sto­ries by Eliz­a­beth Gon­za­les

To­ba­go Cor­re­spon­dent

For­mer prime min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley says his re­tire­ment from pub­lic of­fice marks a re­turn to his first love—vol­cano re­search. Next month, he’ll be back in the field.

Row­ley, who spoke at a Men in Lead­er­ship fo­rum at Bish­op’s High School, To­ba­go, on Sat­ur­day night, was asked by Chief Sec­re­tary Far­ley Au­gus­tine about his plans now that he has stepped away from pol­i­tics. The for­mer prime min­is­ter, who led T&T for near­ly a decade, said he’s go­ing back to what he miss­es most.

“Now that I have re­tired from pol­i­tics, the very first thing I want to do is to get back in­to vol­ca­noes, so as a re­sult of that, I’ve agreed next month I’m go­ing to Montser­rat, where we cel­e­brate a con­fer­ence of 30 years of the vol­cano that de­stroyed Montser­rat,” he said.

“I’m div­ing straight back in­to that, not as a job, but as in­tel­lec­tu­al stim­u­la­tion.”

Be­fore he en­tered pol­i­tics, Row­ley, a ge­ol­o­gist, was head of the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies Seis­mic Re­search Cen­tre.

At the fo­rum, he spoke about his ear­ly ca­reer in vol­canol­o­gy and what drew him in­to the field.

“I had the op­por­tu­ni­ty on more than one oc­ca­sion to stand be­tween pop­u­la­tions that were threat­ened and vol­ca­noes that are vir­tu­al­ly a su­per what­ev­er and ... I felt that is the biggest sac­ri­fice that I could have made,” he said.

He said his de­ci­sion to get in­volved in vol­canol­o­gy was based on the re­gion’s vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty. Al­though mil­lions live near vol­canic cen­tres, the Caribbean once had no one for­mal­ly trained in the field.

Row­ley said his re­turn to sci­ence is not about work, but about stay­ing men­tal­ly en­gaged in some­thing that still ex­cites him.

While he has not ruled out pro­vid­ing ad­vice as a for­mer leader, he said his in­volve­ment in pol­i­tics go­ing for­ward would be lim­it­ed.

His planned trip to Montser­rat next month will co­in­cide with the 30th an­niver­sary of the Soufrière Hills erup­tion, which dev­as­tat­ed large parts of the is­land and per­ma­nent­ly changed life for its res­i­dents.

He did not dis­close the spe­cif­ic roles he might play at the con­fer­ence and said he was ea­ger to re­turn to the field that once de­fined him.

Step­ping back in­to vol­canol­o­gy of­fers the kind of in­tel­lec­tu­al chal­lenge he seeks and the re­gion still needs voic­es with lived ex­pe­ri­ence man­ag­ing nat­ur­al dis­as­ters, Row­ley said.