) "Soufrière Hills" — Wikipedia (915 m before 1995, about 1,050 m by 2015, quiet for roughly 95 years, 19 deaths on 25 June 1997, the airport directly in the path of the main flow, dome collapse 11 Feb 2010) Montserrat Volcano Observatory — chronology of eruptive events and Scientific Report 68 (flows began 12:55 on 25 June 1997 and ran 25 minutes down Mosquito Ghaut and the Paradise River; 100-150 houses damaged; Streatham, Dyers, Harris, Bethel, Bramble, Trants, Farms and Spanish Point) Herd, Edmonds & Bass, "Catastrophic lava dome failure at Soufrière Hills Volcano, 12-13 July 2003" (210 million m³ over 18 hours, 170 million of it in 2.6 hours — the largest recorded dome collapse) "Montserrat" — Wikipedia (population 10,581 in 1995; about 7,000 left, roughly 4,000 to the UK; right of abode in the UK from 1998 and full British citizenship from 2002; the 17 March 1768 uprising and the ten-day St Patrick's holiday; Irish spoken on the island into the mid-1800s; over 90% of structures damaged by Hurricane Hugo in 1989; commercial lime juice from 1852, over 100,000 gallons a year by 1895; the Antigua ferry ended in 2020; UK support of about £25 million a year; population about 4,400 in 2024) "AIR Studios" — Wikipedia (George Martin opened AIR Montserrat in July 1979 on a 26-acre farm; Jimmy Buffett's "Volcano" 1979; Dire Straits "Brothers in Arms"; The Police "Ghost in the Machine" and "Synchronicity"; Rolling Stones "Steel Wheels" 1989; closed after Hurricane Hugo, 17 Sept 1989) ICAI, "DFID's support to capital projects in Montserrat" (about £324 million of UK aid, 1997-2012) 🎵 MUSIC Interloper · Earth Prelude · Dreams Become Real · The Descent · Dark Fog · Ouroboros · Dark Times · Mourning Song · Peaceful Desolation · Unanswered Questions · Himalayan Atmosphere — Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b... 🔊 SOUND "Eruption of Mount St. Helens, heard from 140 miles away" (CC BY 3.0), "Howling wind" (CC0), "Sea waves" (CC BY-SA 4.0), "Rain and thunder" (public domain), "Helicopter over a lake" (public domain) — via Wikimedia Commons. #Montserrat #Plymouth #ForgottenPlaces