Word: volcanoed
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When Nevado del Ruiz, the Colombian volcano, blew up last week after 400 years of dormancy, the news did not take long to reach B. William Mader, TIME's deputy chief of correspondents. Already up and around at 6 a.m. in his New York City apartment, Mader dispatched Caribbean Bureau Chief Bernard Diederich to Colombia, then quickly ascertained that TIME's Tom Quinn, who works out of Bogotá, was already on the story. As the death toll mounted, Mader decided to send Rio de Janeiro Bureau Chief Gavin Scott, who was covering Halley's comet, to Bogotá to join...
...double eruption produced none of the spectacular lava displays that characterize such perennially active volcanoes as Hawaii's Kilauea. Instead, the superheated magma within Nevado del Ruiz began to melt the thick blanket of snow and ice that caps the top 2,000 ft. of the peak. Filthy water started to flow down the sides of the mountain. The trickle swiftly turned into a torrent of viscous mud, stones, ashes and debris with a crest of 15 ft. to 50 ft. The liquid avalanche, known as a lahar, was soon hurtling down the steep slopes at speeds...
Cervero did not at first know that he had been flying 7,000 ft. above a 17,716-ft.-high, long-dormant volcano known as 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...
Tragically, it appeared that the signs leading up to the Nevado del Ruiz eruption had been closely monitored. The volcano began to send up plumes of smoke more than a year ago. On two occasions last September, the mountain spat out showers of rock and ash, eventually causing authorities to issue warnings to the surrounding population while quietly preparing contingency plans to avoid a calamity. Maps plotting the likely course of last week's disaster had been completed only four or five weeks ago. But the next steps had not been taken. Said Darrell Herd, deputy chief of the Reston...
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...