A VOLCANO’S TOLL: Disaster In Colombia
By Tomas Guillen
Seattle Times staff reporter
GUAYABAL, Colombia – The voice that came out of the weak, early morning light was that of a child, or a young girl. She was hurt, or she couldn’t move. I couldn’t tell. There was just the high-pitched voice, pleading for help.
And I wasn’t sure where she was, either. Across the dark, stinking waste of mud that had poured off the mountain for miles, it was hard to tell where sounds came from.
Two days had passed since Nevado del Ruiz had sent a torrent of watery earth sweeping through a prosperous farming area of 40,000 people.
The girl crying for help – injured or stuck, lost or trapped – had probably been calling out for 55 hours. No one had heard, or no one had stopped if they had heard. One voice, one person, in a disaster so huge that the death toll had started at 20,000, and then grown.
Times photographer Jimi Lott and I had landed in Bogota late Friday, hired a driver and car, and driven 90 miles through the night from Colombia’s capital to the edge of the disaster area.
By 5:30 a.m. it was light enough for Carlos the driver to decide he couldn’t go any farther on the muddy road – and that’s exactly what he said: "No mas." We were four miles from Armero, or what was left of Armero. Within minutes Wednesday night, the town had ceased to exist.
Jimi and I decided to try walking.
Driving in the dark from Mariquita, to the village of Guayabal, then toward Armero, we could smell the disaster before we saw it. There was the mud, and there was the smell of decay of thousands of animal and human bodies.
In first light we could see the devastation.
For miles tons and tons of mud covered the countryside. The bloated bodies of men, women and children lay strewn across the landscape, where the mud had carried them. A cow, neck-deep in the ooze, mood mournfully in the eerie morning, but mostly there was silence. In some places, telephone poles showed how deep the mud had flowed; it rose almost to their crossbars. In other places it was impossible to tell the depth.
Up the road we met a driver who had been waiting for light, to drive his gasoline tanker into the area to refuel emergency vehicles. Urgently, he pointed to where the flowing mud had parted to create an island of brush and trees. There was a farmhouse and several smaller buildings. The driver said, "Una nina llora! (A little girl cries). Mira (Look). Mija grita, llore! (Little girl, cry!"
The high-pitched voice cried out from somewhere within the island, across a 40-year-wide channel of mud. We couldn't pinpoint the voice, and we didn't want to go into the mud.
In a few minutes the tanker driver left. Jimi went back to the car for his cameras. I stayed and called to the girl to cry out again.
And then in the road appeared a short stocky man, wearing a purple shirt, blinking wild, red eyes, marching determinedly toward the mud.
"Where are you going?" I asked him.
"To get food for my family."
"But this is all mud. There’s no food here."
"Follow me," he said.
"I pointed to the island. "A girl cries out over there," I said.
"I’m going there," he said. "Come, come."
Without hesitating, he stepped into the mud. Quickly, it was up to his thighs.
The man, whose name was Jose Navaro, operated a farm whose land we were on; the house on the island was his.
I didn’t want to follow. I was afraid of the mud. Then, from somewhere, another photographer appeared. He said he was from Newsday, and he pushed into the mud behind Navaro.
So I followed, still afraid. The black mud was like clay, with the thick consistency of freshly poured concrete. It stuck to me like bread dough with too much water, and it was full of sand, rocks and broken sticks.
Halfway across, Navaro was up to his midsection. Crossing the mud was hard labor. He grunted and groaned as he stretched and lurched with each step. My legs felt like I had run a hundred times up and down the steps of a stadium.
The Newsday photographer gave up and turned back. I resented it when he reached the road and walked away without waiting to see what would happen to us. I began to feel panicky following the wild-eyed Colombian farmer.
Although he was smaller, he was leaving me behind. My legs were so tired that I tried to steady myself with my hands on the surface of the mud. They simply sank into the ooze. I felt closer to panic. The mud was up to my belly. I worried about slipping, sinking, disappearing.
"Senor," I said, "slow down, wait for me."
He said we would be fine, but the images of half-buried people and animals kept coming to mind. I lifted one foot after the other, pushing myself beyond what I thought I could give.
The child had stopped crying out. I hadn’t forgotten her, but first I had to get across the mud.
Finally, I hit a buried stump. I knew I needed to take off my heavy boots. They had been valuable when I covered the eruption of El Chichon in the rough mountains of Southern Mexico in 1982. But here they were pulling me down.
Very, very slowly I unstrapped the boots and flung them ahead of me onto the mud. I eased off my small pack, filled with water and food, and threw it after the boots. I didn’t really care if they all sank. Removing the boots made a big difference.
The short man crawled out, almost swimming against the mud. On the island he gathered a few wide boards and threw them toward me across the last yards of mud. The boards sank several inches as I leaned on them, but they helped.
The man wanted me to see his house and help him get food for his family from a storeroom. His family was safe in Guayabal. He said he had pulled several people from the mud two days earlier and had left. But had come back and decided to fight through the mud, because food was running short for eruption survivors in Guayabal.
I told him we first had to find the crying girl. He finally agreed, got a long rope, and walked with me toward the cries we could now hear clearly. It took only a few minutes to find the source of the cry. In tall grass, across a barbed wire fence, was not a girl, but a teen-age boy.
The boy was covered with dried mud, and he looked like he had been rolled in brown flour. Like so many of the volcano’s victims, or survivors, he was naked. The mudflow had stripped away his clothing. But he had held onto a faded red handkerchief, and he covered his genitals with it.
He had what appeared to be a broken ankle, with the bone turned inward awkwardly.
His eyes were wide, and his mouth seemed ready to cry out again.
He was 16, he told us, and he had called for help in a high-pitched girl’s voice because the sound carried better and took less of his energy.
And then the boy, Ramiro Delgado, blurted: "The helicopters don’t stop. I’ve been waving with my handkerchief for three days. WHY? I’ve been dragging myself away from Armero. Can you get me out?"
I carried him on my back toward the mud. The farmer went to a storehouse and rejoined us carrying a large bag filled with food and three chickens tied together by their feet.
I asked Ramiro what had happened.
