When Science Goes Wrong (12 page)

Williams and Chouet also differed in their styles. Chouet was primarily a theoretical geophysicist, whose work consisted of creating mathematical models on computers at the USGS headquarters in Menlo Park. He did sometimes visit volcanoes, as for example when he went to the 1991 Galeras meeting, but such visits were not really essential to his work. Williams, on the other hand, was very much a field volcanologist. His work required him to enter active volcanoes and approach as close as possible to fumaroles while they were discharging literally tons of superheated, toxic, corrosive, or asphyxiating gases. Thus, even putting aside the chance of an explosive eruption while he was on the volcano, there were significant risks in his work, and he seemed to revel in them. As he acknowledged in his own published accounts, Williams sometimes dispensed with the protective gear that the USGS mandated for their scientists – hard hats, gas masks, fire-resistant coveralls, and the like – and worked in nothing more than street clothes and a stout pair of boots. He spoke of ‘sucking volcanic gases’ as if that were a required initiation rite for would-be volcanologists.

Williams obtained funding for the 1993 meeting from the United Nations, and he was able to invite a stellar cast of experts from around the world. From Russia came Igor Menyailov, like Williams an expert on volcanic gases. From Britain came Geoff Brown, who studied changes in gravity caused by magma movement within a volcano. From Switzerland came Bruno Martinelli, a seismologist and Marta Calvache’s long-distance boyfriend. Others came from as far away as Iceland and Japan. The main contingents, however, were from Colombia and the United States. Among the Colombians were three seismologists, Fernando Gil (a collaborator with Chouet in his research on the long-period events), Diego Gomez, and Roberto Torres, as well as two gas experts, José Arles and Nestor Garcia. Marta Calvache also attended; in fact, as a local geologist and Williams’s ex-student she did much of the advance planning for the meeting.

The American group, besides Williams, included Fraser Goff, a chemist from the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Andrew Macfarlane of Florida International University, and Charles Wood, a planetary scientist from the University of North Dakota who was working on technologies for predicting volcanic eruptions with satellites. Williams also invited Bernard Chouet as well as other USGS scientists. In what may have been a fateful decision, however, the USGS prohibited its scientists from attending the meeting, citing the unstable security situation in Colombia. Thus Williams and the other meeting participants were deprived of the expertise of the one person who, in retrospect, was best qualified to save them from tragedy. ‘If I had been down there at the time and I had seen the long-period events,’ says Chouet, ‘I would certainly have voiced my opinion that it was not an appropriate time to go into the crater. But I couldn’t have just jumped in front of them and said, “Over my dead body!” so I don’t know what the outcome would have been.’

The meeting began with three days of scientific talks. Most of the talks were not specifically about Galeras, but two of the Colombian seismologists, Gomez and Torres, did talk (in Spanish) about the seismic history of the volcano, including mention of the
tornillos
that had preceded the eruption of the previous summer. This issue was particularly relevant because, after several months of relative calm, the volcano had begun to show signs of renewed activity toward the end of the year. Two days before Christmas a new
tornillo
had been recorded, and further
tornillos
had been occurring at a rate of about one a day, right up through the beginning of the meeting. If Chouet was right, the new series of
tornillos
signalled that the magma was knocking insistently at the roof of the mountain and would soon blow its lava cap to pieces – a scenario that would make a trip to the caldera a risky, even foolhardy, enterprise.

In view of the tragedy that followed, the question of what was discussed about the current status of Galeras has great significance, yet there are very divergent accounts of the matter. One account was presented by geologist-turned-science-writer Victoria Bruce in her 2001 book
No Apparent Danger
. According to Bruce, there was explicit discussion of the
tornillos
, Chouet’s theory, and the imminent likelihood of an eruption. The linkage between long-period events and eruptions was, in her eyes, pretty much established scientific fact at the time of the meeting, and Williams decided to go ahead with the field trip in the face of explicit warnings from seismologists that an eruption might be looming. His decision, in Bruce’s view, could be explained only by a reckless ‘cowboy’ attitude, perhaps combined with blind belief in the superiority of his own favourite technique – gas analysis.

In his own 2001 book,
Surviving Galeras
(written with Fen Montaigne), Williams painted a very different picture. ‘As our conference got under way,’ he wrote:

INGEOMINAS and foreign seismologists were not alarmed by this desultory pattern of
tornillos
; at the time, such small numbers were considered benign… Only after further eruptions in 1993 did we finally come to understand that small numbers of
tornillos
at Galeras – even as few as one or two a day –
might
presage an eruption. But there was no such understanding then. In the days before our trip into the crater, no one brought the
tornillos
to my attention or warned that the volcano might be poised to blow… Based on all available evidence, the consensus at the observatory was that Galeras was safe.

