To the classroom of Professor Alexander Velásquez, teacher of a village in the municipality of Villa MariaThey haven’t been students for almost a month. The classrooms remained empty because the rains and the quagmire left by the rainfall in that area surrounding the Nevado del Ruiz they made it increasingly difficult for their students to get to class, on horseback, on mule back, and some on foot, traveling up to an hour to get there.
That is why students study through pedagogical guides because the low connectivity and the lack of cell phone signal make it impossible to think about teaching virtual classes. This educational format does not have an expiration date because the orange alert for the possible eruption of the volcano, the Sleeping Lion, as your neighbors tell you, makes that mountainous area uninhabitable.
The center where the teacher Alexander works is six kilometers in a straight line from the crater of Nevado del Ruiz. From the classroom you can see the ash fumaroles that come out of the opening of the mountain and that coexistence with the volcano made the students organize with the neighbors to guard it.
They have a WhatsApp group in which 16 families from the area participate to multiply the information from the authorities and they themselves make their reports of the crater. After months of self-management, a alert from the National Government that asked them to evacuate: the Army began to guard, Family Welfare knocked on their doors to offer to take care of the girls and boys and ordered them to go down the sidewalk to the urban area where they are farthest from an eventual eruption.
“Now arbitrarily what they do is arrive without taking into account the installed capacity of the communityarrive in an abrupt and threatening manner that has generated panic. The community is ready to do what needs to be done, but not like crazy because that makes it a violent act of forced displacement,” says the professor.
Leaving the cottage in the backyard of the Nevado del Ruiz it involves a three-hour journey to the urban area of a nearby municipality, such as Murillo. There are families that do not want to get off their paths because leaving the farms means leaving the animals alone, cows, chickens and horses that are the livelihood for the peasants, and this reality has already been evidenced by the National Government that offered the locals to go up once a day to feed cattle on the condition that people spend the night away from the crater.
In between Villamaria, which is in the department of Caldasand other municipalities close to the geological structure in tolima, Risaralda y cundinamarca 2,500 families have to be evacuated, which means the urgent transfer of thousands of residents of the Sleeping Lion before, God forbid, the beast wakes up.
Living with a neighbor who has a rash
When Rafael Martínez Poveda, a resident of Murillo (Tolima) answered the phone for the interview, he began his story telling that his parents had to evacuate that same area in 1985 due to the alert for the imminent eruption of Nevado del Ruiz: the tragedy that triggered the Armero landslide in which 25,000 people died.
His father, Libardo Martínez, lived in the upper part of the sidewalks and his mother, Luz Estela Poveda, in the urban area. Today they are 66 and 70 years old, they are alive thanks to having followed the call of the authorities and in Rafael they left a life-saving teaching: “One faces the territory with respect for nature itself.” That nature is the great cumanday that registered 5,100 earthquakes during Tuesday and at least 4,000 in the course of this Wednesday: the telluric movements for which the alert is maintained.
The kilometers near the epicenter of the volcano move, those signals sent by the earthquake sensors maintain the alarm level in the authorities and in the residents “there is economic uncertainty because the majority of the families of Murillo depend on tourism. This situation is simply a time bomb that detonates and nobody really expects it”, says Martinez.
The information issued by the National Risk Management Unit when the afternoon of this Wednesday of Holy Week fell was clear: earthquakes continue in a significant proportion and probably since 1985 neither the number nor the magnitude of the earthquakes that exist today were seen. Those words given by the director in charge of the entity, Luis Fernando Velasco, were preceded by a request to speed up the evacuations.
For now, the greatest risk is the fall of pyroclastic flows and future warnings depend on the signals sent by the Nevado del Ruiz, a volcano that has been in the eruption process for a decade and for which 18 orange alerts have been issued since 1985. However, Velasco asserted that these other emergencies have a clear difference with the current one: in this the earthquakes are getting closer to the crater.