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    No Apparent Danger: The True Story of Volcanic Disaster at Galeras and Nevado Del Ruiz
    Unavailable
    No Apparent Danger: The True Story of Volcanic Disaster at Galeras and Nevado Del Ruiz
    Unavailable
    No Apparent Danger: The True Story of Volcanic Disaster at Galeras and Nevado Del Ruiz
    Ebook321 pages4 hours

    No Apparent Danger: The True Story of Volcanic Disaster at Galeras and Nevado Del Ruiz

    By Victoria Bruce

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    On January 14, 1993, a team of scientists descended into the crater of Galeras, a restless Andean volcano in southern Colombia, for a day of field research. As the group slowly moved across the rocky moonscape of the caldera near the heart of the volcano, Galeras erupted, its crater exploding in a barrage of burning rocks and glowing shrapnel. Nine men died instantly, their bodies torn apart by the blast.

    While others watched helplessly from the rim, Colombian geologist Marta Calvache raced into the rumbling crater, praying to find survivors. This was Calvache's second volcanic disaster in less than a decade. In 1985 Calvache was part of a group of Colombia's brightest young scientists that had been studying activity at Nevado del Ruiz, a volcano three hundred miles north of Galeras. They had warned of the dire consequences of an eruption for months, but their fledgling coalition lacked the resources and muscle to implement a plan of action or sway public opinion. When Nevado del Ruiz erupted suddenly in November 1985, it wiped the city of Armero off the face of the earth and killed more than twenty-three thousand people -- one of the worst natural disasters of the twentieth century.

    No Apparent Danger links the characters and events of these two eruptions to tell a riveting story of scientific tragedy and human heroism. In the aftermath of Nevado del Ruiz, volcanologists from all over the world came to Galeras -- some to ensure that such horrors would never be repeated, some to conduct cutting-edge research, and some for personal gain. Seismologists, gas chemists, geologists, and geophysicists hoped to combine their separate areas of expertise to better understand and predict the behavior of monumental forces at work deep within the earth.

    And yet, despite such expertise, experience, and training, crucial data were ignored or overlooked, essential safety precautions were bypassed, and fifteen people descended into a death trap at Galeras. Incredibly, expedition leader Stanley Williams was one of five who survived, aided bravely by Marta Calvache and her colleagues. But nine others were not so lucky.

    Expertly detailing the turbulent history of Colombia and the geology of its snow-peaked volcanoes, Victoria Bruce weaves together the stories of the heroes, victims, survivors, and bystanders, evoking with great sensitivity what it means to live in the shadow of a volcano, a hair's-breadth away from unthinkable natural calamity, and shows how clashing cultures and scientific arrogance resulted in tragic and unnecessary loss of life.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateNov 23, 2010
    ISBN9780062011688
    Unavailable
    No Apparent Danger: The True Story of Volcanic Disaster at Galeras and Nevado Del Ruiz
    Author

    Victoria Bruce

    Victoria Bruce is the author of No Apparent Danger, Hostage Nation, and Sellout. She is the recipient of the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award for excellence in broadcast journalism for her film, The Kidnapping of Ingrid Betancourt. She lives in Anne Arundel County, Maryland.

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    Reviews for No Apparent Danger

    4/5

    38 ratings7 reviews

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    • 5/5
      An amazing, fascinating, and well-written tale of two volcano eruptions. It also exposes a fraud of incredible proportions. Having read Stanley Williams book, I was astonished to find out that the truth was very different.