"They said that if something happened the Red Cross would help us, that the mud would travel slowly and there would be time to get out. We were asleep. The mud smashed our house. I said: ‘Mommy grab my hand.’ She did. The mud tore us apart. My father and grandfather cried, ‘Jesus.’ My mommy screamed ‘Help me!’ and I didn’t see her again.
Ramiro wept.
I gave him my shirt and water. A few minutes later Jimi reappeared with his cameras on the other side of the mudflow. I yelled that we had an injured boy and I didn’t think we could recross the mud. I asked Jimi to continue to Armero to look for rescuers and a helicopter. He headed off, only to discover that mud blocked the road two kilometers farther toward the ruined town.
For two hours we waved at helicopters overhead, but they didn’t see us. Then several Colombian Civil Defense volunteers came along the road. They had a bright yellow blanket and flagged down a helicopter.
It took only minutes for Ramiro, Navaro, his three chickens and me to be evacuated to a hospital in Guayabal. Ramiro was carried inside, with scores of photographers taking his picture, and Navaro disappeared.
Eventually, Jimi, our driver and I found each other again. Jimi was still shaken from trying to walk through the mud to Armero.
"What was awful was that each step was a nightmare," he said. "You could tell when you were stepping on rocks or stepping on bodies. I could feel with my foot and you could feel it was a body."
At one point Jimi used his foot to lift something from the mud – a human hand.
"It was horrifying," he said.
It is almost impossible to believe that an entire city, a commercial center the size of Olympia or Bremerton, could be wiped out so easily.
In one moment Armero, known was the "White City" because of its many cotton and rice fields, was a brisk agricultural center, exporting to the United States, Canada and Germany. At least nine banks served its growers, businessmen and citizens.
In the next moment, Armero had begun to disappear.
On Wednesday night, November 13, a torrent of mud poured off the sides of Nevado del Ruiz and down a river course. It smashed and buried men, women, children, dogs, pigs, trucks, homes, office buildings and 50,000 acres of land.
The mud roared like ten thousand bulls running wild, survivors said. It swept away whole families. It caught fleeing victims just feet outside their homes. It leveled the town.
The gravely mud undressed its victims, stripping their clothes as it tumbled them, sometimes for miles. Most survivors, rescued in the days after the eruption, were found completely naked, struggling in the dense ooze. The power of the mud took victims’ skin, hair, limbs. To survive such a battering was a miracle, and the deaths vastly outnumbered the miracles.
When it was over, there was nothing uglier than the land around Armero. It looked as if someone had filled and then emptied a huge blender of black clay, sand, pigs, trucks and cars, pets, televisions, appliances, whole buildings, mills, tractors, trees and as many as 27,000 humans, including 8,000 children. It was not always easy to understand what one was seeing in the earth: Two round objects that appeared to be rocks actually were a child’s buttocks.
The destruction in Colombia went far beyond what I saw deep in Southern Mexico in 1982 when a lumpy volcano named El Chichon erupted all over a half a dozen Indian pueblos.
As in Colombia, El Chicon erupted at night, catching people in their homes. As El Chichon blasted rocks up to 40 miles away, a gaseous cloud descended one side of the mountain and ignited everything in its path: straw huts, dogs, cattle, fields and people’s clothes.
El Chichon is remembered for the blanket of rocks and fine dirt it left over miles and miles of Southern Mexico. Even as I interviewed survivors a week after the first eruption, the mountain kept spewing ash that choked the land of life.
Colombia’s volcano will be remembered for its tons of ugly black mud.
The 17,716-foot volcano, at the north end of the great Andes, had been belching a little ash since September. On Nov. 13 there was more ash, enough to trouble many people who wondered what they should do. One of them was Diva Cuartas, a doctor at San Jose Mariquita Hospital in Mariquita, 17 miles from Armero.
Cuartas repeatedly called various officials that evening. She was told to simply close all the doors and windows to the hospital to keep the ash out.
"Tranquila, tranquila (Stay calm, stay calm)," she was told.
At 7 the next morning she went to work – and heard the reports that Armero was no more. A sea of mud, created by volcanic heat melting snow atop Nevado del Ruiz, had created a wasteland.
Cuartas and another doctor quickly packed medical supplies and drove to Guayabal, between Mariquita and Armero. Guayabal became a rescue center. Cuartas, 38, one of the first to reach the scene of the disaster, described what she saw:
"There was an odor of death. Twenty-eight persons were lying dead in the churchyard. People were crying but they wouldn’t talk, as if they were stunned, lost. People were walking in circles.
"The dead were scraped up. Men, women, children. They were all scratched up, all scratched up. Disfigured. Some had no legs and one had no head. A child of 5 months drowned. Mangled bodies. But there was no blood. There was not one drop of blood. The hot mud apparently sealed the wounds.
"When survivors began to talk, they said that about 8 p.m. they were told by a church priest with a bullhorn not to worry about the falling sand. They were told to close their doors and go to sleep.
"The first wave of people brought in by Civil Defense were more dead than injured. Seven would be brought in dead, then three alive. There were no children alive. No injured children. The majority of the children died.
By 2 p.m. the churchyard, schools and the college were full of dead. The church floor was wall-to-wall dead. Tractors carried away the dead 10 to 12 at a time on a tractor blade."
Among the few who escaped was Modesto Bocanegra Menesses, 47, an Armero taxi driver with a wife and three daughters.
"Like everybody else, I was asleep. I had my taxi a few steps away from the door but I couldn’t even open the door to the house. The mud just pushed the whole house," he said.
"It dragged me about two miles. I begged God to knock me out or let me die because it hurt. I got hit and hit. People screamed. It all happened in a minute.
"The mud grabbed me and pushed me under. I would come up again and again. I couldn’t breathe. When the mud stopped carrying me, I had mud up to here in my nose." He measured two inches with his finger. "The mud was in my nose, mouth and ears."
Of the rest of his family, only Sarina, 12, apparently survived. She said she woke up when the mud hit her in the face. She was luckier than most. For some reason, she stayed atop and the mud as it pushed through the town, riding the floor, suffering only scratches on her face.
Bocanegra’s wife, a bakery operator, and two other daughters remained missing. Also feared dead were his two brothers and two sisters and all of their families – 16 people altogether.
"Oh, how the people screamed," Bocanegra said. "But I guess I screamed too."
