The Galeras Volcano Disaster of 1993 | Episode 71

People will say that a mountain is just about the most stable and serene thing in nature, but every now and then one says not Today, Hello and welcome to Doomsday, History's most dangerous podcast. Together, we are going to rediscover some of the most traumatic, bizarre, and on inspiring, but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout human history and around the world. On today's episode, we'll see how one volcano was more deadly to all of humanity than that asteroid was to the dinosaurs. We will meet a crew of the most oblivious reporters in the history of news gathering, and we'll see repeatedly what happens when human flesh comes in contact with glowing hot rocks. And if you're listening to this on Patreon, you would also learn about the top four deadliest volcanoes in history. You'd hear about the most famous person in human history to actually swan dive into one. You learn why being eaten by bears or struck by lightning is better than what happens in this episode. You'd also hear the strange tale of eight hundred thousand Icelandic farting sheep, and you would learn what accidentally cooking your friend's brain would smell like, including a quick cooking tip. This is not the show you play around kids, or while eating, or even in mixed company. But as long as you find yourself a little more historically engaged and learn something that can potentially save your life, our work is done. So while that said, shoot the kids out of the room, put on your headphones and safety glasses, and let's beak in. Every time you feel like you don't want to live on this planet anymore, that's a real shame. It's a hell of a planet. It's loaded with and surrounded by really cool stuff, a lot of stuff that we take for granted. First and foremost, if you are new to the planet, garbage day is Tuesday, rent is due the first of the month, and lights go out around nine, depending on location in season. And again, if you are new, tilt your head ever so slightly upwards and you will be happy with your decision to stay on this world. The night sky offers views of the larger surrounding universe that can change the way you ponder the nature of existence itself. Every time you look at the night sky, think about the infinite expanse of stars. Each separated by trillions of miles. When you think of it like that, it's really the best way to even begin to try to appreciate the size of the universe. Really truly humbling stuff. And as with all great real estate, the best part is is our location. Now, some will tell you that the closest star to Earth is Proximus Centory. It's a red dwarf star about forty trillion kilometers or twenty five trillion miles away from us, And that's about a four year long trip if you ever figured out how to travel as fast as light. The Tesla cyber truck can't figure out a windshield wide promoter, so I'm thinking it's going to be a while before we can ever travel that fast. Also, who cares that whole idea to begin with is a lie that you can disprove with your own eyes. The closest star to Earth is a yellow dwarf star we call sall. It's only ninety three million miles or one hundred and fifty million kilometers away, and I can see it right now. It heats my home and it toasts my skin all at the same time. And why are we talking about the sun? Well, because it's perfect. Everything is perfect in its own balance. If we were any closer, we would simply cook while our DNA unraveled from all the radiation and any further and we just freeze. The sun is a violent place. It's a strange blend of constant explosions and heavy gravity holding everything together. And the only reason we don't boil away is because our magnetosphere gives us the perfect balance of ultraviolet radiation exposure. Aliens would be sending probes to the bottom of our oceans looking for any signs of life if we didn't have it, because there sure wouldn't be any on the surface. And the same can be said about volcanoes. They give us the very land that we stand on, and they give us the nutrients that we need to grow the food that we eat. They have produced our atmosphere and the oceans, and they're kind of how the planet keeps its blood pressure and check. They capture our imaginations and they fill our graveyards, and by the numbers, earthquakes are more deadly, but volcanoes do try to compete. It's always hard to deep dive into a disaster that happened before a certain point in history. Because the farther back you go, the worse the documentation becomes. We know, for instance, that Mount Vesuvius killed around sixteen thousand people back in seventy ninety eighty when it buried the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. The twelve fifty seven eruption of Mount Somalis in Indonesia killed tens of thousands of people. The eruption of Nevado Delries in nineteen eighty five caused over twenty three thousand deaths, and looking back to our Mount Pelee volcanic biosworm disaster of nineteen oh two, episode, thirty thousand people were boiled and baked in an afternoon. Mount Tambora, also in Indonesia, erupted in eighteen fifteen and killed around ninety two thousand people. All told, an estimated three hundred thousand people have been killed by volcanos in the last two thousand years, and the largest and most destructive volcanic event in recorded history was the eighteen fifteen Mount Tambora eruption. It barfed up as much as a one hundred and fifty cubic kilometers or thirty six cubic miles of ash, pummus, and rock, including an estimated sixty megatons of sulfur. Now, I know that's really hard to envision in your head, so let me tell you it this way. It ejected enough to cram almost two billion Dodge caravans and thirty trillion liters of fart stinging. It's actually easier to calculate lava blow into Dodge caravans than it is to headcount victims because many get incinerated or buried deeply under debris. Add to that the number of people who go on to die from