Video: This is how Armero was before the tragedy

Survivors and newspapers remember Armero as a place of commerce with inhabitants who thrived amid the warm climate of Tolima. It had its own market square, a beautiful royal street located at 11, with a large weight coliseum known for receiving great athletes, and with a beautiful white church located on the edge of the main avenue.

The town, of peasant inhabitants, was characterized by its rice and cotton crops, which is why it bore the nickname of the ‘White City’. At the time of the tragedy, it was a city with approximately 29,000 inhabitants.

Grass: What we learned from Armero

According to the story of María del Pilar Quesada, one of the survivors of the tragedy that occurred in 1985, Armero was a population of large houses, with extensive patios and where large trees such as mangoes, mamoncillos, banana and guama could be housed that adorned and made the interior more fresh.

For his part, Rodrigo Ariza, a journalist who started in the world of radio 30 years ago, He pointed out that at that time the only station in town was Radio Armero of RCN RadioIt was the most listened to and from there he greeted the peasants and day laborers of the time from early in the morning, detailed Radio Nacional.

A tragedy foretold

Before 1985 there were two eruptions, one in 1595 and the other in 1845. On both occasions, there were avalanches along the Lagunilla River, the shore where Armero was located. Scientists, climbers and figures of political life, since 1984, began to issue alerts in the face of a catastrophe that was seen coming and that many did not want to hear.

In a special from Signal Colombia, it is detailed how at the beginning of In 1984 an increase in temperature began to be noticed in the volcano. Subsequently, since December 1984, the peasants began to see the fish in the Otún, Recio and Lagunillas basins die.

Also, they not only looked large amounts of sulfur but there were small explosions that preceded a forest fire. On September 11, 1985, there was an eruption of gases and steam and rain that fell on the nearby municipalities, just two months before the tragedy.

On November 13, the day of the tragedy, everything started at 4 in the afternoon when ash began to fall on the place. Two hours later a light drizzle falls on Armero. The emergency had not yet arrived, it was when the population slept, at 11:30 pm, that 350 million cubic meters of mud and stones swept through the municipality.

In this video from the University of La Sabana, Armero is shown before the tragedy:

To prevent something like this from happening again, in 1988, three years after the tragedy, the National System for Disaster Prevention and Attention was created, which in 2012 was replaced by the National Disaster Risk Management System.

Regarding the control of the eruptions, as a consequence of the tragedy a volcanic monitoring program was implemented in the country. As explained to the newspaper La Patria, the general director of the National Geological Service, Óscar Paredes, in 1986, With the assistance of the United States Geological Survey, they created the Volcanological Observatory of Colombia in Manizales; later, the observatories of Pasto (1989) and Popayán (1993) arrived.

Keep reading: The lost children of Armero: the dramatic search for the mothers who consider them alive after the avalanche of 35 years ago