Another who survived, with her son and two daughters, was Alba Maria Triviedo, a widow who was a public health nurse in Armero. As the wall of mud came, she refused to try to escape.
"The priest told everyone not to worry, not to be alarmed," she explained. "The whole world locked themselves in."
When the roar of the mud reached her home, her son begged for the family to flee. She decided not to try. If it was time to die, she said, then she would die. Instead, she and her children knelt to pray on a patch of concrete a few yards outside their home.
"The mud tore down our house. Everything around us was destroyed, but it didn’t touch us," Triviedo said. "It was a miracle we lived. We walked out by ourselves. We didn’t eat or drink for two days. It’s so spooky now. So ugly. It smells terrible.
"We all thought the priest who told us to lock ourselves in had died, but people say he went to Ibaqui (a larger city) early that night. Can you imagine, he lived?"
The mud struck about 10:30 p.m. Wednesday. By noon the next day the rescue efforts were under way. Scores of soldiers descended on what was left of Armero – a graveyard and a few buildings on the highest ground, and the dark, stinking plain of mud everywhere else. Survivors were found in miraculous circumstances, stuck in the mud, buried in the mud, in the tattered wreckage of buildings which had been swept along by the torrent. By the end of last week, the number of survivors was estimated at 9,000.
The Red Cross arrived with drugs and other medical supplies and set up a helicopter pad to evacuate the seriously injured to the hospital in Mariquita. Planes, helicopters, buses and private vehicles all became ambulances.
On Friday, the second day after the eruption, Cuartas and five other doctors established quarters at a Guayabal church, and treated 30 or 40 persons each.
Two Bogota doctors sent 100 blankets and 200 bed sheets. Altogether, residents of the capital contributed $300,000 worth of drugs and clothing in the first days.
Aid took different forms. From Mariquita, a soft-drink company sent free more than 100,000 gallon bottles of water and 30,000 12-packs of soft drinks. The company also contributed 2,500 gallons of gasoline for emergency vehicles.
On Friday, with a rising threat of epidemic because of the thousands of unburied dead, mass burials began. Between 200 to 300 victims went into a grave outside the wall of Guayabal’s cemetery.
"No one could go start taking fingerprints," said Cuartas, working into her second day with little sleep or food. "We had to care for the living."
On Saturday, she began distributing two busloads of pocket-size plastic bottles of water, and five busloads of food.
Besides medicine and food and water, rescue officials had brought to the emergency sites hundreds of plastic body bags. But it was decided, for now, that the dead would be left in the fields.
Instead, Cuartas gave the bags to the survivors. They used them to carry away food and clothing they needed.
There was so much death, especially of children. Ravaged bodies and ravaged, bewildered survivors. Families annihilated, a city crushed. Jimi and I were dazed, emotionally and physically exhausted, after our first hours near Armero. We’d had no food, little water.
Late Saturday afternoon we made it back to Mariquita. We needed to rest and eat. But as we sat down in a motel dining area, we saw cars and trucks loaded with frightened people speeding into town on the highway from Guayabal.
A radio was turned on, and government bulletins blasted out. Everyone in Guayabal, Mariquita and Honda was being urged to evacuate immediately:
"ANOTHER TORRENT OF MUD IS COMING DOWN FROM NEVADO DEL RUIZ. THIS ONE IS TWICE TO THREE TIMES LARGER THAN THE ONE THAT HIT THE AREA WEDNESDAY. GET OUT NOW. EVERYONE IN THE THREE TOWNS SHOULD EVACUATE. SAVE YOURSELVES."
People were moving quickly. We ran to our motel room, grabbed the few clothes we had brought and jumped into Carlos’ old Chevrolet. The motel owners were emptying their cash register, ready to flee.
On the highway we joined a growing river of cars, trucks and motorcycles racing down toward Honda, where a steel bridge crossed the large Rio Magdalena and the road turned up again to higher ground. It was 16 miles to the outskirts of Honda. By the time we reached the town, both edges of the highway also were crowded with people fleeing on foot, carrying sacks on their backs and children in their arms.
Fright turned to panic in Honda. Three roads, swollen with traffic, converged on the bridge. The exodus stopped almost dead at the bottleneck. It was the worst place to be stuck, for it was feared new mudflows could create a flood in the river. The bridge could be wiped out. People were in a frenzy to cross.
Somehow, Carlos got us across. He had been anxious to return to Bogota since his first sight of the death and the mud that morning. For an hour we crawled up the road through narrow mountain passes with an endless caravan of frightened people, then stopped in a village to spend the night.
By 5 a.m. we were up, headed back toward Armero, listening on the radio for bulletins on the latest round of disaster. But Saturday’s volcano warnings turned out to be a false alarm. Nothing happened, except that emotionally shattered Colombians were tormented anew with danger and a sense of helplessness.
But the radio told us plenty, particularly a station with the call letters RCN. From the first moment of the tragedy, its reporters were out with portable units. They not only reported events, but provided an electronic bulletin board, a broadcast party line, for anyone trying to get a message to someone who might, or might not, be listening.
The radio announcers walked among the people, reading messages scribbled on matchbooks, or allowing people to say a few words themselves. All day, all night, we heard:
"My name is Alejandro Zamora. I want to inform my family that we just arrived in Bogota and we are fine. Come to Bogota."
Announcer: "We are looking for the relatives of a little girl. The girl is a little fat. Black hair. On the white side. She was rescued by helicopter. She’s about 10 years old."
"This is the Gonzales family in Bogota. We want to announce that our parents are at the funeral home Ramirez."
A military roadblock had been placed on the road back toward Armero, a couple of miles past Honda. A young officer refused to allow vehicles through, though there had been no new disasters. Villagers and farmers wanted to return to their homes. Journalists from all over the world were there, arguing and shouting.
Jimi and I abandoned our driver and decided to begin walking. We told Carlos to meet us at the hospital in Mariquita when the government let cars through.
Walking, we talked to the Sandoval family – mother, father, a 5-month-old son, an 8-year-old daughter, their 70-year-old grandmother. They were beginning the 15-mile walk to Mariquita. They had ridden a bus as far as Honda in Saturday’s exodus.