starvation and injury and disease after the fact. Now, if you had a time machine and wanted to see the most deadly and consequential eruption in history, you're going to want to go visit Lake Toba and Sumatra seventy four thousand years ago. This eruption ejected about twenty eight hundred cubic kilometers or six hundred and seventy cubic miles of material, and that is more than thirty seven billion Dodge caravans. This thing maxed out to the volcanic explosivity index at eight point zero, because that is the top of the scale. It blew an eleven hundred and thirty square kilometer or four hundred and forty square mile hole in the earth, which then flooded to form the modern day Like Toba. For reference, that hole is one and a half times the size of New York City, and all of Los Angeles is only slightly larger than like Toba. The energy released during the Toba supereruption was roughly equivalent to two two point three nine quadrillion kilotons of TFT. To compare that to nuclear explosions, the Hiroshima bomb was as powerful as fifteen kilotons of TNT, the Nagasaki bomb was as powerful as twenty one kilotons, and if you ever heard of the Russian Czar BOMBA, the largest nuclear bomb ever detonated, that was approximately fifty thousand keletons of TNT. The Toba supereruption was one hundred and fifty nine trillion times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb and forty eight billion times more powerful than the Czar BOMBA. And it gets worse. All the ash and sulfur dioxide vomited up created a volcanic winter, and the amount of sunlight that actually made it through the atmosphere was slashed. The globe cooled by up to five degrees celsius or nine degrees fahrenheit for years. And to the average person listening, that really doesn't sound like that much. It was five degrees cooler in the morning than it was in the afternoon, right, Well, yeah, locally, but not on an entire global scale. No sun meant plants died out. No plants meant animals died out. Whole ecosystems failed, and no animals meant humans died out, and I mean a lot. The Toba supereruption nearly destroyed humanity. It was that extremely rare kind of disaster that actually created a historical genetic bottleneck. See. Back then, the global human population was estimated to be about one hundred thousand individual humans spread out across Africa, parts of the Middle East, and probably Southeast Asia. And the current population of Southeast Asia alone is close to seven hundred million. So yeah, one hundred thousand is a tiny population. I can say quite confidently that there are currently more people trapped in bumper to bumper traffic near my house. But by the time all was said and done, the entire human population, all of humanity was cut down too. Closer to three thousand people. I believe more people will fit into the VIC Theater in Chicago. And I'm about to say something about Toba and the extinction of the dinosaurs that I do not believe that anyone has ever said before. The Toba super eruption wiped out ninety six percent of humanity over the course of hundreds of years. The Chick Salube meteor impact did not wipe out the dinosaurs over a long weekend like we think. It took thousands of years, maybe tens of thousands of years, for the wild majority of non avian dinosaurs to die off. So all told, the Chick Salube meteor wiped out seventy five percent of the dinosaurs compared to ninety six percent of humanity, and it took a lot longer. So here it goes. The Toba supereruption was more devastating to humanity than Chick Salub was to the dinosaurs. We're all worried about meteors, but the danger beneath our feet can be so so much more frightening. In North America, we worry about the Yellowstone super called era, and yeah, it's super comparable to Toba. Yellowstone hasn't gone off in about six hundred and forty thousand years, but we do get occasional reports of geysers and ponds boiling and land raising in lakes spilling over honestly, though, honestly, it's not even worth worrying about. So let me distract you. Maybe I could tept you with a little travel pack, your sunscreen, your favorite guinea pig bib, and some thick ass fireproof boots. We are heading to Columbia. I believe the last time that we were here was during our Corlea Stadium Disaster of nineteen eighty episode. It was one of our very first episodes, and I remember quite fondly that we learned what to do when a bull's horned the size of an NBA sneaker enters through your chest and comes out somewhere from your neck. Well, if it makes you feel any safer, there are no bulls or alcohol or alcoholic bulls in this episode. Quite the opposite. In fact, we are going to be hanging around with scientists and folkanologists. I'll tell you why in a second. Now. If you remember anything about Columbia, many countries have states or provinces, but Columbia went with departments, and so today we will be visiting pot in the department of Narinho. It's the capital of Narinho. Actually, and Pasto is a beautiful city found in western Colombia, sitting in the Fertile Arties Valley at the foot of Galerus Volcano. It's known as a real South American festival town, known mostly for the annual Negro Eblanco Festival. Before that, it was known as the site of horrific massacres during the War for Independence from Spain. But it's also home to what trip Advisor calls the best roasted guinea pig in the Andes. It's a regional delicacy. And yeah, I said guinea pig. And yes, if you're not from this corner of the world, what I just said might sound pretty terrible. But did you say volcano, Well, yes I did. Galerus volcano. It's a type of stratovolcano. And stratovolcanoes are those cone shaped, gently sloping, postcard ready monsters that get built up over time from layers of lava and ash and rocks from previous eruptions. A good example is Mount Saint Helens. That was a strato volcano, of course, it was more of a real brand named volcano compared to Galerus. Galerus rerupts all the time, it