Reporter’s Notebook : A Latter-Day Pompeii: Epitaphs in Mud, Debris

A Bogota newspaper solemnly described this buried town as “the Pompeii of the Andes.” And perhaps the broad shroud of mud that covers about 4,000 houses and an estimated 21,000 bodies will preserve for future ages the excruciating detail of a thriving Colombian community frozen in its last, tragic moment.

On the surface, what little is left of Armero is a few hillocks of high ground--islands surrounded by broad mud flows that spread out from the mouth of a narrow canyon. Several hundred buildings, and the town cemetery, remain intact on the islands. These high places have been connected by makeshift walkways made of planks, roofing material and other debris from destroyed buildings.

Since the Nevado del Ruiz volcano erupted a week ago, melting its snowcap and sending a devastating flow of mud and water down its slopes, survivors, rescue workers, journalists and others have used these makeshift routes to pick their way across the mud. Here and there, corpses protrude.

The body of a woman stands buried up to the shoulders with a dead child’s head at the breast. Another woman’s body, in a red dress, lies within a crumpled orange car, overturned in debris.

Over the weekend, hilltop streets of the dead town were strangely alive with activity. Relatives of missing Armero residents wandered from island to island, searching.

“I have four children. My wife and three brothers are missing,” said Hernan Pinzon, 36.

Henry Camacho, 25, was engaged to be married to an Armero woman next Sunday. A store clerk in a neighboring town, Camacho came to the disaster site to look for his fiancee, who lived with a sister. The sister’s house was gone, but Camacho was trying to be optimistic about the chances of his bride-to-be.

“I think she is alive,” he said. “She was going to see her parents in San Pedro and buy a wedding dress there . . . but I’m not sure she got out.”

Jose Alfonso Martinez, who grew up in Armero and often returned as an adult, came back a last time to look for his aunts, uncles and cousins. He was unable to get within four blocks of the neighborhood, called Yavi, where they had lived. It was covered with mud.

“I guess I’ll go now,” he said. “There’s nothing left to do now except pray for their souls.”

A big-bellied man in blue jeans, Martinez stood on the roof of a two-story concrete block building surrounded by mud. He pointed to Yavi, “four blocks from where we are, where you see those two trees there.” Two mango trees protruded from the brown mud over what had been a shady neighborhood of middle-class houses.

“I spent my whole childhood here in this town,” Martinez reflected. “Everything was very beautiful--its people, its climate, its fruit trees. All of the houses had fruit trees--mangoes, oranges, tangerines.”

His cousins were his pals. “We would go swimming in the river, steal mangoes and oranges,” he said. “You didn’t need money to have a good time.”

Rescue workers poked among the mud and rubble at the islands’ edges. It did not appear to be a well-organized, systematic search. This week, overlooked survivors were still being found, trapped by the mud or by broken structures.

In some cases, amputations were performed in order to extract victims caught in the rubble. The suction of the muck made it difficult to pull others out. Omayra Sanchez, 12, died in shoulder-deep mud after three days of fruitless efforts to free her.

Helicopters clattered constantly overhead, also looking for survivors. But on Monday, rescue officials decided to declare Armero a “zone of silence” for an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon. Helicopters were banned from the area, and civil defense workers spread out to listen for cries for help. In at least one case, it worked. In the first hour of silence, a teen-age girl was found when she called out from a house, the exits of which had been blocked by a mud flow, said Father Jorge Uribe, a rescue coordinator.

Many houses that escaped the disaster were soon hit by looters. “They stole a television here, a stereo in there--the whole house was sacked,” said Nelson Beltran, who had returned Saturday to check his mother-in-law’s home. At a footpath leaving the town, two soldiers checked the identification of people carrying away sacks and bundles.

Later, authorities closed off public access to Armero, putting it under military control. Officials said about 30 suspected looters were arrested.

The sun has begun to bake the mud and turn exposed corpses black. For sanitation, some of them have been set afire, others covered with lime. The Health Ministry has declared Armero a “sanitary emergency zone,” and officials are worried about possible outbreaks of typhoid fever, tetanus and intestinal diseases.

On the north side of Armero, where the mud meets green pastures, cattle grazed peacefully this week, and a few straggling survivors painstakingly hauled belongings toward the town of Guayabal, five miles away.

At one point on the edge of the mud, men were trying to pull a steer that was buried up to its neck. They paid no attention to several dark, twisted human bodies only a few feet away.

Few vehicles were using the paved road to Guayabal; police were turning back most of the traffic approaching Armero. And travelers who were permitted to pass soon had to stop again where the road to Armero ends abruptly in a bank of deep, drying mud.