The Nevado del Ruiz Armero Volcano Disaster of 1985 | Episode 111

Between all the war and strife and diarrhea in twenty twenty six, it's safe to say that this year could use a laugh, so we made one. Introducing Peepee Poo Poo Bee Fun for all ages. Childish sounding adult party game from Nacho Shark and Doomsday. It's easy to learn and hilarious to play. Your mission is to collect the right number of pee and poo cards while friends and foes try to sabotage you at every turn with everything in simple farts to diarrhea. Check out Pee Poopoo on Kickstarter and click notify me on launch so you do not miss out on our early bird specials. If you know someone who enjoys wetting themselves with laughter, spread the word. Check out peepe Poopoo and wipe out the competition on Kickstarter. Today, Live Laugh Lava, except in this case less lava and more mud and ash and trees and water and buildings and cars and boulders, the size of cars and bits of roadways and people and all kinds of debris flowing as a fast moving river with the consistency of wet concrete. Hello, and welcome to Doomsday Histories Most Dangerous Podcast. Together We're going to rediscover some of the most traumatic, bizarre, and awe inspiring but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout human history and around the world. On today's episode, you will learn how Native Colombians were able to send European visitors scrambling to their deaths with a word including jumping into active volcanoes. I will teach the parents of young children the best way to threaten your kids into letting you have a nap uninterrupted, and you will learn what happens when a town is transformed into the texture of a smoothie. And if you were listening to this on Patreon, you would meet the monster who invented shrapnel. You would learn the real reason Yogi Bear was so content to be a nihilistic picnic basket thief, and you would learn the Vegas odds of the Yellowstone super called era, curploding and bathing the continent in a thick blanket of claustrophobia. In your lifetime, 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 could potentially save your life, our work is done. So with all that said, shoot the kids out of the room, put on your headphones and safety glasses, and let's begin. What is the most beautiful place that you have never been to? There is a chance that the answer is South America. Ah, South America, the gorgeous, sprawling, forgotten land of rainforests and mountains and mysteries. To many North Americans, South America can feel distant and exotic. In reality, North and South America are like two halves of a giant, misshapen hourglass, connected at the waste by a thin strip of land, and our shared history stretches back thousands of years. Some call South America the continent of giants, you know, because of the Amazon River and the Andes Mountains, and of course having the world's largest rainforest. Those kinds of giants not like crickishly tall people. South America is a place with endless things to experience and enjoy. So, if I may, if you have never been a good place to start for first timers might be Columbia. You could start your morning in a warm tropical valley, surrounded by parrots and songbirds, and be gasping for air on a snow covered volcanic peak by the afternoon. A single road could take you past an array of seemingly unrelated climates and sights, from jungle valleys to deserts, to rainforests, to mountains, and to bustling cities. This is one of the few places on Earth where you will find rainforests and volcanoes, and deserts and glaciers all sharing a border. In a way, it's as if every type of South American land has been all packed into one country. Columbia sits at the northern tip of the continent, where the Andes Mountains split into three separate ranges, before descending into tropical forests, vast grasslands, those gorgeous Caribbean beaches, and eventually all the way to the Amazon Rainforest. As you can imagine, Colombia is one of the most biologically rich places on Earth, with an astonishing variety of plants and animals in different ecosystems. So it's no wonder that European explorers were so excited by the endless promise of scroungeibles and resources that they might find when they first arrived at the tail end of the fourteen hundreds. They mostly set their helloes and mapped and inventoried everything from the safety of their boats until they were ready to start doing some shopping. Set in quotes, and this is my favorite thing about Columbia. They're snarky as indigenous people. They'd already set up shop for as long as sixteen thousand years when shiny white space aliens descended on them with a crazy look in their eyes. Long but very cool story short. Columbia had gold, and to the Europeans of the Middle Ages, gold had the same effect as viagra. The indigenous peoples didn't have the kind of weapons needed to defend themselves properly against guns and cannons, so they went another way. Imagine drooling foreign invaders, seething with anger and lusting after some worthless but beautiful minerals, in this case gold, so you not appreciatively, then give them the once over, and since they seem like nice guys, you decide to confide in them that there is a lifetime supply of gold just somewhere. Then you just pick a direction at random, just beyond the mountains and jungles and valleys. They baited them by making up tails of a king of a land so wealthy that he covered his whole body in gold dust, and this became known as the search for El Dorado, which was Spanish for the Golden One. Before long, el Dorado became an entire kingdom where they used gold instead of stone to build, and sometimes it just rained gems. These indigenous pre Colombians understood human weakness and they baited them with their own desires. They played a kind of a get off my lawn