seems, had pretty big ones back in fifteen eighty, seventeen oh one and eighteen sixty six, but again no one took any real notes on it, so it kind of was thought as a quiet and fairly well tempered volcano. Now the truth is it's been doing something quietly in the background for the last five hundred years. It used to spook the Spanish conquistadors back in the day. It's a part of the Colombian Andes mountain chain, and with sixty other volcanoes to choose from here in Columbia, this is one of the most active. In fact, Galerus sits pretty close to the border with Ecuador, but about eleven hundred kilometers or seven hundred miles north by northeast of Galarus, sits Nevado del Ruiz. It sits literally halfway between Galarus and Seneleo, which long time listeners will remember as the site of the drunken Bulkipades from our Corealis Stadium disaster episode. But we're not going back there. Let's check out Nevada del Ruiz for a second. That's a volcano. Yes, oh hell, yes it is. I mentioned it a few minutes ago. But to remind you the beauty of this show, no tests. In November of nineteen eighty five, internal heat melted all this ice and snow around the summit, and that generated a muddy lahar that broke free from the peak and flowed over twenty kilometers down the surrounding river valleys. And it's been a while since we visited a volcano, so I'll remind you. A lahar is just a mix of melted water and ash and rock that flows like wet concrete, but at hundreds of miles an hour and destroys, burns, or berries everything it touches. And twenty five thousand people died during that lahar. Twenty five thousand. I'm not going to get into it, but it could easily have been its own episode all by itself, and Nevado del Ruiz was the fourth deadliest volcanic incident in recorded history. Some people call fourth place first runner up, but did you know there's actually a medal for fourth place. It's Pewter gold, Silver, bronze, and pewter. Pewter it's an alloy made of tin, antimony, copper, and bismuth, and they use it mostly to make jewelry and tableware out of it, and apparently fourth place medals. The gold winning volcanic murder mountain is Tambora in eighteen fifteen with a high score of ninety two thousand. The silver medal goes to Krakatoa in eighteen eighty three with thirty six thousand killed, and the bronze award winner goes to the star of our second episode ever, the Saint Pierre volcanic Bioswarm of nineteen oh two. Mount Pelee, which claimed twenty eight thousand lives in a single afternoon, and if you do not like bugs and things that crawl, it is our worst episode ever. Think of a volcano like a mountain that already blew its own top off. The volcano bar it s, guts out, and when it later heals, so to speak, the center of the volcano depresses into a kind of a cauldron shape. We take the Latin term caldera to describe it. Today, when a significant chunk of the volcano's rim has been blown up or eroded. You can get a large breach caldera uh brah what Galderas. Caldera was largely formed after a massive blast about five hundred and sixty thousand years ago. Think of the breach as a burpole for lava and other volcanic debris. Think of it like a mountain with a clear throat and a belly full of flaming puke. Hundreds of miles below. About ten thousand people live within what you would call the danger zone around Galerus, but the rest of that four hundred thousand live in what realtors would probably call an area of potential harmful effects. Historically, eruptions or damaging flows have pointed away from Pasto, and Galerus may have the occasional borborygmi, but it has so much as burned in over forty years. And if there is anything that I hope you take away with you for the rest of your life from this episode outside of the safety segment, it's that the sound your stomach makes when it's talking to you is actually called borborygmy, and borborygmy is an automatopoeia which nobody ever remembers, but that is a word where its name sounds like the thing that it's actually doing, like buzz or clang or vomit, borberygmy, sounds like what your stomach is trying to tell you. The Colombian Geological Survey monitors Galarus constantly, and we are here today for an international Volcanic conference as part of the United Nations Decade of Natural Disaster Reduction Initiative, or the unden Undry. Galerus is considered a decade volcano. So out of fifteen hundred active volcanoes around the world, the United Nations and the International Association of Volcanology in Chemistry of the Earth's Interior consider sixteen of these to be worthy of serious study because of their past destructive eruptions or their proximity to heavily populated areas. The goal of the conference was to share knowledge and improve global volcanic monitoring systems, basically to advance the science which, in all fairness and no offense, is lacking. Stanley Williams of Arizona State University was invited because of his expertise on Latin American volcanoes. He even helped organize the conference, where about one hundred volcanologists from fifteen different countries would be there, and between their shared knowledge and having an actual living volcano pretty much outside their window, they were excited about potential breakthroughs that this conference might spark, and skipping past the convention montage of the lectures and swag bags. After three days of meetings, Williams and his colleagues played a drunken game of would you rather, and long story short, they all crammed onto a party bus and headed to Galeris. Now I'm joking, of course, I said there would be no alcohol. All of this had been planned out very carefully, well ahead of time. The date was January the fourteenth, nineteen ninety three, and Williams with thirty other scientists boarded a regular standard non party bus and rolled out. There were even reporters on the bus, you know, looking to fill some column space, and they bombarded the scientists with questions about