      A great read.
    • 3/5
      This is three different stories, interwoven because that's how the world is; the mismanaged volcanic crisis at Colombia's Nevado del Ruiz in 1985, the totally avoidable deaths (largely of scientists) at the Colombian volcano Galeras in 1993, and finally the fallout in the scientific community. While the stories are fascinating and sad in their own right, prepare to be very, very angry; first at the bickering, political maneuvering and poverty that cost lives; and secondly, at the face-saving, credit-stealing, and corpse-climbing that can occur in science. Competently written (the author is a geologist and a journalist.)Warning: There are a few very disturbing descriptions in this book, of things volcanoes and mudflows do to human bodies. You can tell they're coming if you're squeamish, though.About the recorded book: While otherwise adequate, the reader's enthusiastic tone gives a ghoulish note to some of the passages, as if she's quite happy to be able to read this exciting stuff and doesn't remember those are real people dying.
    • 5/5
      Bruce recounts the history, both geologic and historic, of the active volcanic range in Colombia. It's quite a story.The Nevado del Ruiz eruption, when it came was horrifying. It wasn't one of those blow-the-tops off like Mt. St. Helens, rather an insidious flow of lava that melted several glaciers which then overran rivers and created a mudslide close to one-hundred feet high and traveled at about fifty miles per hour. It literally obliterated the town of Armero and killed more than 23,000 people. Ironically, there was warning. Ham radio operators living high in the mountains who saw what was happening sent warnings, but the local priest had broadcast calm reassurances saying it was just an ash rain so people even refused the frantic warnings of local firemen who had pounded on their doors insisting they evacuate. Only 5% of the icecap had melted. 85% of Armero vanished under the mud.Following that eruption there was an increased interest in the volcanoes of the Andes and the next on the list was Galeras. Bruce does a great job of illuminating the social and political pressures on the scientists who by now had become quite interested in those wisps of steam coming from the top of the mountain. Everyone wanted accurate predictions of when the volcano would pop off and what form it would take. (By the way, here is a nasty description of the dangers of pyroclastic flows: "an absolute death sentence that kills not from the heat but from inhalation of scalding hot ash. On the first breath, a person’s lungs react with instant pneumonia and fill with fluid. With the second breath, the fluid and ash mix and create wet cement. By the time the person takes a third breath, thick, hot cement fills the lungs and windpipe, causing the victim to suffocate. There were autopsy pictures of a surgeon opening a victim’s trachea with a chisel.")As it turns out, a scientist by the name of Chouet had studied the seismic waves before eruptions of numerous volcanoes and he noticed some screw-like motions. "Chouet believed he knew what the signals were saying. Inside the volcano, in fractures in the rocks, boiling water turned to steam. And the steam, under great pressure and unable to escape, resonated brutally in the fractures, creating a high- frequency song like a boiling teakettle whistling an imperceptible pitch." Turns out he was prescient and accurate. Those little squiggles were predictive of explosive events.On the fateful day, the scientists hiked up to the top and then roped down into the caldera to take measurements. The dome of lava, ever expanding, concerned several of them, but contrary to the pattern and habit of the U.S. Geological Survey scientists, hard hats and safety equipment was not present. No one was positioned on the top to relay radio signals nor did they have emergency medical supplies. Even some untrained journalists were invited to go along into the active volcano. Nine people (five scientists) died when the volcano popped. Afterwards, one of the gas scientists claimed to have been the only survivor, an untruth, but then he had sustained severe brain injury and needed brain surgery so I suppose a little mendacity could be excused. Not so forgiveable was the appropriation by one of his students of the work of Chouet nor his insistence there was no warning. There was.Riveting.
    • 3/5
      Setting the record straight

      This book provides a behind-the-scenes account of two Columbian volcanic eruptions. It is a stark reminder about the dangers in complacency. Unfortunately, much of the information communicated in the US news media about Galeras was based on one person's slanted perspective. The author has done a service in setting the record straight. The author manages the scientific material well, portraying it in easy-to-understand language. I learned a lot about the science of predicting eruptions. I recommend this book to anyone interested in volcanoes or natural disasters.
    • 4/5
      I just finished reading Surviving Galeras (by Stanley Williams) and No Apparent Danger (Victoria Bruce), books about Galeras, a volcano in southern Colombia. During a conference field trip in 1993 there was a small eruption which killed 6 scientists and 3 tourists and seriously injured half a dozen other scientists. Most of the killed scientists were in or on the rim of the active cone at the time and were killed instantly by the blast. The others were killed or injured by volcanic bombs -- hot but solid boulders or lumps of rock that rained down from above or burst like bullets upon hitting the ground.The conference organizer and leader of the field trip, Stanley Williams, was nearly killed, with a badly broken ankle and a brain injury. All the injured were burned from the barrage of hot rocks.Apart from being an absorbing tale of what it's like on top of an active, steaming volcano, the books have a touch of controversy on whether there was credible warning of the eruption (in which case the field trip could have been cancelled), and on the need for hard hats and fire-protective clothes, both of which were not worn by most of those on the crater.Both books are excellent, and I'd recommend reading both if you can, because of the controversy. They cover slightly different fields: Bruce tells the tale of Nevado del Ruiz's 1985 eruption in some detail, an even more devastating story in which 23,000 people died in a mudflow simply because of civic incompetence. Williams covers more history of other eruptions around the world and throughout history, although briefly. A better although still complementary book to these is Volcano Cowboys by Dick Thompson, which describes the role of the United States Geological Survey (USGS) and covers the eruptions of Mt St Helens (1980) and Pinatubo (1991) in great detail.
    • 5/5
      great story no too technical a real thrill ride!
    • 3/5
      The True Story of Volcanic Disaster at Galeras and Nevado Del Ruiz. The author is a geologist and a journalist.