uno and weaponized the Europeans obsession against themselves into suicide marches that killed thousands in some of the harshest and most regrettable terrain on Earth. They would even point to far off smoking volcanic peaks and send them running like dogs after a stick. The people wanted the Spanish gone, the Spanish wanted their volcano gold, and volcanoes won human skin. And that is why we are here for human sacrifice. No, we are here for the volcanology. Now to begin, I do not want to suggest that volcanology is not a rewarding vocation. It's just that the end goal is to understand volcanoes to the point where you could successfully predict an eruption in time to meaningfully protect thousands of lives, and sadly, this is not a trophy that a lot of volcanologists hold. The odds of successfully predicting a volcanic eruption are as bad as the odds of even calculating those odds. It took me a while, but at best I arrived at one in eight hundred and seventy six thousand. So what if you're a volcanologist to dreams of becoming as famous as Harun Tazif or Katya Maurice Kraft when you discover that your work is getting scooped by a bunch of geologists. I'm not implying that there's any beef between volcanologists and geologists. In fact, most volcanologists began as geologists. They just decided to go niche that said, there is a difference. See, volcanologists are afforded a status closer to a rock star than geologists because they study explosive mountains, and that is cool and also the kind of thing that could get one interviewed on the news anyway. In late nineteen eighty four, a team of geologists had been studying a gorgeous chunk of rock called Nevado del Luise. It is a massive steep sided, glacier covered stratovolcano sitting in the central Andes, about eighty miles or one hundred and thirty kilometers from the capital of Bogataw in the Las Nevado National Park. On a map of Columbia, if you drew a triangle connecting Bogataw and Medellin and Cali, Nevado del Ruiz sits pretty much in the middle of it. Some of the locals just call it El Ruiz, Ruiz being the name of some colonial accountant who stole the name from the original title Kumandi. It sits in the Colombian Andes, right where the Oceanic Nazca plate forces its way underneath the South American plate. It's the perfect place to generate all the magma a bunch of hungry Colombian volcanoes could possibly ask for. And Ruiz was not alone. It was part of a massive of five major, fairly closely packed volcanoes Ruis, Tolima, Isabelle, Quindio and Makin. And these things are closer together than my house is. From the airport, Nevado del Ruiz grew layer by layer, eruption after eruption over hundreds of thousands of years, and today it rises to about fifty three hundred meters seventeen four hundred feet above sea level, and it is capped by glaciers and snowfields. In fact, the word nevado means snow covered. Now. Volcanic summits are pretty much the most defining part of a volcano, but they do tend to collapse or fall apart or even get blown away every now and then, which of course changes everything and you wouldn't really think about it, but volcanoes do change all the time. The current summit of Nevado del Ruiz is known as the Aranus Crater, at least for now, and from that glaciated top. As a newbie, you probably think that lava and ice shouldn't really play that well together. Oh they work fine. The heat from the mountain regularly melts this glacial water and that goes on to feed rivers that go on to supply millions of people and plants and animals with their drinking water. Now, we just got here, and although it's never been the most most dangerous volcano in the country, it is certainly one of the more active. Now when my kids were really young, and I was exhausted. I would tell them that I was a monster and I needed my rest, and if they woke me up, I would get angry and kill them. Then I would put cookies on my chest and fall asleep while they silently and gingerly mission impossible their way around me for the next thirty minutes. It works like a charm, and it's not really that far from how volcanologists treat mountains. They pepper them with equipment and transmitters, looking for any sign of increased temperature or ground swelling or gas emissions, just like my kids, but instead of cookies, scientists are more concerned about how much danger they might face over the coming days, weeks, or months. If a mountain does literally anything, they are all over it. And it was around the time of our store today that they began detecting seismic activity around the mountain. It started with a few small earthquakes, which they love, followed by steam driven freatic explosions, which totally makes them do that kind of clap where you're just smacking your palms together. As you know, a hot volcano is an interesting volcano, and there were plenty of hot things happening beneath the surface. You probably don't know what a freatic explosion is. It's what happens when groundwater or rainwater, snowmelt, crater, lake water, even seawater comes into contact with extremely hot rock or magma inside or beneath a volcano. It basically turns into steam almost instantaneously. And we've talked about steam explosions before. The lake wood turns into gas in an instant about seventeen hundred times its original volume, and if the surrounding rock can't contain all that pressure, then cub boom. They sound like artillery fire, and they are no joke. Nothing a volcano does is funny. They're almost famously unfunny. You don't want to take any kind of rock or mud or soil or steam or even volcanic gases to the crutch or face because all of that stuff can be traveling at highwaist speeds, and at that speed we call it shrapnel. Shrapnel in this case could do anything from poke a cartoonish little hole in you to removing your torso. The