Galaris. Williams assured them this would be a brief but very safe expedition, you know, anything to get into the office. Am I right? The year before, during a period of some activity, there was a mound of thick lava that accumulated near the summit and it formed a bit of a lava dome that trapped gases inside the volcano, and then in July of that year, there was a mini eruption that blasted through the dome, releasing the built up pressure, and now everything had gone quiet. This was the perfect opportunity for a little hands on infield research. And it's not the hardest climb ever. I mean the weather was cool and overcast, but it is over fourteen thousand fe so by all definitions, Galerius is a real mountain. In North America, they call anything over fourteen thousand feet a fourteener, and there were ninety six fourteen ers in the United States, none on the East Coast. I mean, the East Coast does have mountains, believe me. But I believe the tallest is Mount Mitchell in North Carolina, and that's not even half as tall as a fourteener. Canada has about a dozen fourteen ers, but in America, Colorado has the most in the country with fifty eight, and Alaska's first runner up with twenty nine. And people want to climb them all, which some people dismiss. They see it as gimmicky and kind of dumb, or they say that fourteen ers are just easy. Well, that's nice, but I disagree. I'm not going to be the one to tell people how to not feel happy about anything ever, except for maybe certain drugs or revenge field murder. No, all that leads down a path that we'll discuss once meteors finally destroy society. But until then, it's not like fourteen thousand feet is nothing. You are breathing forty percent less oxygen at that altitude, and this leads to hypoxia where you get all blue and slow and really not make things so good. And not just that, I mean very experienced and healthy hikers die on these things every year. The weather can change in minutes. The winds can just blow you off a ridge. As soon as you pass the tree line of palms and greenery, Galarus's Peak finally comes into view. Closer to the peak, the rock itself becomes quite craggy, but the views become more sweeping and panoramic. You can even see the rooftops of Pasto from here. Normally, the winding road to the summit was bathed in heavy fog, and along the way, signs pointed out different examples of a historic volcanic residue and yes, the views were a perk of the visit, but these people were here more for the mysteries that lay beneath their feet, and it's not just that they were visiting the peak of a volcano. Most of the thirty scientists from the conference began taking measurements around the volcano's outer rim, but Williams had a different idea. Williams and twelve other scientists in his group would join him on a grueling hike over the rim and actually into the inner crater. A freezing wind gave anyone doubting the idea a little last minute enthusiasm to hustle over the lip and hop into the warmth and windless protection of the caldera, and by nine thirty in the morning, they began their descent to the caldera floor, using a yellow nylon rope that had been cemented into the ridgeline because of the obvious danger of dislodging rocks. As they made their way down, they took turns, descending the rope one hundred feet down one at a time. From there they could stroll the bottom of the crater much easier to give you a sense of how big the inside was. The flat area that they walked on was about two thousand feet or half a kilometer wide. Being inside an active volcanos crater was a once in a lifetime opportunity. Not quite it as rare as walking on the Moon, but really honestly not that far off. Jose Sapata was a young Colombian volcanologists and eagerly volunteered to climb in first. Next was Igor Menov, a Russian scientist on his very first trip to South America, followed by doctor Williams, followed by Jeff Brown from England, Carlos Trio, Nestor Garcia, Julio Cortes, and Fernando Quena, all Colombian geologists. Fernando Cuenza and Martina Martinez were also surprise geologists, but these ones were from Spain. Three Americans, Mike Conway, Andrew McFarland and Andy Adams came next, with three more Colombian scientists, Alfredo Paeschon, Fabio Garcia and Carlos the Strada. Following up in the rear at the center of the caldera floor lay the breech hole, which was over four hundred feet or one hundred and twenty meters wide. The group collected rocks and gas samples and took lots of readings using their geological tricorders, and Williams teased Pachon and Adams for wearing hard hats. It was kind of a weird thing for an adult to say, but here we were. Turns out, most of the scientists had no safety gear of any kind, no gas masks, not even safety goggles. Sapata was the only one to even think to bring a radio, and it was a good thing he did. He got word from the Galarius monitoring station that they were picking up small seismograph readings, nothing major, but worth noting, and Sapata told the rest of the group, but they just kind of waved him off. They'd actually talked about it earlier and decided that good boots and warm clothing was all the protection that they were going to need for the day, even though they would be standing only a few hundred feet from the mouth of a volcano. You remember that scene in Star Wars when ben Kenobi gives Luke lightsaber and the very first thing he does is pointed at his own face. Well, it was a little like that, and Adams was irritated by all of it. He'd never been mocked in a professional setting before, he'd never been mocked as an adult, but he'd never worked with Stanley Williams before. Williams, as it turns out, had a bit of a reputation for being difficult. He was always finding himself at odds with the US Geological Survey and common scientific consensus. He believed, for example, that gas emissions were a more reliable predictor of eruptions than seismic activity, and oddly, in saying that the