Word: armero
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...first word to the outside world came from Armero's mayor, Ramón Antonio Rodríguez, 34. A ham operator, he was on the radio to a fellow ham in Ibagué, 60 miles to the south, when Nevado del Ruiz erupted, scattering rock and ashes across the Lagunilla Canyon. The mayor was calmly describing the event when suddenly he shouted, "Wait a minute. I think the town is getting flooded." Those words were his last...
...mudslide that entombed Rodríguez cut through Armero like a liquid scythe. Henao later recollected that the wave "rolled into town with a moaning sound, like some sort of monster." Luckily, her home was on a hill. "Houses below us started cracking under the advance of the river of mud," she recalled. She grabbed her children and climbed to the roof of her home. As they watched, more than 80% of the roughly 4,200 buildings in Armero simply vanished into the torrents of slime. Said she: "It seemed like the end of the world...
What was left behind in Armero, in Henao's words, was "one big beach of mud." A viscous gray layer, between 7 ft. and 15 ft. thick, covered most of the town. Thousands of bodies were buried in the sludge, their location sometimes marked by pools of blood on the surface. Other corpses lay half visible in miniature bogs that were as treacherous as quicksand. Some exhausted survivors lay on the surface of the mud in shallows, or staggered along in shock on drier ground. Many of the living were naked or only partly clothed; their garments had been torn...
Despite that rapid and spontaneous outpouring, rescue work at Armero proceeded at a slow and frustrating pace. The torrential mudslides washed away roads and bridges, limiting efforts to deliver both rescuers and relief supplies. Foul weather and the continuing down pour of volcanic ash from the smoking mountain kept Colombian helicopters away from Armero until Thursday afternoon. Only on Friday could the U.S. fly in any of the big CH-47 Chinook helicopters, capable of evacuating dozens of people at a time. In the interim, only nine small helicopters, able to carry just a handful of victims each, had flown...
...Armero itself, rescue helicopters took off and landed on a grassy slope beside a lake of mud where a town once stood. A crew of 78 rescuers occupied the area, rushing gray-caked victims in stretchers made from coffee bags strung between poles. Badly overworked and undersupplied, the crew viewed the relief situation as increasingly desperate. "We are working against time," said Raúl Alferez, a Colombian Red Cross worker. "There are still a lot of people out there to be rescued, and we are not getting to them...