"There are always these alarms," said Rubiela, the mother. "They have us going back and forth. It is hard on the kids."
A motorcycle approached. We flagged it down and paid a driver $5 to take Jimi ahead. Fifteen minutes later, other vehicles began flooding past. The officer had opened the road. Carlos found me on the highway, and we drove to the Mariquita hospital.
There, throngs of people pressed against a concrete fence around the building. Some looked for friends or relatives waiting inside. Most studied a list taped to a post. The list gave the names of survivors treated in Mariquita, and told what cities they had been transferred to, to make room in Mariquita for more injured from Guayabal.
Inside the entrance to the hospital – slumped in a chair in clothes that she’d worn for four days – I found Dr. Cuartas.
She had walked out of the hills an hour before, with colleagues and patients. Her hand shook as she lit a cigarette.
"The false alarm caused great danger," she said. "I’m like those from Armero. I would like to know why we were given bad information before the mud came. I’m sad, hurt."
From the hospital we drove past Guayabal, to a back road that had been created by survivors searching for family or going back for a look at what used to be their city. In a Civil Defense jeep we drove over downed fences, through mudholes that had been filled with sticks for traction, and past survivors who seemed to be doing nothing but hanging around, unsure what do, waiting for whatever might come next.
Our jeep was halted by a deep gully. Jimi and I got out and hiked up a steep hill. From the top, we could see Armero’s agony spread in panorama below us. A few houses stood here and there, but mostly there was the broad, featureless plateau of mud. The smell of decay was powerful.
A breeze carried the echoing yelp of a dog, stuck somewhere in the mess. Otherwise, it was eerily silent. The faces of survivors and the words of their stories swam up inside me. I could almost see them, on the night of terror, running, screaming, crying, dying. I imagined a voice, Grab my hand Daddy. Mama, Mama. God, please, help us.
I went limp. I was close to tears, and I have cried since then for the people of Armero.
After a moment, Jimi and I walked to the edge of the town, where remains of some homes still stood. Inside one, in a patch of muddy water, floated the bodies of a man and woman who had died in an embrace. Nearby was the body of a small child, face down on the surface of the mud.
In another home we saw food still in the small pan. A bed had been pushed against the front door, perhaps to keep the mud from entering.
Enough. Enough. We walked back to the jeep.
On the ride back to Guayabal, our driver pointed to men with four-wheel-drive pickup trucks.
"They are thieves." The driver spat out the words. "And look over their, our beautiful army."
Resting under a tree nearby were a dozen or so uniformed soldiers.
Bogota is only as far from Armero as Seattle is from Mount Rainier. But when we returned to the capital Monday, five days after the eruption, it seemed the tragedy had never occurred. There was little sign in Bogota of the death and mourning.
Our first stop was the Presidential Palace, where we sat down with Juan Castillo, a presidential spokesman. We felt out of place. In the rich surroundings, among government officials in fine suits, we still smelled like the mud around Armero.
Castillo said the government had been prepared for an eruption from Nevado del Ruiz, but they expected the mountain to spit rocks and then slow-moving lava that would give officials time to warn people below. No one, he said, expected the volcano’s heat to melt the snow and send the mud upon Armero.
"We just didn’t anticipate the flood of water and mud," he said.
As for Saturday’s false warnings about a bigger flood coming, Castillo blamed an error by scientists monitoring the volcano.
It still must be monitored closely. Scientists say it could erupt explosively again, since the violent forces inside are still capped by the mountaintop. How soon that might happen isn’t known. The biggest danger, scientists say, is future mudflows, because 90 percent of the volcano’s snow and ice cap remains intact, even after the disastrous melting of Nov. 13.
As for the future of Armero, the government is considering building a "New Armero" for the survivors. The new city would include homes and ranches that would provide jobs. The city cannot be built on the old site because of the mud and all the dead. So officials are looking to build New Armero just outside the pueblo of Guayabal.
Listening to Castillo, I was reminded of covering El Chicho. After the mountain’s initial explosion, I had heard one scientist insist there was little chance of it erupting again. With such advice, many peasants returned as soon as they could to what was left of their villages.
Suddenly, there was a rumble deep in the ground, the temperature rose, a curtain of smoke covered the stars in the sky and then the rocks started coming down with the speed of bullets, going through roofs. I ran yelping for cover, damning the scientist.
It is with the children that it always hurts the most. As Jimi and I visited the intensive care unit of Clinica Infatil Colsubsidi in Bogota, I kept thinking of my 3-year-old son, Felipe. There seemed to be no difference between him and one of the children we found, a 3-year-old making gurgling noises.
The staff at the hospital had called this one "NN" for "No Name."
White gauze covered his right eye. At the slightest sound NN’s puffy left eye wandered wildly, trying to locate the source, uncertain where to look.
A nurse rubbed his protruding stomach to calm him, then rubbed his swollen head. It was beet-red with scratches. NN only gurgled.
After he was flown to the clinic from Armero, the boy’s tiny body was x-rayed to check for fractures or internal injuries. Amazed doctors discovered that his intestines were filled with a mixture of mud, rocks and bits of debris. The doctors expected NN to live.
In the same hospital, two floors below, we found Marcela and Esperanza Ticora, both 6. They were beautiful little girls, and I thought of my 4-year-old, Natalie, and again wanted to cry.
Though Marcela and Esperanza survived, their pain was clear. They seemed unable to smile. Hospital workers said the girls would wake up screaming uncontrollably. Marcela couldn’t stop talking about losing her mother and how all the kitchen pots and pans had vanished, gone.
We met Luis Olarte, 8, who suffered two deep, silver-dollar-sized cuts on the side of the face.
"Jimi, Jimi," he begged, "let me take a picture of you."
Jimi gave Luis his camera. As Jimi and I embraced for him, Luis snapped away. Then he took pictures of the hospital administrator and the hospital director, the hospital walls, the doorways.
Luis’ mother had died, and he was anxious to join his father, who survived along with a 6-year-old brother.
Hospital workers had to watch the elevators closely to keep Luis from leaving. When the elevators were blocked, he ran to a phone and tried to dial out. When a nurse gently took the phone away, he proclaimed:
"I want to get out of here. Where’s my Papa?" And then he cheerfully ran around the nurses.
