Skip to main content

Menegai is firing up agan








One of my former Menengai High School students, Narendra Khagram, sent me the attached photo of Menengai Crater with the message that Menengai, long considered a dormant volcano, is showing signs of activity. The accompanying photograph shows either smoke or steam - it's difficult to tell which with any certainty.  The activity shown in the photograph is almost insignificant compared with, for example, the eruption that took place in La Palma in the Canary Islands and lasted 85 days until December 14, 2021. Although Menengai crater is considered dormant, in view of the increased activity, it is prudent of the authorities to have alerted residents of Nakuru to the possibility of danger especially as fault lines run near the city and cracks have occurred recently showing signs of dangerous activity below.


I taught in Nakuru from 1961 to 1970 at Menengai High School. Cybele and I had a lovely house on the last road on the way up the crater which is the second-largest volcanic caldera in Africa after Ngorongoro. Around the mid-sixties, a tremor shook Nakuru at night. Cybele and I slept through it. The next day, when we heard the news on the radio, we checked around our house and the only evidence of a tremor that we noticed was that some pictures on the wall were askew. No big deal, I thought.

Anyway, as the subject was topical, we invited a Government seismologist to give us a talk on volcanic activity in Kenya's Rift Valley. We were aware that there had been a major earthquake of 6.9 magnitudes in the Subukia Valley (about 30 miles from Nakuru) in 1928, but there had not been anything of consequence since then to our knowledge. In my naivety, I asked the expert how often there was evidence of volcanic activity in Nakuru.

"Oh," said the seismologist, "on an average, we have a tremor once every four minutes," he stated, quite matter-of-factly!

ONCE EVERY FOUR MINUTES!!! My house, scenically located on the slopes of Menengai, is in the first line of fire. If lava comes pouring out of the sleeping giant, I thought, Cybele, Lisa and I would be toast in seconds!  

As it happened, we lived quite safely and slept quite soundly for a further five years in Nakuru till the Ministry of Education transferred me to Mombasa, Cybele's birthplace on Kenya's beautiful coastline, 400 miles away from the seismic danger zone.

image.png
Lava streams from the volcano in La Palma burying vineyards, houses.
cars, everything in their way.

image.png
Cracks and sinkholes in West Nakuru along fault lines.

From time to time, I have heard reports of increased volcanic and seismic activity in Kenya's Rift Valley. Longido, near Arusha, (not far from majestic Mt. Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa), has an earthquake or two of a magnitude of 5.0 or higher every month. The doom and gloom fear mongers are convinced that in the not too distant future a whole chunk of Eastern Africa is going to break off at the Rift Valley fault line and become an island the size of Australia! I'm not the gambling kind but I would quite happily wager a buck or two that such a catastrophe won't happen in my lifetime. What is much more likely is that Menengai is likely to continue to give the residents of Nakuru the jitters to an increasing extent. Nakuru was a town of 45,000 when I left. It has increased tenfold to a city of 400,000. A major earthquake or volcanic eruption in the area would have serious consequences for a city of that size. I pray it won't happen. I spent ten of the happiest and most productive years of my life there and have very many happy memories of Nakuru and its people, especially my students and colleagues.

Francis

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

MORE photos of cricketers in Kenya added

More cricket photos added! Asians v Europeans, v Tanganyika, v Uganda, v East Africa, Rhodesia, etc some names missing! Photo Gallery of Kenya Cricket 23 photos: CM Gracias, Blaise d'Cunha Johnny Lobo! Ramanbhai Patel, Mehboob Ali, Basharat Hassan and hundreds others.  

Pinto: Blood on Western and Kenyan hands

  BOOK REVIEW   Pinto: Blood on Western and Kenyan hands   Review by Cyprian Fernandes     Pio Gama Pinto, Kenya’s Unsung Martyr 1927-1965 Edited by Shiraz Durrani [Vita Books, Kenya, 2018, 392 pp.   Pbk, £30, ISBN 978-9966-1890-0-4; distributed worldwide by African Books Collective, www.africanbookscollective.com ]   Less than two years after independence from the British, on 24 February 1965, the Kenyan nationalist Pio Gama Pinto was gunned down in the driveway of his Nairobi home.   His young daughter watched helplessly in the back seat of the family car.   Pinto, a Member of Parliament at the time, was Kenya’s first political martyr.   One man was wrongly accused of his death, served several years in prison and was later released and compensated.   Since then no one has been charged with the murder.   Now the long-awaited book on Pio Gama Pinto is finally here, launched in Nairobi on 16 October 2018....

Celly Dias: one of Uganda's greatest sportsmen

  Celly Dias One of Uganda’s greatest sportsmen By Norman Da Costa Celly Dias will be remembered for his excellence on and off the field. He used his creativity and skills to get to the top. Then he turned his attention indoors and again mastered the intricacies of each sport to reign supreme. Celly was a legend in Uganda and his impact on the field was immediate and profound. He enjoyed the best of two worlds – indoors and outdoors - and even his opponents admired him and spoke in glowing terms of this sportsman. He was a sportsman in the true real sense of the word. Having met and interviewed some of the greatest sportsmen during my career in Kenya and later in Canada one thing that struck me about Celly was that he reminded me of tennis ace Roger Federer - humble and down-to-earth.  Celly, who passed away at the age of 94, still followed every sport closely and would analyze the strengths and weaknesses of a batsman or a bowler. This isn’t surprising as Celly p...