When Science Goes Wrong (13 page)

Precisely at 1.41pm was the moment when the upward force exerted by the magma within the volcano’s cone finally exceeded the downward force exerted by the weight of the overlying rock, and a devastating explosion ensued. The blast was followed by an unending roar as rocks and magma flew skyward. The blast ripped the floor of the crater to shreds, instantly killing Igor Menyailov and Nestor Garcia and vaporising their bodies. The three men who had been standing on the western rim of the crater were also killed instantly. Carlos Trujillo’s body was cut cleanly in half by a flying boulder; as for Geoff Brown and Fernando Cuenca, nothing was ever found of them beyond small fragments of flesh stuck to rocks.

The eight men who were descending the cone broke into an instinctive mad downward rush. A barrage of incandescent rocks – some as small as bullets, some as big as television sets – began falling among them. As the rocks struck the ground they exploded like shells, firing off secondary showers of red-hot shrapnel in all directions.

Four of the men – José Arles and all three of the local hikers – were killed within seconds as flying rocks stove in their skulls and smashed their bodies. Andrew Macfarlane was knocked down several times, once by a rock that struck his forehead, creating a hairline fracture in his skull and sending blood pouring into one eye. For a brief time he took refuge behind a rock, then he continued on his stumbling downward run. Every time he fell, his hands or body were seared by the rocks they touched, and he was forced to get up and struggle on. Then he came across Mike Conway and Luis LeMarie, who had found partial protection in a small hollow. The three men hid there for about five minutes, while the rain of rocks gradually abated and changed to harmless ash.

Stanley Williams also took off running at the first explosion, but he was quickly knocked down by falling rocks. One rock smashed his right lower leg with such force as to almost completely sever it: his foot was left dangling at an unnatural angle from the leg, connected to it by a few strips of flesh. His other leg was also broken, and a third rock struck his head above his left ear: It dislocated his jaw, partially detached the retinas of both eyes, and drove fragments of skull into his brain. Smaller rocks burned holes in the skin of his back. He lay helpless, just a few feet from the lifeless body of José Arles. In spite of his terrible injuries, Williams remained alive and conscious, and he cried out for help. For a long time he received none.

Roldan’s television interview on the rim of the caldera was rudely interrupted by the blast, as both he and the newsmen dived for cover. Roldan was struck on the head by a flying rock, but his hard hat saved his life. He crouched down behind the rim of the caldera and watched a cloud of ash and hot gas rise from the crater and reach more than a mile into the sky. At about the same time one of the policemen who was stationed at the guardhouse was also struck: the rock hit his lower arm and completely amputated one of his hands.

Fabio Garcia and Carlos Estrada, who had been climbing the caldera wall at the time of the blast, were able to complete their climb safely, though they had to dodge a hail of rocks during the first five minutes. Andy Adams, who had not yet begun the climb at the time of the blast, was also able to climb out unaided. He was struck by innumerable small rocks, but his fireproof clothing and hard hat saved him from serious injury – he sustained only some burns on his unprotected neck.

After the initial barrage of rocks subsided, Mike Conway, Luis LeMarie and Andy Macfarlane left their foxhole and began to make their way down the cone and out of the caldera. It was slow going. All three men had numerous cuts and burns. LeMarie had fractures in both legs. Macfarlane had several severe lacerations in addition to his head wound. It wasn’t until an hour after the eruption that the three men made it down to the moat, and then they faced the arduous ascent of the caldera wall. Conway, the least injured, was able to clamber to the caldera rim unaided. LeMarie was assisted up the rope by Carlos Estrada, who had climbed back down into the caldera to help him. Macfarlane could only make it as far as the bottom of the rope before he collapsed in pain and exhaustion.