Luis made us laugh. He helped our spirits.
By Tomas Guillen
Seattle Times staff reporter
GUAYABAL, Colombia – The voice that came out of the weak, early morning light was that of a child, or a young girl. She was hurt, or she couldn’t move. I couldn’t tell. There was just the high-pitched voice, pleading for help.
And I wasn’t sure where she was, either. Across the dark, stinking waste of mud that had poured off the mountain for miles, it was hard to tell where sounds came from.
Two days had passed since Nevado del Ruiz had sent a torrent of watery earth sweeping through a prosperous farming area of 40,000 people.
The girl crying for help – injured or stuck, lost or trapped – had probably been calling out for 55 hours. No one had heard, or no one had stopped if they had heard. One voice, one person, in a disaster so huge that the death toll had started at 20,000, and then grown.
Times photographer Jimi Lott and I had landed in Bogota late Friday, hired a driver and car, and driven 90 miles through the night from Colombia’s capital to the edge of the disaster area.
By 5:30 a.m. it was light enough for Carlos the driver to decide he couldn’t go any farther on the muddy road – and that’s exactly what he said: "No mas." We were four miles from Armero, or what was left of Armero. Within minutes Wednesday night, the town had ceased to exist.
Jimi and I decided to try walking.
Driving in the dark from Mariquita, to the village of Guayabal, then toward Armero, we could smell the disaster before we saw it. There was the mud, and there was the smell of decay of thousands of animal and human bodies.
In first light we could see the devastation.
For miles tons and tons of mud covered the countryside. The bloated bodies of men, women and children lay strewn across the landscape, where the mud had carried them. A cow, neck-deep in the ooze, mood mournfully in the eerie morning, but mostly there was silence. In some places, telephone poles showed how deep the mud had flowed; it rose almost to their crossbars. In other places it was impossible to tell the depth.
Up the road we met a driver who had been waiting for light, to drive his gasoline tanker into the area to refuel emergency vehicles. Urgently, he pointed to where the flowing mud had parted to create an island of brush and trees. There was a farmhouse and several smaller buildings. The driver said, "Una nina llora! (A little girl cries). Mira (Look). Mija grita, llore! (Little girl, cry!"
The high-pitched voice cried out from somewhere within the island, across a 40-year-wide channel of mud. We couldn't pinpoint the voice, and we didn't want to go into the mud.
In a few minutes the tanker driver left. Jimi went back to the car for his cameras. I stayed and called to the girl to cry out again.
And then in the road appeared a short stocky man, wearing a purple shirt, blinking wild, red eyes, marching determinedly toward the mud.
"Where are you going?" I asked him.
"To get food for my family."
"But this is all mud. There’s no food here."
"Follow me," he said.
"I pointed to the island. "A girl cries out over there," I said.
"I’m going there," he said. "Come, come."
Without hesitating, he stepped into the mud. Quickly, it was up to his thighs.
The man, whose name was Jose Navaro, operated a farm whose land we were on; the house on the island was his.
I didn’t want to follow. I was afraid of the mud. Then, from somewhere, another photographer appeared. He said he was from Newsday, and he pushed into the mud behind Navaro.
So I followed, still afraid. The black mud was like clay, with the thick consistency of freshly poured concrete. It stuck to me like bread dough with too much water, and it was full of sand, rocks and broken sticks.
Halfway across, Navaro was up to his midsection. Crossing the mud was hard labor. He grunted and groaned as he stretched and lurched with each step. My legs felt like I had run a hundred times up and down the steps of a stadium.
The Newsday photographer gave up and turned back. I resented it when he reached the road and walked away without waiting to see what would happen to us. I began to feel panicky following the wild-eyed Colombian farmer.
Although he was smaller, he was leaving me behind. My legs were so tired that I tried to steady myself with my hands on the surface of the mud. They simply sank into the ooze. I felt closer to panic. The mud was up to my belly. I worried about slipping, sinking, disappearing.
"Senor," I said, "slow down, wait for me."
He said we would be fine, but the images of half-buried people and animals kept coming to mind. I lifted one foot after the other, pushing myself beyond what I thought I could give.
The child had stopped crying out. I hadn’t forgotten her, but first I had to get across the mud.
Finally, I hit a buried stump. I knew I needed to take off my heavy boots. They had been valuable when I covered the eruption of El Chichon in the rough mountains of Southern Mexico in 1982. But here they were pulling me down.
Very, very slowly I unstrapped the boots and flung them ahead of me onto the mud. I eased off my small pack, filled with water and food, and threw it after the boots. I didn’t really care if they all sank. Removing the boots made a big difference.
The short man crawled out, almost swimming against the mud. On the island he gathered a few wide boards and threw them toward me across the last yards of mud. The boards sank several inches as I leaned on them, but they helped.
The man wanted me to see his house and help him get food for his family from a storeroom. His family was safe in Guayabal. He said he had pulled several people from the mud two days earlier and had left. But had come back and decided to fight through the mud, because food was running short for eruption survivors in Guayabal.
I told him we first had to find the crying girl. He finally agreed, got a long rope, and walked with me toward the cries we could now hear clearly. It took only a few minutes to find the source of the cry. In tall grass, across a barbed wire fence, was not a girl, but a teen-age boy.
The boy was covered with dried mud, and he looked like he had been rolled in brown flour. Like so many of the volcano’s victims, or survivors, he was naked. The mudflow had stripped away his clothing. But he had held onto a faded red handkerchief, and he covered his genitals with it.
He had what appeared to be a broken ankle, with the bone turned inward awkwardly.
His eyes were wide, and his mouth seemed ready to cry out again.
He was 16, he told us, and he had called for help in a high-pitched girl’s voice because the sound carried better and took less of his energy.
And then the boy, Ramiro Delgado, blurted: "The helicopters don’t stop. I’ve been waving with my handkerchief for three days. WHY? I’ve been dragging myself away from Armero. Can you get me out?"
I carried him on my back toward the mud. The farmer went to a storehouse and rejoined us carrying a large bag filled with food and three chickens tied together by their feet.
I asked Ramiro what had happened.
