Word: armero
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...Nevado del Ruiz at the exact moment when it came thunderously alive. Within hours, that rebirth had left upwards of 20,000 people dead or missing in a steaming, mile-wide avalanche of gray ash and mud. Thousands more were injured, orphaned and homeless. The Colombian town of Armero (pop. about 22,500) had virtually disappeared. At week's end a huge cloud of ash, rising as high as 45,000 ft., hung dramatically over the area. The pall obscured the sun and caused the normal afternoon temperature of 77° F to drop to about 55° F. As rescuers hunted...
Some 30 miles from Nevado del Ruiz, in the Lagunilla River canyon, lay Armero. A thriving agricultural center of whitewashed, tile-roofed homes and pastel colonial churches, the town had taken little part in the more turbulent eras of modern Colombian history. The region's wealth is based on cotton and rice farming. The surrounding Lagunilla River canyon contains some of the country's finest agricultural land...
...Many of Armero's residents probably never knew their prosperity was the result of Nevado del Ruiz's last eruption. On Feb. 19, 1845, according to Colombian Historian Rafael Gómez Picón, "subterranean sounds emanated from the upper part of the ... river on the slopes of the snowcapped volcano . . . accompanied by a series of slight quakes. Suddenly, out of the canyon wherein the Lagunilla River flows, an enormous and strange torrent of thick mud became dislodged at tremendous velocity. It dragged with it great blocks of snow, debris, trees and sand." According to Gómez's chronicle, the mudslide...
...destruction that fell on their town in almost the same words used by Historian Gómez. "First there were earth tremors," remembered Rosa Maria Henao, 39, the mother of two, as she lay in the 30-bed hospital of Mariquita, a small town about 15 miles north of Armero. "The air suddenly seemed heavy. It smelled of sulfur. Then there was a horrible rumbling that seemed to come from deep inside the earth...
...avalanche poured down on Armero, it gained additional ferocity from several sources. Three days of torrential rains had greatly swollen the Lagunilla River, which was already choked with mudslides from the volcano's tentative stirrings in September. At that time geologists from the surrounding federal department of Tolima had expressed concern about the dangers from the dammed-up river. At first the departmental governor, Eduardo Alzate García, said that "there are no immediate risks." Two days later he changed his mind. The geologists declared the region at the base of the volcano a local emergency area, and Alzate planned...