November 13, 1985. Twenty-three thousand people went to bed in Armero, Colombia. Four hours later, the town didn’t exist.
When a Mountain Spits Out Enough Ice Cream to Bury Manhattan
Nevado del Ruiz had been rumbling for months—seismic hiccups, sulfur burps, the usual volcanic mood swings. Geologists were waving red flags so frantically they nearly dislocated their shoulders. But here’s the thing: nobody evacuated. The local priest told people to stay calm. The mayor insisted everything was fine. And then at 9:09 PM, the volcano belched a relatively modest eruption—nothing like Krakatoa or Mount St. Helens—but it melted about 10% of the mountain’s ice cap in minutes.
That’s 20 million cubic meters of ice turned to water, instantly.
The resulting lahars—volcanic mudflows that move like wet concrete avalanches—screamed down the mountain at 60 kilometers per hour. They picked up everything: boulders, trees, houses, livestock. By the time this geological smoothie reached Armero, 74 kilometers away, it was a three-story wall of destruction carrying the consistency of wet cement and the temperature of bathwater. The town was built on an old lahar deposit, which is like building your house on a bowling lane and acting surprised when someone rolls another ball.
The Volcano That Murdered a Town While Scientists Watched
Wait—maybe the most haunting part isn’t the eruption itself but the utter preventability of it all. Hazard maps existed. They showed Armero sitting directly in the path of potential lahars. The maps were published in October 1985, exactly one month before the disaster. Scientists had literally drawn a bullseye around the town and said, “This place will be obliterated if the volcano erupts.”
And yet.
Communication failures stacked up like a comedy of errors, except nobody was laughing. The local emergency committee met the afternoon of November 13th. They decided the danger had passed because seismic activity had decreased. Classic mistake—volcanoes don’t follow parliamentary procedure. Then the eruption knocked out power and phone lines, so when scientists in Manizales tried to warn Armero, nobody picked up the phone. Some residents did flee to higher ground, but civil defense officials used megaphones to tell them to return home, that everything was under control.
Turns out everything was decidedly not under control.
Omayra Sanchez and the Photograph That Changed Nothing
Three days after the lahars hit, photojournalist Frank Fournier captured an image that would haunt the world: 13-year-old Omayra Sanchez, trapped in debris and water up to her neck, staring directly into the camera with eerie calm. She was pinned by concrete and her aunt’s corpse. Rescuers couldn’t free her without amputating her legs, and they had no surgical equipment. She talked to rescuers for 60 hours before dying of gangrene and hypothermia.
The photo won World Press Photo of the Year. It sparked debates about journalistic ethics—should Fournier have been taking pictures instead of helping? (Spoiler: he couldn’t have helped; nobody could.) But here’s what didn’t happen: meaningful changes to Colombia’s disaster preparedness systems. Armero became a synonym for preventable tragedy, and then the world moved on.
What the Mountain Teaches Us About Listening When Nature Clears Its Throat
Nevado del Ruiz sits in Colombia’s coffee region, one of five volcanoes in the area that could theoretically do this again. It’s still active—a small eruption in 1989 reminded everyone it wasn’t done. Current monitoring is lightyears better than 1985, but the fundamental equation hasn’t changed: glaciated volcanoes plus steep slopes plus populated valleys equals potential catastrophe.
The volcano didn’t need a massive eruption to kill 23,000 people, which is the terrifying lesson. Smaller eruptions can be deadlier if they happen in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong amount of ice on top. Mount Rainier in Washington State has 25 times more glacial ice than Nevado del Ruiz had in 1985. Seattle and Tacoma sit downstream. Do the math.
Armero remains buried under meters of hardened volcanic mud—a ghost town that’s literally petrified. Some church steeples still poke through the surface like geological gravestones. Survivors built a new settlement called Nuevo Armero, but most people scattered. The Colombian government declared the old town site a national cemetary, which is grimly appropriate since it’s where most of the victims still lie, entombed in the same mud that killed them.
