Living with volcanoes, and learning from the past.

Nevado del Ruiz. Colombia. Photo by Anna Hicks, from the Volcanoes Top Trumps website.

November 13th, 1985, is a date that is still etched in my memory. This was the day that the Colombian town of Armero was submerged beneath a catastrophic flood of volcanic rocks, mud and water; a lahar that had swept down from the summit of the volcano Nevado del Ruiz, erupting about 40 kilometres away. For days, terrible scenes of anguish and despair filled our television screens, as rescuers struggled desperately to help the survivors, and recover the many thousands of victims. Thirty years on, and Colombia has one of the most sophisticated national volcano monitoring systems in the world, run from a network of observatories by the Servicio Geologico Colombiano (SGC). But what of the people of Armero; the survivors, and those who still live at the foot of the restless volcano, Nevado del Ruiz?

Over the past year, researchers from the University of East Anglia and the ‘STREVA‘ project have been working with the SGC and a filmmaker, Lambda films, to collect oral histories, to explore what people recall from that fateful day, and to learn more about how people live with the volcano today. The result is three short films: beautifully shot, tremendously moving, and well worth a few minutes of your time.