steam itself could be fantastically hot, depending on how much it cools before reaching you. That steam may feel anywhere from a hot blast of air to something capable of blowing your skin off in melty sheets. If it makes you feel any better. Most victims are dead before they're able to fully understand what happened to them, and these explosions are taken as an indicator that magma is rising towards the surface. You probably tend to think of the Earth's crust as a solid block of rock that circles the world, like a bowling ball or a jawbreaker, but it's not. The crust is full of cracks and faults and fractures, and all these different parts and layers have different strengths, and beneath all of that, all the heat and pressure deep inside the planet turns molten rock into magma, and because it is less dense than the material surrounding it, it tries to move upward through the rock like a bubble in a glass. It can take weeks or months or even years for it to work its way up through the crust, and only a fraction of it actually ever reaches the surface, and that is why volcanology is a sport of patients. Nevado del Ruiz kept on sputtering and quietly belching for more than half a year, and by mid nineteen eighty five scientists started to worry. The shake and shimmy was on an upward trend, and sulfur emissions were even harder to ignore as they were on the rise. Still, with all the predictive ability of all the professionals assembled and a dime, you had exactly ten cents worth of not much. That was until September the eleventh, nineteen eighty five, when a significant steam eruption happened and scientists finally got to holler at the Columbian authorities, how ya like minow? It began as great white steam and an ash cloud rising from the crater, followed by explosive bursts of steam which carried all kinds of rock and ash upwards. And while all that was going on, the snow and ice melted around the crater and all of the water produced escaped and became a lahar of muddy floodwaters draining downstream down river valleys along the volcano, and all of those river valleys leading away from Ruiz ultimately emptied into the Magdalena River. This is the largest river in all of Columbia. And if you don't know what a lahar is. Just think of it like a fast moving river of wet concrete made out of water and mud and ash and rocks and trees and debris that all flows down the slopes of a volcano in a thick, churning slurry. And this traveled about seventeen miles or twenty seven kilometers away from the volcano, and thankfully no one was hurt. However, it was an eye opener. So by October the authorities had started distributing hazard maps. They wanted to show residents in potentially affectible areas how safe or not so safe they might be if and when the mountain decided to play a more serious game of look what I can do. But again, the majority of volcanoes just put on a bit of a show as they start rearranging their basements, and then they just go dormant again, but of course leaving everyone with their fingers still in their ears because they do not give all clear signs. One of those potentially affected areas I was talking about was called Armero. It sat in a warm valley near Ibagwe in Tolima in the Magdalena River valley, and historically volcanic flows coated these valley floors with rich sediments, which leaves them incredibly fertile and valuable. Remember old coffee commercials where people would try to dry hump the side of a hill in Columbia and tell you how great the soil was for growing coffee. Well, Armeo isn't the most famous place in the world, and people don't generally hump it, but it was exactly the kind of place people were humping about. Armeo was one of the most prosperous agricultural towns in all of Central Columbia. Generations of farmers and their families built prosperous lives from the fertile soil in the around them, and because of that, our marrow became a close knit community with a strong sense of identity, where church bells rang and children played in the plaza, and daily life revolved around family gatherings and religious events. This was the kind of place where young couple strolled beautiful tree lined streets and neighbors all knew each other by name. Basically an idyllic South American mountain town until October of nineteen eighty five, when the citizens opened their mail to learn that their beloved home lay in the path of a potential unscheduled mud flow. This wasn't the first time this kind of thing had happened, but it had been a while. About one hundred and forty years earlier, in eighteen forty five, a massive mudflow raced down the Laganius valley, which killed around one thousand people. About two hundred and sixty years before that, in fifteen ninety five, a major eruption sent lahars racing down the surrounding Lagunias and Guali river valleys and killed more than six hundred people. Two major mudflows over four hundred years. Yeah, you've got to feel pretty good about your chances. Anyway. There had been a team of Italian volcanologists, amongst others, who had taken a keen interest in the volcano's activity and declared the risk of a lahar as higher than average. When Mount Saint Helens was growing and farting and carrying on in nineteen eighty, experts warned that it was probably going to do something. But would that be next Tuesday, or three weeks from now or seven years from now. There was simply no way to say. But what authorities and locals could definitely say was that they couldn't just abandon their entire lives on a whim. You're asking people to leave everything they have for an ende definite period of time, and when that happens, more often than not, people get frustrated and start sneaking back into the area. In this case, some of the officials tasked with evacuating the area questioned the warnings themselves, so