Opposing Tales of Tragedy in the Mouth of a Volcano

Eight years ago, a team of scientists rappelled down the crater of a 14,000-foot active volcano in Colombia to conduct some tests. Just as the scientists were climbing back out of Galeras, it erupted, shooting rock and debris through the air. It was a small and brief eruption, but a deadly one.

Six scientists and three hikers who happened to be in the crater with them were killed. The expedition’s leader, Arizona State University volcanologist Stanley Williams, was one of the seven survivors, though he was injured so badly that, by his own estimate, he may never fully recover. Ninety minutes after the eruption, volcanologists Marta Calvache, director of the Galeras Volcanic Observatory, and Patty Mothes, an American usually based in Quito, Ecuador, reached the rim, picked their way into the crater and pulled Williams and the others to safety.

Williams suffered burns and a skull fracture so serious that his brain was exposed, and his nose, jaw and both legs were broken.

Now two competing books about the event and what led up to it are being published, one written by Williams, a fractious iconoclast in volcanic research and sometime critic of the U.S. Geological Survey, and the other holding him responsible for the deaths.

Williams, 48, joined by writer Fen Montaigne, has written “Surviving Galeras” (Houghton Mifflin), which details the disaster and attempts to rebuff his critics. It is due to hit stores April 17.

The second book, out April 2 from HarperCollins, is titled “No Apparent Danger” and was written by Victoria Bruce, a 34-year-old former NASA science writer who holds a master’s degree in geology. Her book charges that Williams was negligent in leading his party into the volcano because there were warning signs of danger. She also says Williams misrepresented other aspects of the tragedy.

In the wake of other recent successful outdoor disaster tales, both publishers have high hopes for their books. Williams and Montaigne received a reported advance of about $500,000 with a first printing of 150,000. Bruce signed a deal “in the mid-six figures,” with a first printing of 100,000.

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There is no nicety in the dispute between the authors and their supporters. Bruce asks in the book, “Would you let the people who went with you not know that there was some risk? There had been warnings. Had that information been passed on, the others could have made the decision whether to go for themselves. No one was told. It was like the sailing captain who takes a crew out without letting them know that there’s a hurricane watch.”

But Williams insists in his book there were no clear warnings. “How easy it is to snipe after the fact,” he observes. “We studied the best available data. We made what looked like a sound decision. And just when we were on the cone, Galeras behaved capriciously, as natural forces are wont to do. I was fooled, and for that I will take responsibility. But I do not feel guilty about the deaths of my colleagues. There is no guilt. There was only an eruption.”

Yet survivor Andrew MacFarlane, a Florida International University geologist, recalled in an interview last week, “Right after the eruption, the first thing [Williams] said to me was that he felt terribly guilty for what had happened and that he felt like it was his fault.”

Behind the dispute there is quite a history. Williams, in his two decades of volcanic research--10 of those as a professor at Arizona State--has clashed repeatedly with the Geological Survey over his outspokenness. Leading Survey volcanic researchers, such as Bernard Chouet, Randy White and Dan Miller, make no secret of their disdain for Williams, who has often warned of cataclysmic developments at such sites as Popocatepetl outside Mexico City and Mammoth Mountain in California; while they have been much more reserved.

Bruce independently investigated the events at Galeras. “I had no idea what happened at Galeras when I started researching. I had no idea what I would find and had no idea there was bad feeling between the USGS and Williams,” she said.

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These are the main disputes between Bruce and Williams, and their responses:

* Was there warning of the eruption Williams should have heeded?

The Geological Survey was not present at Galeras, mainly because the U.S. government was wary of letting its scientists go into politically turbulent Colombia. But the organization did have an interest in the volcano because it had been designated by the United Nations as one that could impact a heavily populated urban area with deadly eruptions. It was a USGS seismologist, Chouet, who had been working on a theory that the occurrence of a particular type of earthquake, which shows up as distinctively screw-shaped on seismographs, could presage an eruption. Bruce found that there had been a few of these quakes, called tornillos, occurring at Galeras, which had not erupted for six months, in the hours before the eruption, and said that Williams was warned of the danger at a meeting the night before the eruption but chose to ignore it.

Williams insists that there were no clear warnings and that Chouet’s research had not advanced to the point where the significance of the tornillos was known. Co-author Montaigne, in an e-mail, quotes five others who were at the casual meeting, all of whom say there was only brief mention of the tornillos.

* Should the Williams party have been wearing hard hats and fire-resistant clothing?

Bruce says yes, quoting in her book one of the survivors, chemist Andy Adams of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, as saying that when he and another member of the party turned up in such protective garb, Williams “made fun of us, and they all laughed because we were all dressed up with our safety gear.”

Adams, who had been ahead of most of the party in hiking out of an inner crater, down the cone and toward the rim of the old crater, escaped relatively unhurt, as did the other scientist with safety gear. But even Williams quotes him in his book as saying later, “We were the only ones who thought about safety before going in. It’s a shame no one else put a thought into that.”

In an e-mail last week, Williams noted that two scientists who had been wearing hard hats were killed in an Ecuador volcano just two months after the Galeras eruption. “We must all . . . work together in sharing ideas about safety, without establishing some rigid protocol to which one cannot practically adhere,” he asserted. “We must also be realistic about the true danger and how far we can depend on safety plans and equipment. Active volcanoes are dangerous.”

Yet Adams fervently believes his survival is due to his having worn the safety gear. And the Geological Survey’s Miller says when his scientists monitor volcanoes, they “always use hard hats, fire-retardant clothing . . . Nomex gloves, nonflammable leather boots. That was true in 1993 too.”

The last picture in a photographic section of Williams’ book, taken at Galeras six years after the fatal Jan. 14, 1993, eruption, shows Williams wearing a hard hat.

* Did Williams repeatedly say he was the only survivor of Galeras when he wasn’t?

Bruce makes a lot of this assertion in her book, and in a recent conversation, Williams acknowledged, “I let myself become known as the only survivor.” In his book, Williams says, “I never claimed to be the sole survivor, but some news stories pinned that tag on me. Then, when Katie Couric called me the sole survivor on the ‘Today’ show, I did not contradict her.

“I was the leader of the field trip. I was the most seriously injured survivor, and I was at the center of the action that day. But for some reason that wasn’t enough. I continued to gloss over the involvement of the three other survivors, and for that I am sorry.”

But this too is a mistake. There were seven survivors.

At a few points in his book, Williams acknowledges that his memory of what happened at Galeras may not always be reliable.

Bruce asserts that Williams has changed his story to respond to criticism, and Montaigne admits Williams may have been in error in his past assertions. As a colleague in writing the book, Montaigne says both he and Houghton Mifflin representatives had prevailed on Williams to interview some of the other survivors and pay attention to points he didn’t remember precisely.

“Stan did some things wrong,” Montaigne says. “He should have talked about the others. His behavior afterward wasn’t always right. His head injury caused him to lose his inhibitions. But we feel so much attention has been paid to Bruce’s charges, and very little to the fact that some of them, like the meeting the night before, don’t bear scrutiny.”

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Stanley Williams and Victoria Bruce will each appear at Vroman’s bookstore in Pasadena, 695 E. Colorado Blvd., next month. Williams at 7 p.m., April 9, and Bruce at 7 p.m., April 10.