Just finished reading
No Apparent Danger, the story of two volcanic disasters in Colombia in 1985 and 1993.
The book details two stories.
1) the near hopelessness poor countries have in saving their people from volcanic disasters. In 1985, Colombia had no vulcanologists, but they had volcanoes and they had no money in which to fund a properly run agency to study them.
The book details the Colombian scientists' difficulty of getting equipment that actually worked to monitor the mountains, the harder difficulty of getting people who knew how to read and interpret what their equipment was telling them and trying to stop the local poor people from trooping up the mountainside to steal the equipment to sell for scrap.
I was shocked at how long it takes one government to ask another government for help when there isn't any current danger or disaster - it takes months. The Colombians had requested technical advice and visits from the USGS (world renown for their expertise).
Once, one of the head USGS scientists came and gave recommendations to the Colombians on one of their active volcanoes. He advised
a) restricting tourism
b) adding security to protect the monitoring equipment
c) moving the radio towers off the mountain
d) lighting the local airport in case a disaster did come so that support from the air could land
Needless to say, the Colombians didn't act on his advice. The Colombian scientists were aghast that Americans would make recommendations that
cost money! So when the disaster did come, needless to say, tourists were killed, half the radio towers were destroyed, etc. and the local people blamed the scientists because the mountain had been "fine" up until they started moving equipment on it. This obviously made the mountain "mad". So the blame went to the scientists.
It makes me sad how such poor countries basically don't have the money to save their own people. Despite scientists' advice on relocating populaces or making evacuation plans, their advice will go unheeded because the governments don't have the money to spend on them and the populace has nowhere to go. Their lives and means of a living are tied to the land and so many
can't leave.
So the solution is that the volcano will eventually wipe out the lands and the people on them, solving both problems.
The book also
2) tells the story of the hijacking of the last disaster, in which an unbalanced, arrogant scientist, unable to abandon his pet theory which did not work, scoffing at safety gear, ignoring proven warning signs, led 14 fellow scientists - into the active volcano. Nine were killed when the volcano blew.
Surviving the blast, this scientist reached the U.S. first and held press conferences and interviews, describing himself as the lone survivor and taking credit for having warned his fellow scientists about the danger. He urged one of his graduate students to copy another man's work (I guess it isn't plagiarizing if the other work isn't published) describing the warning signs and got him to publish first, leaving the man whose worked they based their paper on and had actually predicted two volcanic eruptions, out in the cold, his work unpublishable due to this academic theft.
The book was also an attempt to get out the knowledge of this man's misdeeds.
Sad, all the way around.