"They said that if something happened the Red Cross would help us, that the mud would travel slowly and there would be time to get out. We were asleep. The mud smashed our house. I said: ‘Mommy grab my hand.’ She did. The mud tore us apart. My father and grandfather cried, ‘Jesus.’ My mommy screamed ‘Help me!’ and I didn’t see her again.
Ramiro wept.
I gave him my shirt and water. A few minutes later Jimi reappeared with his cameras on the other side of the mudflow. I yelled that we had an injured boy and I didn’t think we could recross the mud. I asked Jimi to continue to Armero to look for rescuers and a helicopter. He headed off, only to discover that mud blocked the road two kilometers farther toward the ruined town.
For two hours we waved at helicopters overhead, but they didn’t see us. Then several Colombian Civil Defense volunteers came along the road. They had a bright yellow blanket and flagged down a helicopter.
It took only minutes for Ramiro, Navaro, his three chickens and me to be evacuated to a hospital in Guayabal. Ramiro was carried inside, with scores of photographers taking his picture, and Navaro disappeared.
Eventually, Jimi, our driver and I found each other again. Jimi was still shaken from trying to walk through the mud to Armero.
"What was awful was that each step was a nightmare," he said. "You could tell when you were stepping on rocks or stepping on bodies. I could feel with my foot and you could feel it was a body."
At one point Jimi used his foot to lift something from the mud – a human hand.
"It was horrifying," he said.
It is almost impossible to believe that an entire city, a commercial center the size of Olympia or Bremerton, could be wiped out so easily.
In one moment Armero, known was the "White City" because of its many cotton and rice fields, was a brisk agricultural center, exporting to the United States, Canada and Germany. At least nine banks served its growers, businessmen and citizens.
In the next moment, Armero had begun to disappear.
On Wednesday night, November 13, a torrent of mud poured off the sides of Nevado del Ruiz and down a river course. It smashed and buried men, women, children, dogs, pigs, trucks, homes, office buildings and 50,000 acres of land.
The mud roared like ten thousand bulls running wild, survivors said. It swept away whole families. It caught fleeing victims just feet outside their homes. It leveled the town.
The gravely mud undressed its victims, stripping their clothes as it tumbled them, sometimes for miles. Most survivors, rescued in the days after the eruption, were found completely naked, struggling in the dense ooze. The power of the mud took victims’ skin, hair, limbs. To survive such a battering was a miracle, and the deaths vastly outnumbered the miracles.
When it was over, there was nothing uglier than the land around Armero. It looked as if someone had filled and then emptied a huge blender of black clay, sand, pigs, trucks and cars, pets, televisions, appliances, whole buildings, mills, tractors, trees and as many as 27,000 humans, including 8,000 children. It was not always easy to understand what one was seeing in the earth: Two round objects that appeared to be rocks actually were a child’s buttocks.
The destruction in Colombia went far beyond what I saw deep in Southern Mexico in 1982 when a lumpy volcano named El Chichon erupted all over a half a dozen Indian pueblos.
As in Colombia, El Chicon erupted at night, catching people in their homes. As El Chichon blasted rocks up to 40 miles away, a gaseous cloud descended one side of the mountain and ignited everything in its path: straw huts, dogs, cattle, fields and people’s clothes.
El Chichon is remembered for the blanket of rocks and fine dirt it left over miles and miles of Southern Mexico. Even as I interviewed survivors a week after the first eruption, the mountain kept spewing ash that choked the land of life.
Colombia’s volcano will be remembered for its tons of ugly black mud.
The 17,716-foot volcano, at the north end of the great Andes, had been belching a little ash since September. On Nov. 13 there was more ash, enough to trouble many people who wondered what they should do. One of them was Diva Cuartas, a doctor at San Jose Mariquita Hospital in Mariquita, 17 miles from Armero.
Cuartas repeatedly called various officials that evening. She was told to simply close all the doors and windows to the hospital to keep the ash out.
"Tranquila, tranquila (Stay calm, stay calm)," she was told.
At 7 the next morning she went to work – and heard the reports that Armero was no more. A sea of mud, created by volcanic heat melting snow atop Nevado del Ruiz, had created a wasteland.
Cuartas and another doctor quickly packed medical supplies and drove to Guayabal, between Mariquita and Armero. Guayabal became a rescue center. Cuartas, 38, one of the first to reach the scene of the disaster, described what she saw:
"There was an odor of death. Twenty-eight persons were lying dead in the churchyard. People were crying but they wouldn’t talk, as if they were stunned, lost. People were walking in circles.
"The dead were scraped up. Men, women, children. They were all scratched up, all scratched up. Disfigured. Some had no legs and one had no head. A child of 5 months drowned. Mangled bodies. But there was no blood. There was not one drop of blood. The hot mud apparently sealed the wounds.
"When survivors began to talk, they said that about 8 p.m. they were told by a church priest with a bullhorn not to worry about the falling sand. They were told to close their doors and go to sleep.
"The first wave of people brought in by Civil Defense were more dead than injured. Seven would be brought in dead, then three alive. There were no children alive. No injured children. The majority of the children died.
By 2 p.m. the churchyard, schools and the college were full of dead. The church floor was wall-to-wall dead. Tractors carried away the dead 10 to 12 at a time on a tractor blade."
Among the few who escaped was Modesto Bocanegra Menesses, 47, an Armero taxi driver with a wife and three daughters.
"Like everybody else, I was asleep. I had my taxi a few steps away from the door but I couldn’t even open the door to the house. The mud just pushed the whole house," he said.
"It dragged me about two miles. I begged God to knock me out or let me die because it hurt. I got hit and hit. People screamed. It all happened in a minute.
"The mud grabbed me and pushed me under. I would come up again and again. I couldn’t breathe. When the mud stopped carrying me, I had mud up to here in my nose." He measured two inches with his finger. "The mud was in my nose, mouth and ears."
Of the rest of his family, only Sarina, 12, apparently survived. She said she woke up when the mud hit her in the face. She was luckier than most. For some reason, she stayed atop and the mud as it pushed through the town, riding the floor, suffering only scratches on her face.
Bocanegra’s wife, a bakery operator, and two other daughters remained missing. Also feared dead were his two brothers and two sisters and all of their families – 16 people altogether.
"Oh, how the people screamed," Bocanegra said. "But I guess I screamed too."