The initial explosion had alerted the groups of scientists who were on the outer flanks of the volcano. From where Marta Calvache and Patty Mothes’s group was positioned, about halfway down the volcano, the sound was not especially loud. ‘We were having lunch,’ said Wood. ‘We looked up, thinking, “What was that?” and we saw the [ash] cloud. Marta and Patty said, “OK, we’re going up; we have the most experience with this volcano – the rest of you evacuate down to Pasto.” So they got into a jeep and went up to the summit.’

It took Calvache and Mothes about 30 minutes to reach the summit, because they first had to hike from their location to the access road where their vehicle was parked. Then, on the way up the road they met a military truck that contained most of the policemen who had been stationed at the guardhouse, including the man who had lost a hand. Calvache told a couple of the men to accompany them back to the summit in order to help with the rescue.

When they got to the summit, they were met by a chaotic scene: a battered guardhouse, vehicles with windows smashed out, blood and rocks on the ground, and a large number of people, including a civilian rescue squad, who were milling about ineffectually. No one had dared to descend into the caldera, but at that same moment two Colombians from the Observatory in Pasto, Ricardo Villota and Milton Ordoñez, arrived on the scene. They had been alerted by the violent signals that were appearing on their seismographs and, fearing the worst, they had rushed up the mountain in a truck. Villota and Ordoñez immediately began descending the steep rampart, and Calvache and Mothes followed them. They could see Andrew Macfarlane lying half-conscious at the bottom of the fixed rope, and although they couldn’t see Stanley Williams they could hear his calls for help. Thus they were spurred on to attempt a rescue, in spite of the danger of a renewed eruption.

When they reached Macfarlane, Ordoñez and Mothes started to attend to his wounds. Soon, other helpers arrived, and eventually they were able to get Macfarlane onto a stretcher, haul him up to the caldera rim, and place him in an ambulance that rushed him off to a hospital in Pasto.

Meanwhile Calvache and Villota had gone off in search of other survivors. They soon saw that the three local hikers were dead. José Arles was dead, too, with a huge gash in his skull that exposed most of his brain. Villota, a close friend of Arles, made a futile attempt to revive him by raising him into a sitting position, whereupon his brain fell out onto the rocks. Villota was too shocked to continue with the rescue efforts.

Stanley Williams was the only person still alive on the volcanic cone, but he was horribly wounded, with a nearly-severed right foot, a broken left leg, a depressed fracture of his skull, a broken jaw and burns and lacerations over much of his body. Calvache, Mothes, Ordoñez and another rescuer placed Williams in a blanket and, painfully slowly, hauled him down the cone and across the moat. The journey of a few hundred yards took nearly two hours, and throughout that time the volcano continued its ominous rumblings. By the time they arrived at the base of the caldera wall, professional rescuers had reached the scene. Williams was placed on a stretcher, hauled up to the rim of the caldera, and airlifted by helicopter to a hospital in Pasto. Calvache and Mothes continued their search for more survivors, but by 6pm they realised there were none, and they in turn were airlifted off the mountain.

Williams had been rescued, but his ordeal had barely begun. At a hospital in Pasto, he had surgery to remove a blood clot and bone fragments from his brain. His legs were put in plaster casts, and he was flown by air ambulance to Bogotá and from Bogotá back to the United States. There he underwent further surgery to his head and legs: after some unsuccessful operations to repair his shattered right leg, the entire lower leg was stabilised with a ‘birdcage’ of embedded metal rods, which Williams wore for 11 months. He also had operations – only partially successful – to restore the hearing in his left ear. Later, Williams developed pneumonia, and he also had a grand mal epileptic seizure.

Besides the physical problems, Williams was plagued by other kinds of difficulties. Whether on account of the horrifying experience he had lived through or because of the brain damage he had suffered, he recalled events incorrectly. In media interviews – of which he gave many – he allowed himself to be presented as the sole survivor of the scientists who had been on the volcanic cone, or even of the entire party who entered the caldera. This naturally irked the other survivors, who came to see Williams as a publicity hound.