large scale evacuations were never ordered. They were taking it under advisement. Then, in the beginning of November, the amount of sulfur and hydrogen compounds shot way up and change the chemistry of the water near the volcano. In the reading Tee Lee's version of volcanic prediction, this plus the freatic explosions heavily suggested that magma was in fact nearing the surface, and there was an emergency planning meeting scheduled in Armero to talk about all of this, but that wasn't going to be for another couple of days. But before that could come to pass, on the morning of November thirteenth, nineteen eighty five, a light ash began to fall to their way of thinking. They were sitting more than forty five miles or almost seventy five kilometers away from the volcano that had to be more than safe. Here at Toronto last week we had the worst air quality on the planet because of a few hundred wildfires raging in northern Ontario and carrying for hundreds and hundreds of miles. Wood smoke usually leads to coughing and difficulty breathing. A volcanic ash can cause severe respiratory injury and toxic gas exposure. If you took a deep sniff, the first thing you'd probably notice after the smell would be the millions of microscopic volcanic glass shards. You eat certain rocks up enough and they turn into glass, and then you'd blow the whole thing up, and you find yourself a blizzard of tiny, sharp edged knives that are perfect for getting deep into the lungs and eyes. And once they're in the lungs, they reached deep into the tiny air sacks where your lungs turn oxygen into something that can be carried by the blood. The residents of our marrow were worried, but not worried. Worried so they stayed to observe. And I'm not judging them for staying I just have a pretty low tolerance for ash falling from the sky, and all the while small earthquakes continued. Gas and steam were seen leaving the summit crater, but by three in the afternoon, Ruiz was spewing all kinds of crap high into the air far above the summit, together with a dark plume of ash, and just to keep things lively, stormy weather started moving into the area, which did make things harder to see from far away, but also made what they could see a little more apocalyptic. By late afternoon, magma had reached the surface. The crater was glowing, but apparently this magma was just too thick to really put on a show like the kind you might get in Hawaii or Iceland. It was all being blasted into ash and fragments, like we said, And then at just after nine o'clock PM, Nevado del Ruiz, the region's most iconic peak, erupted explosively. Witnesses describe the ash cloud flashing with lightning and the deep rolling rumble of continuous detonations like distant thunder or artillery, rather than just one giant kaboom ash and pummus and rock fragments rose more than thirty kilometers or eighteen miles into the sky. And I'm skipping a little ahead here by telling you that this eruption would be rated as a VEI three on the Volcanic Explosivity Index, and that would be considered a moderate eruption. VII is based on how much mass is ejected and then how high the eruption cloud rises into the atmosphere. For reference, Mount Saint Helen's was a VEI five, Pinatubo in nineteen ninety one was a VII six, and Tambora in eighteen fifteen was a VII seven. Nevado del Ruiz was a three, even though the ash cloud rose more than thirty kilometers in the air, which should make it a five or a six, but it didn't eject a lot of material, So scribble, scribble, scribble, and we're back down to three. And you might not think that sounds impressive for one of the most dangerous stories you're ever going to hear, but no spoilers. Within minutes of the eruption, pyroclastic activity melted the glacier covered summit, which quickly drained down the mountain and all that meltwater combined with the ash and the rocks and the debris, like we said, turning into a slurry of fast moving danger, and close to the summit where all this began, it accelerated rapidly that flowed down very steep slopes and began tearing apart the landscape to add to its own mass. It uprooted trees, and it picked up everything it touched, scouring the valley floor clean. And it wasn't just one, not two, not three, but four massive lahars had all left the summit around the same time, all racing down river valleys at speeds approaching thirty seven miles or sixty kilometers an hour, and all reaching a meeting point at the confluence of the Magdalena River Valley. Now, it was around eleven pm in our Marrow, and the mountain popped off about two and a half hours earlier, so they were feeling pretty safe. That was until an endless rumbling became noticeably louder and closer and closer, turning into a kind of a distant roaring sound, growing and closing in on them. And then a surge of water and mud entered town, not much, just a little at first, and people thought maybe they were watching a little late flooding, but nope. Before they knew it, it had grown so powerful that vehicles and people in the streets were pulled off their feet and swept away, screaming. As the floe grew in size and strength, and it scoured around buildings until it had become pulverising waves of hot mud and rocks and trees and debris forcing its way into town, crashing through everything in its path, laying everything flat. This incredible barrage of death and destruction had traveled two and a half hours to get here, and it was still this powerful. The floes leaving the mountain would have started anywhere as high as seven hundred degrees celsius or thirteen hundred fahrenheit, but by the time it had reached Darmero, it had cooled into something much more comfortable. However, that is the last bit of good news you are going to hear. Within minutes, flood and debris overwhelmed the town, reaching depths