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Historic Disasters That Were Way Worse Than People Think

Khalid Elhassan April 6, 2020 33 min

Yellow River - 1887 Yellow River flood — 1887 Yellow River Flood. Hakai Magazine

20. “The Town Vanished Before Our Eyes”

Saint Pierre before and after the Mount Pelee eruption. Earth Magazine

When Mount Pelee erupted, all of Saint Pierre’s buildings were flattened, and the population was burned or suffocated to death. Offshore, a witness in a steamship described the city’s fate when the incandescent cloud hit: “The fire rolled down upon Saint Pierre. The town vanished before our eyes“. The eruption killed about 28,000 people in Saint Pierre – nearly the town’s entire population, except for one man: Auguste Cyparis.

A laborer and frequent troublemaker, Cyparis had gotten into a bar brawl on the night of May 7^th, some hours before the eruption. He was thrown into jail overnight for assault, and locked in solitary confinement. That was in a partially underground magazine with stone walls, which doubled as a cell. It had no windows, and its only ventilation was through tiny gratings on a door facing away from the volcano. In short, Cyparis’ solitary confinement cell was the most sheltered place in Saint Pierre. That saved his life.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.