Akash Sama­roo

An­jalie Ram­goolam and her fam­i­ly went to get sup­plies at Massy Stores in Kingstown but re­turned home emp­ty hand­ed.

“The gro­ceries are prac­ti­cal­ly emp­ty now. They packed out stuff on Fri­day and to­day (Sat­ur­day) there is noth­ing, Bar­ba­dos sent some re­lief items so we may get stuff from that. Hon­est­ly, we weren’t able to get any­thing to­day,” Ram­goolam told Guardian Me­dia.

She and her par­ents live 21 kilo­me­tres from the La Soufriere vol­cano but even at that dis­tance they are feel­ing the ef­fects.

“I’m liv­ing in Queen’s Dri­ve. Out­side you can­not see any­thing, there’s so much ash and it’s so cloudy, you can­not go out­side right now, and we’ve been ad­vised to stay in the house.”

Ram­goolam, 26, said de­spite Gov­ern­ment’s warn­ing there sur­pris­ing­ly was still a lot of ac­tiv­i­ty on the is­land de­spite the ash.

“It’s al­most as if it is a nor­mal day if you think about it.”

But while old­er cit­i­zens of St Vin­cent and the Grenadines may have seen this be­fore when the same vol­cano erupt­ed in 1979, for the Ram­goolams, these aren’t nor­mal days.

“It’s fright­en­ing and I was ask­ing my par­ents when next we will get a breath of fresh air, it’s amaz­ing and scary.”

Ram­goolam said she would like to re­turn to Trinidad and To­ba­go and so would a few oth­er T&T na­tion­als on the is­land.

How­ev­er, the Ar­gyle In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port is al­so af­fect­ed by the ash.

Dr Amery Browne, the Min­is­ter of For­eign and Cari­com Af­fairs said the Min­istry of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty said all ef­forts were be­ing made to ac­com­mo­date na­tion­al who re­quired evac­u­a­tion. He said that for­tu­nate­ly there had been no in­ci­dents of T&T na­tion­als be­ing harmed dur­ing the vol­cano’s erup­tion and he thanked the Gov­ern­ment there for how it was han­dling the sit­u­a­tion.

Browne said he was mon­i­tor­ing the sit­u­a­tion dai­ly and the in­for­ma­tion gath­ered would be fac­tored in­to this coun­try’s re­lief ef­forts.

“For ex­am­ple, the Vin­cen­tians are in­di­cat­ing that their ground wa­ter sup­ply is like­ly to be chal­lenged due to quan­ti­ties of ash and dust af­fect­ing their ex­ist­ing wa­ter catch­ment ar­eas. The Trinidad and To­ba­go De­fence Force has been made aware and has in­cor­po­rat­ed these types of in­puts in­to their mo­bil­i­sa­tion pro­ce­dures,” he said.