as high as six meters that's twenty feet in places. Homes, schools, businesses, roads, all of it gone like it had never been there. Entire neighborhoods were erased, and you might be wondering what happened to all the homes and buildings. Were they buried or broken up or carried away? The answer is all three. In the areas that received the full force of the Lahar, they were essentially demolished and shredded. You have to remember the front of the floe contained boulders as large as cars and trees, and actual cars and even pieces of other buildings. If it is possible that there were somehow an uglier battering ram to be found anywhere in the world, I do not know where that would be. Neighborhoods collapsed and were smashed apart before they could be buried. Within half an hour, most of our marrow was under Buildings on higher ground were missing walls and filled with mud, but still somewhat intact. Before the disaster, not many buildings rose more than a few stories, and the tallest thing around, dominating the skyline, was the church steeple. The Lahar lost a lot of energy along its way, and yet it was still more than powerful enough to liquid paper armerow off the map, and early on the next day of November fourteenth, people trapped in the mud were heard calling for help through the darkness. Would be Rescuers and emergency workers raced to the scene as quickly as they could, which was difficult because the Lahars had also destroyed the roads. They hadn't received any communications from Armero itself, but they presumed that was because communications had also been destroyed, and by the time daylight arrived, the scale of the disaster finally became apparent. Workers found that most of our marrow was gone, was just gone. While it was there, it was just in a different configuration than people might remember, and snugly tucked under twenty plus feet of hardened mud and debris. And there had been tens of thousands of people here, and what people were not seeing were tens of thousands of people for days. The military, local volunteers, and international rescue teams poured onto the scene, bringing medical supplies and heavy equipment as quickly as they could, but of course they faced the same problems accessing roads. Survivors had to be ferried out by helicopter. And now you might imagine a town submerged under a smooth blanket of mud, but the reality was way more chaotic. Imagine cars sticking out of the mud at awkward angles around pieces of tree and buildings and everything. You can imagine. About eighty five percent of our marrow looked like it had been put through an industrial blender and then partially buried by fields of gray brown mud and debris. From a helicopter, you could still tell that this had been a town, but just barely. And now to the saddest part of the story. As rescue workers climbed over and through the devastation, they heard a faint cry. After a quick search, they found Omira Sanchez, trapped and pinned in the rubble and debris. She was only thirteen years old, and she had been there for nearly three days. She'd been trapped in a cavity filled with muddy water, and she was conscious and articulate and surrounded by people. She asked for sweets and talked about school, and prayed, and spoke to her mother through television cameras, and she tried to be Rescuers needed a high capacity water pump before they could get to the debris that was holding her legs. But what they didn't know was that her legs were pinned beneath heavy structural debris, and her lower body was also pinned by some kind of masonry, and worse, also, wrapped tightly around her legs and feet were the arms of her aunt, who had tried to protect her. They were going to need heavy lifting equipment and cutting tools to get her out, or they were going to have to amputate her legs, except they didn't have the surgical equipment, or the blood supplies or the medical support to keep her alive afterwards. To do this, they needed a surgical team who knew how to pull off an emergency field amputation. They needed the ability to transfuse her body with new blood, and they needed a helicopter to evacuate her to a hospital. And long story short, they didn't have any of that. Journalists covering the story interviewed her repeatedly. They kept her company and made sure she was never alone. Other reporters ended up distributing supplies or comforting victims or relaying information. Basically, they did anything that they could anywhere it would help. Omira may have become famous around the world, but nothing could make the equipment they needed appear faster. And on November sixteenth, that little girl who stared up bravely from the mud all that time quietly passed away. The official cause of her death was hypothermia and gangrene complicated by severe crush injuries. Before she died, photographer Frank Fournier captured her face, and his photo, The Agony of Omira Sanchez, as it came to be known, became one of the most famous news photographs ever taken. Omaira became the human face of this disaster. Up to the same point, estimating the number of the dead and even the injured had been understandably hard. By the end of November, the best estimates counted around five thousand people had been injured when the Lahars struck, About another thirty three hundred were now missing and presumed lost, and the number of the estimated dead was twenty three thousand. I am not saying that wrong. So what happened well, in order, a relatively moderate volcanic eruption triggered huge mudflows that buried an entire town, which would be a disaster in and of itself right there, but people were still using the town at the time, so it became a catastrophe. If you've ever wondered what the difference between a disaster and a catastrophe is, it's the scale. If your house burns down, that's a disaster, but