THE Board of the Caribbean Development Bank on Thursday approved a grant of over $300 000  towards an early warning tidal wave system ­ the first for the Caribbean.

The system to warn the Caribbean of possible tsunamis (tidal waves) triggered by the underwater volcano, Kick 'em Jenny, is to be set up within the "next few months". The system comes as the volcano, located north of Grenada, is reaching a critical point where a massive eruption will send tsunamis throughout the Caribbean.

"There could be an eruption any time now ... but we have no system to get the message out (to the Caribbean) if there is an eruption outside of 8 a.m. to 4 p.m," Joyce Thomas, national disaster co-ordinator in Grenada, told the Sun On Saturday.

However, the bank's director of projects, Desmond Brunton, confirmed that the board had approved the grant of $340 120 Thursday towards the early warning system. The grant is being given to the Seismic Research Unit

 (SRU) of the University of the West Indies in Trinidad which is setting up the system. The SRU is providing the balance of funding for the project costing a total of $421 800. Dr. John Shepherd, director of the SRU, said it should be in place within a few months.

There is a single monitoring station on Mount St. Catherine in northern Grenada, but more equipment will be set up on the sea floor and on islands closer to the volcano.

"These will send data in real time to a monitoring centre in the north of Grenada, manned by local people whom we will train, and the data will come to the office here, so we will know much more quickly when activity is developing at Kick 'em Jenny," said Shepherd.
"The major hazard is a tsunami. The volcano has never gone into full eruption instantaneously, so we expect a day or two warning as the thing builds up to full eruption."

The summit of the volcano is now around 130 to 140 metres below the sea surface and the pressure of the water dampens explosions, but once it reaches 110 metres, Shepherd said eruptions would become more violent and a massive eruption would trigger a tsunami. Grenada is expected to be hardest hit with waves around 150 feet in 15 minutes, in the worst case scenario, while Barbados is expected to be least affected by waves around 12 feet in 40 minutes. These waves will be travelling at speeds between 300 to 500 miles per hour.

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