Audiobook: "Surviving Galeras" (Soundelux)
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EnglishVoice Age
Middle Aged (35-54)Transcript
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sound. Deluxe audio publishing is pleased to present surviving Galeras by Stanley Williams and Pen Montagne. This is Robert greedy. Six years after the eruption at Dolorous, I stood again, the creators rim, scarcely recognizing the blasted grape. It spread out before me, the ledge on which Igor Manure Law and Nestor Garcia knelt and sample gases had disappeared. The Western rim, where Jeff Brown, Fernando Kalinka and Carlos Trujillo stood, had been partially blown away by the eruption. Gazing into the crater, I was struck by how tiny in a geological sense the eruption had been as the steam from fumaroles drifted past me and walked you down galleries, Western flank. I reminded myself that the deadly eruption was a mere hiccup, a blast so small that geologists decades hence will find no sign of it. Yet the power of the eruption to those of us who lived through it, was staggering. It wiped five of my colleagues from the face of the earth. It killed nine men in George, six others, and continues to ripple through the lives of dozens of people. It nearly killed. May the volcano runs like a fault line through my days, dividing my existence into life before Galeras and life after I know now what a tricky and elusive thing memory can be, particularly after a calamity such as Galeras. I sustained a grave head wound but was nevertheless able to piece together a picture of the last minutes before the eruption. Over the years, as I underwent 16 operations as galleries greeted me every morning when I awoke as I slogged through a recovery that continues to this day, I came to believe unshakably in my version of what had transpired on the crater rim before. Galleries blue. But I am less certain now. Three of my colleagues, standing just feet from me, remember things differently. Are they right? And their stories really be true? Some of my memories are vivid, others less so, But no matter. This is what I remember of the moments before galleries exploded. Chapter one Dolorous Hoste, Oh, population 300,000 sits at 9000 feet in a wide green bowl in the northern Andes. The city's central square is five miles from the creator of Galeras, and on a clear day, residents consumptive times see steam rising from the volcano, whose squad baron silhouette, looms over the city. Local Indians long refer to the volcano as or cantina the fire mountain. But to the Spanish colonists, the gas clouds that formed over the volcano resembled sales at its long, gentle slope looked like a ship's hole. In the 19th century, they re christened the mountain Galeras from the Spanish Galera, a boat with large open sales as pastor. When its surroundings have grown, the population has gradually crept onto the flanks of Galeras. Today, on all sides, the volcanoes apron is colored green, brown and gold by a patchwork of crops corn, wheat, potatoes and vegetables. The soil is enriched by volcanic ash, and Galera seems to be a generally benign presence. Occasionally it explodes, shooting a black column several miles high and dusting pasta. When its surrounding towns with fine gray ash the fire mountain also rumbles. It's earthquakes, shaking the region's adobe and stucco homes with such force that nervous residents take two sleeping in the streets. Despite these reminders that they live under a volcano lost to Zoe's, are quick to point out that galleries has never killed anyone in recorded history. Never, that is, until the scientists angered the mountain by prodding it with their equipment. The landscape around dolorous Baird intend. Breathtaking does not inspire foreboding. The lower realms of the mountain, at around 5000 to 6000 feet, are thick with white flowering coffee bushes, yellow flower and guava trees, red and purple bougainvillea, six foot point Syria's or engine, avocado trees and banana plants. Tall, ramrod straight eucalyptus trees line many roads, which campesinos followed by mule or on foot. Driving down these winding, vertiginous thoroughfares where 2000 foot drop offs are common, the traveler is treated too expansive vistas where the heavily cultivated Andy's ranges unrolled on the horizon. As a geologist, I see a different and more threatening landscape. Arriving in Pashto, I see beneath parks and streets the deposits of massive pyroclastic flows that swept over this terrain as recently as 40,000 years ago. The blink of an eye in geological time. Wherever ah, highway slices through a hillside, I see the geological record of countless volcanic corruptions Ah, yellow and grey layer, cake of ash, promise and lava on the western side of dolorous near the Valley of Rio. As a fraud, Villagers pay no mind to ah, high rounded hillock covered in corn fields that rises abruptly from the landscape. I see it for what it is. 150,000 year old satellite cone of a long, extinct embodiment of Galeras. Geologists have two ways of dividing the threat of volcano poses by studying its current activity or reading a record of past eruptions in the landscape. A close Look at Goal Aris's geological pedigree leads to an inescapable conclusion. This volcano is anything but benign. Another fact should give pause. Polaris has been the most historically active volcano in Colombia. Over the past 500 years, it has erupted nearly 30 times. One eruption in 18 66 sent a lava stream 3.5 miles long and 90 feet deep down the western slope of the volcano. Toward gone, Sokka Polaris has disgorged pyroclastic flows, deadly clouds of hot ash gas and volcanic ejecta on many recent occasions, including 1936 the August 27 1936 pyroclastic flow captured by a photographer sped several kilometres down the north eastern slope toward Pashto. A similar event today would probably kill thousands of people scientists love to convene, and the tribe of men and women who work on active volcanoes about 300 to 400 people worldwide, is no exception. Roughly 50 hard core vulcanologists and an equal number of geologists and related fields were flying into Pashto for a conference scheduled for Monday, January 11. They came from 14 countries because galleries had been selected. It's one of 15 volcanoes worthy of study under a United Nations programme, the International Decade for the Reduction of Natural Hazards. We planned to hold two days of meetings in pasta to conduct six field trips on Wednesday, including a research foray into the crater and to hold two days of round table discussions on Thursday and Friday. Many scientists, including Igor Manuel Off and Jeff Brown, would continue working on the volcano after the conference. The goal was to launch several long term research projects that would focus on Galeras, deepening our understanding of the volcano and assessing the threat it posed to the region. On Saturday and Sunday, January 9th and 10th old friends and colleagues began arriving in Pashto. Helping me welcome them and run the conference was Marta Lucy, a Calvin Velasco, my good friend and prized graduate student. A petite striking woman with short black hair and dark blue eyes. Marta was a native of pasta who also headed the local geological observatory that was run by NGO Minhas, Colombia's Geological Survey. She was doing her PhD work on the history of goal, Aris's eruptions you every bit of its terrain and hiked the Andes with an ease I could admire but never match. By the end of the week, she would leave the effort that saved my life. Two good friends in the Vulcan illogical community, Menard Pete Hall and his wife, Patty, Mo face drove in from key toe. I knew Pete and Patty well and had great respect for both of them. They had gone thoroughly, native speaking, excellent Spanish, living mainly up their meager Ecuadorian salary, building their house themselves and generously sharing their knowledge with their Ecuadorian colleagues. Beat in, Patti felt none of the condescension Some expatriates display towards the indigenous culture and treated Ecuadorians with decency and respect.
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