if it burns down your whole neighborhood with it, that's a catastrophe. And every catastrophe is a disaster, but not every disaster is a catastrophe. The eruption was completely unexpected, well, not necessarily unexpected, necessarily but unpredictable. There were warnings and communications and even evacuation orders on the table, and then there was the public's willingness or lack of willingness to comply, and all of this was still going on in mid argument when the lahar arrived. There was no single mistake here. There was a chain of factors. People always imagine volcanic eruptions as meaning, look, here's a bunch of lava and ash and maybe an explosion or two, and it always happens very near the volcano. The people of Ourmero had reason to believe that they were far enough away to be spared any involvement if Ruiz had a bad day. It's just simple observation and conclusion. They presumed that they were safe and then ignored the larger danger of fast moving, utterly destructive lahars that could reach out and attack them. From a distance, even with hazard maps detailing how they were sitting directly in a known lahar pathway. But honestly, it was hard to blame them. If your town had a beautiful public pool in the center of it, but once in every handful of centuries a giant tentacle came out and killed someone, nine times out of ten, you are absolutely still going to enjoy that pool. The threat was real, but the timing was vague, and it can be hard to make people sacrifice their homes and lives than everything they know unless it's unquestionably and immediately necessary. So you're busy ignoring science, and you're annoyed that you seem to keep having to wipe ash off of your phones. You're trying to mine your own business when you hear a rumble and you hear liquid, and you grab your surfboard, but not fast enough for it to be of any good, And now you're in a washing machine full of volcanic mud. Would you know what to do? Of the many hazards on display at an erupting volcano, a lahar can potentially be the worst. Victims never see it coming and it arrives with barely any warning. I can't teach you how to punch your way through one, but I can give you some practical survival tips. Step one simply enough, do a little homework and find out if you're living or staying in a lahar zone basically anywhere inside of a river valley that connects to a volcano. If you answered yes to step one, Step two is to consult a real estate agent, but closing on a home can take time, so the second best thing to do is figure out your best evacuation routes to higher ground. Most people say root singular, but I say have backups just in case. If a lahar is approaching, you would either feel it or hear it, but not with a lot of lead time. The force of an approaching lahar can change river levels before it arrives, so keep an eye out for that as a good sign that something is pushing its way towards you. And once you know, or even just suspect, it's time to get step in and keep step in, move immediately to higher ground. Just get away from any river valley or creek bed or canyon or drainage channel. What if you decide to climb twenty feet but a thirty foot wall of mud and debris peekaboos from around a bend, and you're too busy fouling yourself at the sight of it to continue racing uphill that fast. Well, you do what you can. This is why some survivalists will tell you to make sure that you can run a mile in and lift your own body weight, because body positivity makes for good survival possibility. And I don't know that you will hear this from any other safety people, but I do not expect you to necessarily be able to do this, and for the simple reason that a if you're not in shape, it's not easy, and B you can't live in fear. If you did step one well enough, you shouldn't have to live in fear. Just because you do not have the physical ability to outrun a lahar does not mean that you do not count oh and on that you will never be able to outrun a lahar. Remember Indiana Jones running away from that boulder. It's you're not doing. It's not happening. Escape is your only job. But let's say you were in a car at the time. As soon as the waters appear, the road becomes a trap. So the moment you know that something's up. Abandon your car and run to higher ground perpendicular to the flow. I do not care if you are driving a surplus military tank. Your vehicle is no match for the pounding power of boulders and trees and the scrubbing and lifting power of that much liquid and material. A lot of people die because they stop to watch these damn things. We see a giant wall of mud carrying refrigerators and trees and screaming people, and our instinct is to decide whether we film it vertically or horizontally. And here's the thing. The flow that you can see is not necessarily the whole flow. Anything could happen. The banks beneath your feet could collapse, You could end up playing catch with debris, and some crazy secondary surge could arrive minutes later. Lahars can travel forty miles or sixty kilometers an hour, and even faster on slopes. So what if it just decides to hawk a rocket you that blows your head and neck off. Now, in that case, I appreciate you listening to the show. Now, if you were trapped in a building, you want to get as high as possible, as fast as possible. Not like that. I mean to get to as high a floor as you can, or even the roof if possible. From there, you simply build a zipline and ferry yourself to the nearest hillside or ridge. But let's say you found yourself at your local tax office in that situation. As much as you might want to just grab an accountant and use them as a surfboard, I'm afraid that's just not going to work. Stay away from the windows and do what you can to protect yourself from debris. You want to shelter behind the sturdiest structural walls that you