Allegations that he had ignored the signs of an impending eruption culminated in Victoria Bruce’s scathing book. Some of Williams’s colleagues echoed Bruce’s point of view. In a 2001 review in
Science
, volcanologist Haraldur Sigurdsson of the University of Rhode Island took issue with Williams’s claim that ‘the best work… comes from those of us who walk into the crater.’ Dismissing this as more bravado than science, Sigurdsson asserted that the most modern techniques in volcanology don’t require risky excursions into danger zones. Still, there have been other volcanologists, such as Charles Wood, who have steadfastly defended Williams.

In response to the Galeras tragedy, as well as a string of other events that had taken the lives of volcanologists, a group of scientists put together a set of safety guidelines that was published in 1994 by the International Association of Volcanology and Chemistry of the Earth’s Interior. The guidelines recommend that scientists should not visit active volcanoes unless it is absolutely necessary for data gathering: field trips to active volcanoes should not be offered as add-ons to scientific meetings. The guidelines also describe the kinds of protective gear that should be worn, as well as other precautions that should be taken, such as radio communications, emergency preparedness, and so on.

But the guidelines haven’t put a stop to the deaths and injuries, because volcanologists often disregard them. In July 2000, for example, an international group of scientists climbed Mt. Semeru, a volcano on the island of Java. The trip, which followed a volcanological meeting, had no particular scientific purpose, and there had been no plan to approach the active crater, but some of the scientists did so on the spur of the moment, without any kind of protective gear or other safety precautions. A small explosive eruption, similar to the one that killed Stanley Williams’s colleagues on Galeras, happened without warning while the scientists were standing on the edge of the crater. It killed two Indonesians and injured three Americans, one of them severely.

While this accident may have been the result of mere thoughtlessness, a culture of daredevilry still permeates the volcanological community. To take one example, the website of John Stix, one of the organisers of the 1993 Galeras meeting, shows a student posing
Jackass
-like in front of a spray of red-hot lava, while wearing no more protection than a cotton cap. It is as if some of the people who are drawn to do research on active volcanoes are exactly the ones who are psychologically ill-suited for the job.

Stanley Williams has remained professionally active, but both he and others have noted a sharp decline in his intellectual powers and productivity, which he attributes to his brain injury. Williams has had other travails in recent years, including a divorce and a bizarre episode in 2001 when he was briefly suspected (but quickly cleared) of involvement in a double homicide – an event that brought him another deluge of publicity.

Whatever the views of others, Williams himself (who didn’t respond to my requests for an interview) has steadfastly refused to accept any blame for the Galeras tragedy. ‘I do not feel guilty about the deaths of my colleagues,’ he wrote in his book. ‘There is no guilt. There was only an eruption.’

NEUROSCIENCE: The Ecstasy and the Agony

IN 2002, WHEN a neurologist at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, published a study on the toxic effects of the drug Ecstasy, his findings bolstered a political campaign against recreational use of the drug. Only much later did it turn out that the findings were the consequence of an almost laughable laboratory blunder.

The year 2002 was a high-profile one for Ecstasy. On June 18, Joseph Biden, then the senior Democratic senator from Delaware and now the US Vice President, introduced the Reducing Americans’ Vulnerability to Ecstasy Act into the US Senate. As its acronym suggested, the RAVE Act was directed against the scenes where the use of Ecstasy and other ‘club drugs’ was most in evidence: the all-night music and dance parties known as raves. (Ecstasy use has since expanded to other venues, such as college campuses.)

Although Biden is best known as a foreign-policy expert, he also has a long history of involvement in drug-control legislation, including the laws that created the Office of National Drug Control Policy (the ‘Drug Czar’). The RAVE Act was actually an amendment to a section of the existing Controlled Substances Act – the so-called crack-house statute – which allowed prosecutors to seek the destruction of premises used for drug sales or drug use. Biden’s bill allowed for $250,000 fines against persons who promoted or provided space for raves if they knowingly permitted the use of illegal drugs such as Ecstasy at these events.