group had discovered a higher than usual concentration of sulfur dioxide in the gas coming out of the breach, and this was usually a checkered flag for magma rising to the surface, Adams even choked that he hoped that they would live long enough to see the lab results. And yeah, after that, he was too spook to enter the crater. Igor Manalo, on the other hand, walked right into the hottest and most dangerous part of the volcano center and he had a cigarette dangling from his mouth the whole time, and it lit all by itself. And this will sound like an unusual opinion, but if you had to choose between cigarettes and vaping volcanic steam, I think cigarettes are the way to go when choosing to huff volcanic steam. It's fair to say that you would have a greater life expectancy walking up to a mushroom cloud. Williams liked Manla's attitude, but the others were a little more nervous. Zapata kept urging them all to hurry up so that they could go, but Williams wanted them to take the time to just really suck it all in. And around twelve forty five, more than three hours after they had arrived, Williams finally suggested that they start heading back and made their way back to the ridge, which took about twice as long because they were walking uphill and these were labrats, not mountain men, so yeah, they were tired. And about one point forty they stopped and they reacted to something that they couldn't put into words. It was not the kind of thing you could see or hear. You ever hear about animals reacting to natural phenomenon before it happens. The theory is that they're reacting to ultrasonic sounds or pressure waves or other warning signs that our sense organs are just too shit to pick up. On. My favorite story about this was about a sea turtle that was captured and released from Australia into the Southern Pacific back in January of twenty twenty two. Her name was Tilly the turtle, and she was heading east towards the island of Tonga, just beeping away on the GPS, minding her own business, when suddenly, out of nowhere, she made a u turn. No one could explain the behavior. But two days after that, the Honga Tonga Hanga ha up pie A volcano took a big drink of sea water and belched hard. How hard? Okay? People think of the Mount Saint Helen's explosion I referenced earlier as kind of big, but it doesn't even fit on the same chart as this. The atmospheric pressure waves recorded after the Hanga explosion was more on par with the eighteen eighty three eruption of Krakatoa, and we've talked about that one before. It's one of my favorites. Anyway. For Williams and the rest of the group, something was set up off their volcanological spider scents, kind of like a moment of subconscious anticipation, and without warning, the ground beneath their feet began to rumble. Small rocks and loose stone began sliding down the inside of the crater as bents of steam and smoke erupted all around them. Williams yelled for the others to run for it. It would sound advice, in fact, if this were a safety segment, that would be the biggest part the running. But the thing was, have you ever tried walking on a stony beach. It's not easy without a flat surface that always ends up twisting and contorting your feed and your ankles with every step. Imagine running on a mixture of soft ash and large rocks. In fact, think of our frank rock slide episode for inspiration. From where he stood, Williams could see lava and rock raining down on his colleagues, who then disappeared in a cloud of volcanic gas. Igor Manalla and the four other researchers near the crater center or Purple were almost certainly not going to need their seats on a ride home, if you follow my meaning. He then watched as a glowing hot boulder fell from the sky and pile drives apat his head face burst into burning rubble. Ricardo found him and he was extremely bloody and contorted, and he tried to lift him up, but his skull had been destroyed and his brain fell out and immediately began to cook on the rocks. Uh yeah, Milton saw what was happening to the brains and had to slap Ricardo to make him stop screaming. On their way out, they passed four more bodies, each in a state of violent rearrangement, like a scene from a battlefield, but fought inside of a volcano. Williams heeded his own advice and bolted for safety. For what it was worth see, the men hurried set in quotes towards the yellow rope and climbed for all they were worth, and Peshan was one of the first, and when he reached the summit, he was immediately accosted by those reporters. They threw a camera and a microphone in his face right off the bat. He hadn't even had time to catch his breath and they were already bombarding him with questions about the volcano. But instead of kick flipping them over the rim to see for themselves, he didn't want to make things worse, so he told them that the day had been a great success, and because the volcano was doing a bunch of stuff in the background, they asked him when he thought it might erupt, and he said it could be a year from now, a month from now, or next week. And right at that moment, the video in the camera goes blank, but the microphone kept working, and what it recorded was pure horror. It captured the sound of a loud explosion and three screams from the crater. A thick surge of black ash and red lava shot into the sky and one of the scientists scream, and that's what the mic must have picked up. It was hard for the scientists to keep on their feet as the cuator floor lurched back and forth. And here's a thing about volcanoes that they maybe don't tell you before you climb into one. If it decided, it's just because that it wants to show a little life, even the most modest side effects can be deadly. Imagine getting poisoned by toxic gas and then carried into the crater by a landslide. Imagine that and then being rolled over by a boulder the size of a house. That hasn't happened here today yet, No today, the biggest problems facing our crew were poison gases and