What we learned from Armero

“Armero was in a risk zone, but nobody believed, as they were country people, incredulous people because they had never experienced a tragedy, they had never experienced anything like that, so people laughed,” Carlos recalls, in an interview for CNN Echeverry, one of the survivors of the mudslide that, 35 years ago, buried his town, in the department of Tolima, leaving a balance of 25 thousand dead, almost the same number of victims of the covid-19 in the first six months of the pandemic in Colombia.

“From one moment to another the power went out,” says Echeverry. The town was in darkness, when, from one moment to another, a roar began, I pretended as if it were a turbine plane 100 meters above us: pa, pa, pa, pa, and when I saw a wave go down gigantic, and tore the mail in half, split the building, and fell. When I saw that, I took my mother and ran, and we managed to go up to a high altitude that there was and we embraced the trees and prayed ”.

On the night of November 13, 1985, an avalanche of mud and stones disappeared what until then was a prosperous town, on the shores of the highway that connects Ibagué with Mariquita.

Before the incredulity of the inhabitants, as Carlos Echeverry narrated, the Arenas crater of the Nevado del Ruiz volcano, located between Caldas and Tolima, threw lava and mud, as had not happened since February 19, 1845, when the explosion left a thousand dead settlers.

“After Ibagué, we were the most prosperous town in Tolima with outstanding agricultural activity, hundreds of commercial premises and about 10 credit institutions, as well as transportation companies, schools and colleges,” Alfenibal Tinoco, president of El Tiempo, assured in an interview. the Federation for the Development of Gunsmiths.

There were about 40 thousand inhabitants of Armero who were sleeping when the avalanche came, which destroyed 4,200 houses, 20 bridges and all the streets of the town

For hours, the survivors were unaware of the scale of the tragedy.

“When we started to see the clarity, noooo, that was a total desolation, that was a total pavement, as if an asphalt machine had passed and left that town without houses. It began to clarify, and we began to realize that where we lived no longer existed ”, continues his story Carlos Echeverry.

On the morning of November 14, the Boyaca pilot Leopoldo Guevara, a Civil Defense volunteer, managed to get the then President of the Republic, Belisario Betancourt, to call him to receive the report of the tragedy that was just beginning to be known. “Armero is a mud beach, Armero has been erased from the map,” Guevara anguished informed the president, who, on the other side of the line, replied “man, don’t exaggerate” and hung up on him.

The explosion of the Nevado del Ruiz volcano melted 10 percent of the ice that surrounded it, creating a release of water that caused the overflow of several of the water sources in the area, especially the Lagunilla River, which fell on the population.

For some, the tragedy, which destroyed 95% of the town, left some 21,000 injured and more than 200,000 affected, could have been avoided. According to reports cited by the Las Dos Rrillas portal, “on the day of the eruption, columns of dark ash came out of the volcano around 3:00 pm, Colombian time. The local director of the Colombian Civil Defense, who was quickly informed of the situation, contacted Ingeominas, an organization that determined that the area should be evacuated; then he was told that he should contact the directors of the Civil Defense in Tolima and Bogotá ”.

However, as at the end of the afternoon, on November 13, the ash stopped falling, the local authorities told the villagers to “keep calm” and stay in their homes.

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

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

From this initiative, Paredes explained, a whole program was implemented that today has 650 digital seismological stations, which allow 24-hour surveillance of 30 volcanoes that are currently active in Colombia, with the accompaniment of experts from Mexico, the United States, Japan. , Costa Rica and Germany.