can find. And this would be a one and a half hour safety segment if I had to explain all of the secondary hazards around building collapse or contaminated water, or broken gas lines or down power lines. So just be painfully observant and aware. After the lahar, stay away from river channels. These things can happen in surges, so choosing to return too soon can be a serious mistake. In fact, just stay away until the authorities declare the area safe. That way, if anything does go wrong, it's their fault. Scientists identified the danger months earlier and repeatedly urged authorities to prepare evacuation plans. But because nobody could say exactly when an eruption would occur, you had political leaders who worried about catching flak for causing panic. You had other officials saying maybe the warnings were exaggerated, which automatically undercuts the seriousness of it and basically gave people validation to ignore them. And then you had the fact that when the volcano had gotten huffy before, it never led to disaster, at least not in living memory, So it was obvious that the locals suffered from complacency or normalcy bias. I've never blown off my face before, so I probably never will. They called the mountain a sleeping lion, and because it was such a quiet mountain, ninety nine percent of the time, any threat felt pretty remote, like the way you don't worry about getting hit by a meteor, but you still could worry about it. I mean, your actual odds are only about one in seven hundred thousand. No, see, people like to worry about real things. Only neurotic people have the kind of time to worry about abstract things. My stupid nervous system can't tell the difference between being chased by a lion and missing a mortgage payment. But let's say the people had immediately jumped on Lahar watch, ringing bells across the city, yelling this is what we prepared for people. There was also that terrible weather on the night of the eruption. On a clear night, residents might have recognized the seriousness of the situation sooner. But I described the glowing of the crater, which you could only see intermittently through the cloud cover and the heavy rain. People couldn't easily see what was happening on the volcano, and the sound of the storm may also have massed earlier warning signs of the lahars approach. As ash fell over Armerow, some officials and community leaders told residents to hunker down and remain indoors, just wait for further instructions, and it was the last thing that many of them ever did. Sadly, if not for the weather and the failure of communications, in theory, there would have been more than enough time between the eruption and the Lahar's arrival to properly evacuate the town. It is impossible to know the exact number of victims in a landslide situation like this, where the scene of the disaster is destroyed and sealed away forever. The population of Armero before the disaster was around thirty thousand. About eighty percent, that's four out of five had been killed, around seven eighteen percent had been injured, and twenty percent survived. And I know that sounds like bad math, but it's not. It's just because many of the injured were also survivors that the categories overlapped confusingly. But basically everyone was either dead or seriously traumatized and homeless. What made that so sad was that, by every account, this was a deeply interconnected community of families that had lived together for generations, the kind of place where anyone could call you by name, and social events brought people together. When the disaster struck, entire family networks were wiped out like they never existed. Any loss is felt profoundly, but this was on a whole nother level. Following the disaster, people spent decades preserving and documenting family histories and identifying victims and maintaining orioles. Our Marrow was never rebuilt. Much of the former town remains a memorial landscape, with roads and foundations and cemeteries and monuments marking where neighborhoods once stood. It was effectively a living graveyard. The US Geological Survey described everything beneath their feet as being trapped within a concrete like mixture of mud and vegetation and buildings and debris. But even after forty years, many still identify as Amortas or people from Armerow, even though they now live elsewhere. These were ordinary people caught in an extraordinary event, and our Merow does get most of the attention. But it was not the only community struck that day. There were four major lahars and at least thirteen other villages and settlements were destroyed or severely damaged, and several larger towns were also affected. The second hardest hit was Chinchina. It had a community of about sixty thousand people, and the lahar confined itself mainly to the Chinchina River valley, and it destroyed around four hundred homes and caused eighteen hundred deaths, but it did leave most of the town still on the map. Another lahar, racing down the Guwali River valley, slammed into Marikda, and it did kill an unknown number of people in devastated homes and infrastructure, but Marakida wasn't completely buried and also remained largely intact. Hundreds of additional deaths were spread among smaller villages and rural areas, and hundreds of thousands of people across the entire region were affected by the eruption. The damage was estimated to be around two hundred and eighteen million in nineteen eighty five dollars, which is closer to seven hundred million today. Within a year of the disaster, Columbia established stronger volcanic monitoring programs. New observatories and warning systems were developed. Scientists who had been monitoring the volcano described a series of distinctive, long period earthquakes that happened within hours of the eruption, and this kind of thing is