Another who survived, with her son and two daughters, was Alba Maria Triviedo, a widow who was a public health nurse in Armero. As the wall of mud came, she refused to try to escape.
"The priest told everyone not to worry, not to be alarmed," she explained. "The whole world locked themselves in."
When the roar of the mud reached her home, her son begged for the family to flee. She decided not to try. If it was time to die, she said, then she would die. Instead, she and her children knelt to pray on a patch of concrete a few yards outside their home.
"The mud tore down our house. Everything around us was destroyed, but it didn’t touch us," Triviedo said. "It was a miracle we lived. We walked out by ourselves. We didn’t eat or drink for two days. It’s so spooky now. So ugly. It smells terrible.
"We all thought the priest who told us to lock ourselves in had died, but people say he went to Ibaqui (a larger city) early that night. Can you imagine, he lived?"
The mud struck about 10:30 p.m. Wednesday. By noon the next day the rescue efforts were under way. Scores of soldiers descended on what was left of Armero – a graveyard and a few buildings on the highest ground, and the dark, stinking plain of mud everywhere else. Survivors were found in miraculous circumstances, stuck in the mud, buried in the mud, in the tattered wreckage of buildings which had been swept along by the torrent. By the end of last week, the number of survivors was estimated at 9,000.
The Red Cross arrived with drugs and other medical supplies and set up a helicopter pad to evacuate the seriously injured to the hospital in Mariquita. Planes, helicopters, buses and private vehicles all became ambulances.
On Friday, the second day after the eruption, Cuartas and five other doctors established quarters at a Guayabal church, and treated 30 or 40 persons each.
Two Bogota doctors sent 100 blankets and 200 bed sheets. Altogether, residents of the capital contributed $300,000 worth of drugs and clothing in the first days.
Aid took different forms. From Mariquita, a soft-drink company sent free more than 100,000 gallon bottles of water and 30,000 12-packs of soft drinks. The company also contributed 2,500 gallons of gasoline for emergency vehicles.
On Friday, with a rising threat of epidemic because of the thousands of unburied dead, mass burials began. Between 200 to 300 victims went into a grave outside the wall of Guayabal’s cemetery.
"No one could go start taking fingerprints," said Cuartas, working into her second day with little sleep or food. "We had to care for the living."
On Saturday, she began distributing two busloads of pocket-size plastic bottles of water, and five busloads of food.
Besides medicine and food and water, rescue officials had brought to the emergency sites hundreds of plastic body bags. But it was decided, for now, that the dead would be left in the fields.
Instead, Cuartas gave the bags to the survivors. They used them to carry away food and clothing they needed.
There was so much death, especially of children. Ravaged bodies and ravaged, bewildered survivors. Families annihilated, a city crushed. Jimi and I were dazed, emotionally and physically exhausted, after our first hours near Armero. We’d had no food, little water.
Late Saturday afternoon we made it back to Mariquita. We needed to rest and eat. But as we sat down in a motel dining area, we saw cars and trucks loaded with frightened people speeding into town on the highway from Guayabal.
A radio was turned on, and government bulletins blasted out. Everyone in Guayabal, Mariquita and Honda was being urged to evacuate immediately:
"ANOTHER TORRENT OF MUD IS COMING DOWN FROM NEVADO DEL RUIZ. THIS ONE IS TWICE TO THREE TIMES LARGER THAN THE ONE THAT HIT THE AREA WEDNESDAY. GET OUT NOW. EVERYONE IN THE THREE TOWNS SHOULD EVACUATE. SAVE YOURSELVES."
People were moving quickly. We ran to our motel room, grabbed the few clothes we had brought and jumped into Carlos’ old Chevrolet. The motel owners were emptying their cash register, ready to flee.
On the highway we joined a growing river of cars, trucks and motorcycles racing down toward Honda, where a steel bridge crossed the large Rio Magdalena and the road turned up again to higher ground. It was 16 miles to the outskirts of Honda. By the time we reached the town, both edges of the highway also were crowded with people fleeing on foot, carrying sacks on their backs and children in their arms.
Fright turned to panic in Honda. Three roads, swollen with traffic, converged on the bridge. The exodus stopped almost dead at the bottleneck. It was the worst place to be stuck, for it was feared new mudflows could create a flood in the river. The bridge could be wiped out. People were in a frenzy to cross.
Somehow, Carlos got us across. He had been anxious to return to Bogota since his first sight of the death and the mud that morning. For an hour we crawled up the road through narrow mountain passes with an endless caravan of frightened people, then stopped in a village to spend the night.
By 5 a.m. we were up, headed back toward Armero, listening on the radio for bulletins on the latest round of disaster. But Saturday’s volcano warnings turned out to be a false alarm. Nothing happened, except that emotionally shattered Colombians were tormented anew with danger and a sense of helplessness.
But the radio told us plenty, particularly a station with the call letters RCN. From the first moment of the tragedy, its reporters were out with portable units. They not only reported events, but provided an electronic bulletin board, a broadcast party line, for anyone trying to get a message to someone who might, or might not, be listening.
The radio announcers walked among the people, reading messages scribbled on matchbooks, or allowing people to say a few words themselves. All day, all night, we heard:
"My name is Alejandro Zamora. I want to inform my family that we just arrived in Bogota and we are fine. Come to Bogota."
Announcer: "We are looking for the relatives of a little girl. The girl is a little fat. Black hair. On the white side. She was rescued by helicopter. She’s about 10 years old."
"This is the Gonzales family in Bogota. We want to announce that our parents are at the funeral home Ramirez."
A military roadblock had been placed on the road back toward Armero, a couple of miles past Honda. A young officer refused to allow vehicles through, though there had been no new disasters. Villagers and farmers wanted to return to their homes. Journalists from all over the world were there, arguing and shouting.
Jimi and I abandoned our driver and decided to begin walking. We told Carlos to meet us at the hospital in Mariquita when the government let cars through.
Walking, we talked to the Sandoval family – mother, father, a 5-month-old son, an 8-year-old daughter, their 70-year-old grandmother. They were beginning the 15-mile walk to Mariquita. They had ridden a bus as far as Honda in Saturday’s exodus.
"There are always these alarms," said Rubiela, the mother. "They have us going back and forth. It is hard on the kids."