volcanic projectile ballistics. Basically, volcanoes, like most people, are under a lot of pressure, and like people who relieve their pressure with a farther or two, you may get something a little more tangible. Volcanoes can wash anything from molten rocks to lava bombs for miles with zero effort. Blame the rapidly expanding gas within the lava. The rocks flying out from the volcano ranged from pea sized pebbles to thirty four hundred pound chunks of volcanic basalt. And I'll tell you right now, Stanley Williams survives what I am next about to tell you, which is elaborate and awful. Stanley spun on his heels and ran as fast as he could in spite of the relatively loose surface and the slope that he was on. It would have felt like one of those nightmares where you're trying to run, but it's only in slow moo and running feels extra slow. Compared to the fact that volcanoes canvert out rocks that travel up to three hundred kilometers or over two hundred miles per hour, McFarlane was hit with a rock that launched him off his feet, and he landed face first into a pile of shards of glowing rock, kind of like sapata, and for reference, rocks don't glow until they get upwards of five hundred and fifty degree celsius or one thousand fahrenheit. The heat would have been unbearable. McFarland's arms and hands were burned raw. He managed to get to his feet, stringing melted flesh to the spot where he had just laid Louis La Marie had two broken legs and a broken collarbone, and he was worried of pyroclastic flow. People generally don't survive pyroclastic flows, I mean volcanic debris flowing hundreds of miles an hour at hundreds of degrees. Thank you, but no. The best chance to survive one is to barricade yourself in an airtight building or a depression and just hold your breath until the smoke and gas passes. But that is not an option inside of a volcano. So they ran set in quotes for the rope. How they were going to hold onto it with no skin on their hands was a bridge that they'd have to cross when they got there. There's no way to say how fast the rock that then hit Williams in the head was going, but it was fast enough to cave in part of his skull and drive bone fragments into his now exposed brain. It also broke his jaw and tore off his ear. He was obviously stunned and already most likely in shock, but he kept running, with smaller rocks pelting him the whole way. He made it maybe another twenty or thirty feet before he was winged with another large rock, and winged isn't really the word. This thing fell out of the sky, broke his left leg and absolutely shattered his other one. He tried to keep running, but he realized pretty quickly that his foot was no longer attached. Well, okay, it wasn't detached per se. It was just more dangling, kind of like dragging around a dead balloon by its string. Either way, he didn't want to leave it behind, but it wasn't helping him escape. He had very few options at this point, but rather than lay down and just wait to get pummeled to death by flaming rocks, he crawled. He did not give up. He thought of the famous words of hockey legend Wayne Gretzky. You get killed by one hundred percent of the erupting volcanoes you do not climb out of. You have to remember he was deeply in shock, with chunks of his skull sticking out of his exposed brain. The problem with crawling in a volcano, of course, is you are going to leave your entire pomp prints on the f first hot thing you'd touch. Imagine all the skin on your hand coming off, and then immediately grabbing another flaming hot rock with whatever's left underneath. All of this bothered him less than you'd think, because he was already actively on fire at the time. Yes, Williams had burst into flames, and he had to stop, drop and roll to put it out, which is a little like putting out a flaming hot dog by rolling it around on a hot pan. He knew if he stayed much longer, some flaming piece of debris was gonna blow both of his arms off before he could reach the lip of the rim, So he crawled behind a big rock for cover and waited for instructions from his dead relatives who were waving him into a tunnel of light. Louisa MacFarlane found Williams dying behind a rock, but their hands and arms were pretty much still on fire, so there was no way they could carry him. It killed them inside, but they had no choice but to leave him by Conway, Luisa McFarlane all arrived at the rope at the same time. Since he was the least injured, he went up first. McFarland's palms like you would expect to pretty much slid off. So imagine him pulling his weight up this rope one hundred feet and then imagine Luis. The guy had two broken legs, which made every step impossibly painful. When Conway reached the top, the news crew were there, excited to hear about his day, but he plowed right past them towards the observation station at the summit took call for rescue. So you're attending an international symposium on volcanology and people are dying to get out of it. Would you know what to do? The chances of you ever needing to know any of this are vanishingly remote. However, new volcanoes are popping up all the time. Do you ever hear that famous story about that Mexican farmer who got a volcano of his own in his cornfield. I mean, this was back in nineteen forty three and people were killed by the thing. And maybe we'll come back to that one day. But let's say a local volcano pops up near you and you're thinking exploring it be exciting and rewarding. Before you even think about it, do a little homework on the volcano you plan to explore, things like its activity status and any recent eruptions you should be aware of, or where to park, you know, all that stuff. You want to make sure the forecast is clear and stable. You want to make sure you get there plenty early in the morning, because it's important to leave at least four hours to climb out of this thing before the sun begins to set. And I have no idea why anyone would want to do this in the