now recognized as signs of magma and pressurized volcanic fluids moving beneath the surface. One volcanologist later explained the volcano was basically screaming that it was about to erupt. They just didn't speak volcano so good. This story would go on to become an invaluable case study in risk communication and emergency management and volcanic hazard planning. Worldwide, which is kind of cool, said in quotes, because although increased awareness and safety following a disaster is a fundamental human good, you have to think about what you're applauding. The Nevado del Ruiz Armero volcano disaster became known as the fourth deadliest volcanic incident in recorded history, only behind the nineteen oh one eruption of Mount Pelee, which killed thirty thousand and is one of our most popular episodes, even though we did it all the way back in year one, the eighteen eighty three eruption of Krakatoa, which killed around thirty six thousand people, and Mount Tambora, the angriest volcano we've ever met, which killed more than seventy thousand. Nevado del Ruiz comes in fourth, holding the Pewter Medal among volcanic disasters. And it wasn't just that twenty three thousand people had died and that made this the deadliest lahar disaster in recorded history. To find the next deadliest lahar, you have to travel all the way back to the fifty eighty six eruption of the Kalote volcano in Indonesia, and that was less than half as bad, only ten thousand people had died. Also, that was four hundred and forty years ago. The Nevado del Ruiz Armero volcano disaster of nineteen eighty five is not only the worst natural disaster and deadliest thing to ever happen in Colombia, it will forever remain one of the deadliest volcanic disasters in recorded human history. It's been a minute since we got to visit a volcano. I thought it was timely because the most famous volcano in our neck of the woods would be Mount Saint Helen's, which is starting to smoke again, which always makes people ears per cup, And of course Yellowstone is always in the backs of people's minds too. But right now, when I am thinking about stuff blowing up, you have to know that right now I'm thinking about peepee poo pooh. If you haven't already heard, I have always explained that contributions from listeners like you are the only reason that I have been able to do this show as often as I have, the only reason we have six years worth of episodes, which I appreciate and the people who love the show certainly appreciate. Well, now I want to change that. I said a while back that this is the only show built from the bottom up instead of the top down. There's no corporate sponsorships, there's no big checks settling through the door every month. This is a thing that I do out of love. The show only exists because of your generosity, and when the world has had enough, the show will go away. Well, I want to change all that by injured using peepee Poopoo. It's this idea that I had to make the world's most childish sounding adult card game. This is my very first product, and Doomsday's gravy train to know more delayed episodes. Yes, I know the name is ridiculous, admittedly, but Peepee Poopoo is easy to learn and hilarious to play. It's a little like GoFish and a little like poker, but with portrayal and sabotage. Check out peepe Poopoo on Kickstarter and click notify me on launch so a you're doing me a solid and B so you don't miss out on our early bird special. If you know someone who likes to wet themselves with laughter, spread the word. Check out Peepee Poopoo on Kickstarter and get ready to wipe out the competition and help yourself and the show out today. It's all going down August the eleventh. And as much as I love your support, the only support that I'm asking for at the moment is your consideration in sharing the word of the fundraiser for our crazy game. Now that said, I do really want a shout out Charlotte Nicole Muko, Joyce, mal Joe Reese, Jerry McDonald and Rory Barrett for supporting me on Kickstarter. I also want to shout out Mick from Alaska and Sonia Turner from down Under. They've been sending me letters and postcards and scary stories and I love it. My wall is getting covered. I mean, frankly, I want to thank all of you. If you're still listening at this point, that's a hell of a thing. And if you ever want to talk about it, I'm always available on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook as Doomsday Podcast, or you can just fire me an email to doomsdaypod at gmail dot com. Older episodes can be found wherever you found this one, and while you're there, please leave us a review and tell your friends. And as much as I am all about gratitude for the support and encouragement everyone gives me, and as much as I'm very much trying to funnel you all into turning into brand ambassadors to help sell my games so that I never have to worry about money and just do this show without crying for the rest of my life. I also always ask you to consider making a donation to Global Menic. Global Menic is a rapid response agency of Canadian volunteers offering assistance around the world to aid in the aftermath of disasters and crises. They are often the first and sometimes only team to get critical interventions to people in life threatening situations, and to date they have helped over six million people across eighty nine different countries. You can learn more and donate at Globalmenic dot ca. On the next episode, some people think that liftoff is the worst thing about flying, while others maintain that it's the landings that make them the most nervous. I don't know which one you believe to be true, but figure me out. What if your takeoff was your landing? On the next episode, it's the Air Florida Potomac River disaster of nineteen eighty two. We'll talk soon. Safety goggles off and thanks for listening,