A motorcycle approached. We flagged it down and paid a driver $5 to take Jimi ahead. Fifteen minutes later, other vehicles began flooding past. The officer had opened the road. Carlos found me on the highway, and we drove to the Mariquita hospital.
There, throngs of people pressed against a concrete fence around the building. Some looked for friends or relatives waiting inside. Most studied a list taped to a post. The list gave the names of survivors treated in Mariquita, and told what cities they had been transferred to, to make room in Mariquita for more injured from Guayabal.
Inside the entrance to the hospital – slumped in a chair in clothes that she’d worn for four days – I found Dr. Cuartas.
She had walked out of the hills an hour before, with colleagues and patients. Her hand shook as she lit a cigarette.
"The false alarm caused great danger," she said. "I’m like those from Armero. I would like to know why we were given bad information before the mud came. I’m sad, hurt."
From the hospital we drove past Guayabal, to a back road that had been created by survivors searching for family or going back for a look at what used to be their city. In a Civil Defense jeep we drove over downed fences, through mudholes that had been filled with sticks for traction, and past survivors who seemed to be doing nothing but hanging around, unsure what do, waiting for whatever might come next.
Our jeep was halted by a deep gully. Jimi and I got out and hiked up a steep hill. From the top, we could see Armero’s agony spread in panorama below us. A few houses stood here and there, but mostly there was the broad, featureless plateau of mud. The smell of decay was powerful.
A breeze carried the echoing yelp of a dog, stuck somewhere in the mess. Otherwise, it was eerily silent. The faces of survivors and the words of their stories swam up inside me. I could almost see them, on the night of terror, running, screaming, crying, dying. I imagined a voice, Grab my hand Daddy. Mama, Mama. God, please, help us.
I went limp. I was close to tears, and I have cried since then for the people of Armero.
After a moment, Jimi and I walked to the edge of the town, where remains of some homes still stood. Inside one, in a patch of muddy water, floated the bodies of a man and woman who had died in an embrace. Nearby was the body of a small child, face down on the surface of the mud.
In another home we saw food still in the small pan. A bed had been pushed against the front door, perhaps to keep the mud from entering.
Enough. Enough. We walked back to the jeep.
On the ride back to Guayabal, our driver pointed to men with four-wheel-drive pickup trucks.
"They are thieves." The driver spat out the words. "And look over their, our beautiful army."
Resting under a tree nearby were a dozen or so uniformed soldiers.
Bogota is only as far from Armero as Seattle is from Mount Rainier. But when we returned to the capital Monday, five days after the eruption, it seemed the tragedy had never occurred. There was little sign in Bogota of the death and mourning.
Our first stop was the Presidential Palace, where we sat down with Juan Castillo, a presidential spokesman. We felt out of place. In the rich surroundings, among government officials in fine suits, we still smelled like the mud around Armero.
Castillo said the government had been prepared for an eruption from Nevado del Ruiz, but they expected the mountain to spit rocks and then slow-moving lava that would give officials time to warn people below. No one, he said, expected the volcano’s heat to melt the snow and send the mud upon Armero.
"We just didn’t anticipate the flood of water and mud," he said.
As for Saturday’s false warnings about a bigger flood coming, Castillo blamed an error by scientists monitoring the volcano.
It still must be monitored closely. Scientists say it could erupt explosively again, since the violent forces inside are still capped by the mountaintop. How soon that might happen isn’t known. The biggest danger, scientists say, is future mudflows, because 90 percent of the volcano’s snow and ice cap remains intact, even after the disastrous melting of Nov. 13.
As for the future of Armero, the government is considering building a "New Armero" for the survivors. The new city would include homes and ranches that would provide jobs. The city cannot be built on the old site because of the mud and all the dead. So officials are looking to build New Armero just outside the pueblo of Guayabal.
Listening to Castillo, I was reminded of covering El Chicho. After the mountain’s initial explosion, I had heard one scientist insist there was little chance of it erupting again. With such advice, many peasants returned as soon as they could to what was left of their villages.
Suddenly, there was a rumble deep in the ground, the temperature rose, a curtain of smoke covered the stars in the sky and then the rocks started coming down with the speed of bullets, going through roofs. I ran yelping for cover, damning the scientist.
It is with the children that it always hurts the most. As Jimi and I visited the intensive care unit of Clinica Infatil Colsubsidi in Bogota, I kept thinking of my 3-year-old son, Felipe. There seemed to be no difference between him and one of the children we found, a 3-year-old making gurgling noises.
The staff at the hospital had called this one "NN" for "No Name."
White gauze covered his right eye. At the slightest sound NN’s puffy left eye wandered wildly, trying to locate the source, uncertain where to look.
A nurse rubbed his protruding stomach to calm him, then rubbed his swollen head. It was beet-red with scratches. NN only gurgled.
After he was flown to the clinic from Armero, the boy’s tiny body was x-rayed to check for fractures or internal injuries. Amazed doctors discovered that his intestines were filled with a mixture of mud, rocks and bits of debris. The doctors expected NN to live.
In the same hospital, two floors below, we found Marcela and Esperanza Ticora, both 6. They were beautiful little girls, and I thought of my 4-year-old, Natalie, and again wanted to cry.
Though Marcela and Esperanza survived, their pain was clear. They seemed unable to smile. Hospital workers said the girls would wake up screaming uncontrollably. Marcela couldn’t stop talking about losing her mother and how all the kitchen pots and pans had vanished, gone.
We met Luis Olarte, 8, who suffered two deep, silver-dollar-sized cuts on the side of the face.
"Jimi, Jimi," he begged, "let me take a picture of you."
Jimi gave Luis his camera. As Jimi and I embraced for him, Luis snapped away. Then he took pictures of the hospital administrator and the hospital director, the hospital walls, the doorways.
Luis’ mother had died, and he was anxious to join his father, who survived along with a 6-year-old brother.
Hospital workers had to watch the elevators closely to keep Luis from leaving. When the elevators were blocked, he ran to a phone and tried to dial out. When a nurse gently took the phone away, he proclaimed:
"I want to get out of here. Where’s my Papa?" And then he cheerfully ran around the nurses.
Luis made us laugh. He helped our spirits.