rain, but rain storms or even wind can lead to anything from poor visibility to landslides. If your volcano of choice is overseen by local authorities or park services, pay attention to any rules or guides that they post, not because you're a nerd, but because they will keep you separated from unstable ground or toxic gas vents. You should know the signs of gas exposure. In fact, here's a handy acronym to help make it easy. Bewivel confusion, headache, weakness or fatigue, vomiting your nausea, lightheadedness, or dizziness. You experience anything like that, and it is time to go. If you're gonna have gases like sulfur or carbon dioxide getting all up in your grill. An actual gas mask is a fantastic fashion choice. In fact, as long as you're still able to make think good if you run into steam or smoke or gas use campfire rules. Just do whatever you have to do to stay upwind of it and don't let anything touch you. Steel toed, sturdy hiking boots, protective clothing, gloves, a helmet, the whole thing, all of it. If I were entering a volcano, I'd be doing it dressed as a firefighter. And maybe you want to spend a little time doing some strength training and cardio before you go, because if you're like me, you will be running with about seventy pounds of protective equipment slowing you down. Ideally you'd be wearing full body armor, but a hard hat is a good start, because you're not going to remember any of this with a concussion or a head injury. I would also bring a two way radio and a fully charged cell phone, and maybe even a flare gun. The minute you start hatching this awful plan, you are going to want to make sure as many people know what you're thinking as possible. It'll increase the chance of someone talking you out of it, and it'll also give your credit card company enough time to preapprove your rescue expenses in the event that you end up finishing your exciting day in a helicopter. Keep your head on a swivel, and of course, know your exits. You need to memorize any escape routes so you can autopilot your way out of there once your brain shuts down with fear. First sign of gas or odd vibrations or destabilize ground, well, goodbye. Okay, time to go. And unlike most safety segments that usually begin with me asking you to try not to panic to keep your mind clear, in this rare case, I'm actually going to tell you to give yourself a few slaps in the face to keep the adrenaline up and be ready to run for it on a moment, no miracle of miracles. As much as they expected the volcano to keep ramping up until it exploded, it just wasn't happening. It kind of turned the volume up to seven or eight and just left it there for about the next fifteen minutes or so, and then it just slowly calmed. All volcanoes want to do is relieve internal pressure, and it had. And they say time flies when you're having fun. Well, I did the math, and that fifteen minutes of listening to this would have felt like two hundred and twenty eight days or seven and a half months. I'm imagining everyone in the group would be desperately dehydrated from the heat and also because they would have urinated themselves empty. But that's what you get for stealing rocks from a volcano. There's this long standing superstition in Hawaii that taking rocks from the island's angers Pela, the goddess of volcanoes, and that brings bad luck. Just ask the Brady Bunch. Tourists just can't help themselves, and they still pocket volcanic rocks as souvenirs, and there are there are plenty of stories of tourists who didn't believe in any curse who found themselves very much turned around on it and returned the rocks by mail with apology notes begging for forgiveness. After a time, members of William's group slowly crested the summit. They suffered from burns, fractures, ballistic wounds, and they brought news that some of them have died. Oh, and that Williams was still in there, and he had already been beaten half to death and set on fire. He was amazingly still alive and struggling to remain conscious. All he thought about was going home and being with his wife and kids. Rescue teams from Pasto arrived almost three hours later, and they found Williams after he cried out for help on topic this is why I tell people to carry a whistle. It's small and it makes a lot more noise using a lot less energy than screaming. Williams was the last survivor lifted off the mountain. At least he was found several of his colleagues or not. So what the hell happened on that day? Three hikers and six volcanologists died unexpectedly in a blast that no one foresaw, and most Importantly, these were absolute experts in their field. If anyone in the entire lineage of human history had a qualified chance to predict how that day was going to go, it was them, and they were wrong. Carlos Trio had been struck with a blast of intense heat, like a body sized blowtorch, and all that was found were his charred and mutilated head and torso. Nestor Garcia, Jeff Brown, and Fernando Quena were also thoroughly vaporized, leaving no trace of their existence at all. Sapata and the three tourists had been killed by flying rocks traveling at bullet like speeds. This was supposed to have been a pretty low stakes adventure, just some harmless excitement and a chance to flex their professional muscles, you know, get their hands dirty, and maybe advancesome science. Williams was flown to a hospital in Arizona, and after sixteen surgeries, they managed to save his mangled leg and patched the hole in his skull. They also treated his burns with skin grafts and replaced his ear with a hearing aid. In the years following the eruption, Williams was accused of recklessly leading a group to the summit of Galeris without safety helmets, protective suits, or an emergency escape plan. He denied all of it, and he even wrote a book about the experience. From his point of view, at least, his attitude was very much in the camp of what can you do. I'm American, we like taking risks, We're a little arrogant, and we don't like to listen. After the disaster, Williams was partially deaf. He walked with no small degree of difficulty on reconstructed legs set in quotes. He also suffered from depression and uncontrollable anger and neurological issues. He did have a fairly intense brain injury. After all, he never accepted any blame or guilt over the deaths of his colleagues. In the last fifty years, nearly thirty scientists have died in volcanic eruptions, because volcanology is one of those rare sciences that puts you right up against the power of the earth itself. If you had a bowl full of water and had any little cracks in it, water would obviously want who escape through them, and the earth works in a kind of the same way. Nearly two thousand miles beneath our feet. Our molten inner core reaches temperatures over sixty six hundred degrees celsius or twelve thousand degrees fahrenheit, nice and toasty, and any molten rock or magma will rise to the Earth's surface and find a place to squeeze through any available fractures in the crust, which usually are found where one continental plate meets another. The magma blurts out under pressure as lava and gives birth to a volcano, the same way your skin gives birth to a pimple. In this case, the virus marks a point where the South American plate met the Caribbean plate. We talked about those fifth teen hundred potentially dangerous volcanoes around the world earlier on and around the world, more than half a billion people live within slapping distance of one. We have visited a volcano before on this show, obviously, and we have established that I am more likely to guess your phone number than anyone can pinpoint when a volcano is going to explode. There are no early warning systems. I mean they say there are, but it's really more of a weight and see monitoring policy. Like an early warning system against crime, where really you just keep an eye out for anyone crawling in your window. The thing is, volcanologists are the only people in the world who don't think it's their job to predict volcanoes. And it would be great if they could advise people when to get out of the way. But they can't. No one can. And in that way, there's a certain irony that these people died killed by a volcano while attending a United Nations conference on Volcanic risk reduction. Today those people are remember with a memorial plaque on Galerus, which remains the most active volcano in Columbia. Even I was impressed with how gory Today's story turned out. There were way more, very specific details I could have shared about various injuries, but decided that there just had to be a line. And once again, because nothing actually funny happened in this entire episode, let me tell you this. When Stanley Williams was found by rescuers behind that rock, he had a bone sticking out of his pants and they were all ew no, not like that. It was his tibia. Anyway. He went on to continue teaching at Arizona State, but he was just never the same. None of the survivors were. They dealt with trauma and emotional problems for the rest of their lives. And this story very much reminded me of the White Island volcano in New Zealand in December of twenty nineteen. Forty seven tourists and guides had been visiting when out of nowhere, the island erupted. Twenty one out of the forty seven tourist died, and the survivors only felt like they had It was a horrifying experience, and it too, could be its own entire episode. But for the purposes of today's story, it reminds us that volcanoes are unpredictably dangerous and I have no idea how many more times people will need to learn this lesson in the future. My advice just send a drone and hey, since I just saved you from a terrible future of pain and or death. If you are a regular listener, why not consider becoming a supporter. It would really help fulfill my dream of doing this full time. And if you and a few thousand of your friends could spare a buck or two, you would really be helping keep the show and frankly me alive before I tell you about Patreon. If you are into it but you are not looking for a whole relationship, you can visit by mediacoffee dot com slash doomsday to make a one time donation. Those of you who do, I appreciate you from a deep place. I think getting episodes a little early, with no sponsor interruptions and with additional ridiculously interesting material in each new episode is worth it, and if you agree, you can find out more at patreon dot com slash funeral Kazoo. And a quick but heartfelt shout out to Andrew Castillo, Donna Johansson, egg Yo, Beth Britnell, Travis Hine, and Rob Jenkins for helping to support me on Patreon. You can reach out on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook as doomsday Podcast, or fire me an email at doomsdaypod at gmail dot com. I love hearing from you, and I'm not even going to make an excuse this time. I'm caught up. I'm good. Please fire away. Older episodes can be found wherever you found this one, and while you're there, please leave us a review and tell your friends. I always thank all my Patreon listeners, new and old, for their support and encouragement. But if you could spare the money and had to choose, I always ask you to consider making a donation to Global Medic. Global Medic is rapid response agency of Canadian volunteers offering resistance around the world to aid in the aftermath of disasters and crises. They're often the first and sometimes the only team to get critical interventions to people in life threatening situations, and to date they have helped over three point six million people across seventy seven different countries. You can learn more and donate at Globalmedic dot ca. On the next episode, what if I told you that we could combine a horrific commute with horrific weather and you're all really die on the way to work. Well, I'm not saying no. It's the Wahini faery cyclone disaster of nineteen sixty eight. We'll talk soon. Safety GOGGLESOV, and thanks for listening.