I asked Charles Wood (who is now at Wheeling Jesuit University in West Virginia) for his view of the matter, and he generally sided with Williams. ‘My perception is that there was no serious question about whether we should take this field trip,’ he said. If the Colombian scientists discussed the ominous significance of the
tornillos
, their message was lost on Wood and perhaps the other foreigners too. ‘My Spanish is rudimentary, and I mostly talked with the English-speakers,’ he said. ‘I would say that the work Bernard [Chouet] had done was not well enough known, and probably not well enough documented – I’m speculating – to say that if you see any of these screw-type features, you know there’s going to be an eruption in the next 24 hours or whatever. It’s not clear to me that there was that level of awareness of their predictive value.’ Wood also complained that Virginia Bruce, who interviewed him twice for her book, never disclosed her critical views of Williams, and thus gave Wood no motivation or opportunity to defend him.

Another scientist who took issue with Bruce’s book was Chouet’s colleague, Fernando Gil. In Bruce’s account, Gil had a conversation with Williams on the night before the field trip, in which he warned Williams about the
tornillos
and emphasised the danger of an impending eruption. Williams, Bruce says, refused to cancel the trip, though he did agree to cut down the number of scientists who would be allowed to enter the crater. But when Bruce’s book was published in 2001, Gil told the
Chronicle of Higher Education
that this purported conversation between him and Williams didn’t happen.

The field trip was originally scheduled for the third day of the meeting, January 13. In what would turn out to be a fateful change of plan, however, the organisers rescheduled the trip for the following day – the reason being a planned power outage on January 14 that would make indoor lectures impossible on that day. According to Wood, heavy rain on the 13th was another factor in the decision to postpone the trip. In any event, the scientists set out early on the morning of the 14th in a fleet of vehicles, and they reached the rim of the caldera at about 9am.

It had stopped raining, but thick clouds and fog enveloped the volcano’s summit, reducing visibility to a few feet. The interior of the caldera was completely hidden. ‘It was a disappointing touristic experience,’ said Wood. ‘It was cold; we were all in our down jackets, milling around, getting some talks from different people.’

By 10am, the fog had lifted slightly – enough, in Williams’s judgment, to permit the descent into the caldera. Only 12 scientists were to accompany Williams on that leg of the field trip, however. As had been previously arranged, the remaining scientists were to make a variety of other trips around the flanks of the volcano. Wood, for example, joined a group led by Marta Calvache and Patty Mothes, a young American volcanologist living in Ecuador. Their group would explore some deposits left by earlier eruptions, about a half-mile below the caldera rim. Wood was quite happy not to join Williams’s party. ‘Just going down into the caldera with that poor visibility would be dangerous,’ he said.

One by one, the members of Williams’s group backed down the steep wall of the caldera while clinging to the fixed rope. Because of the fog, they were quickly lost to view from the rim. Within the caldera, however, visibility was better. By the time the scientists reached the ‘moat’ – the lowest part of the caldera between the outer ramparts and the central volcanic cone – they could see one another and the cone ahead of them. After crossing the moat they began trudging up the side of the cone toward the crater rim. It was slow going; the terrain was steep and exceedingly rough on account of the rocks and cinders that had been scattered across the slope during previous eruptions. The altitude of more than 13,000ft didn’t help, either: some of the party were decidedly out of shape and needed to pause for breath after every few steps.

Among the 13 men, only one was wearing full protective gear. This was Andy Adams of Los Alamos: as a US government employee, he had to follow safety guidelines that mandated a hard hat, steel-toed boots, and fire-resistant coveralls. One other scientist, the Guatamalan Alfredo Roldan, wore a hard hat. Most of the others were bare-headed and wore down parkas. Williams poked fun at Adams for his seemingly excessive safety-consciousness, something that Adams didn’t find amusing.

Three hikers followed the scientists into the caldera. These were a local professor, his teenage son and his son’s friend, who were visiting the caldera out of pure curiosity. They were dressed even less suitably than Williams: rather than boots, they were wearing trainers – a poor choice for navigating the clinker-strewn slopes of the volcanic cone.

Once the scientists reached the top of the cone they could look down into the crater – a depression about 400ft wide, surrounded by almost sheer 100ft-high walls. Clouds of gas and steam were emerging from various spots on the crater floor, as well as from a group of fumaroles named Deformes on the southwest part of the crater rim. Aside from the gas venting, which had been going on for months, there was no sign of volcanic activity in the crater.

About this time, the seismologist who was watching the seismographs back at the Observatory in Pasto noted the occurrence of a
tornillo
. She radioed the information up to Roberto Torres, who was on the caldera rim, and he relayed it to José Arles on the cone. José noted the information but didn’t consider it particularly worrisome – 15
tornillos
had occurred over the previous three weeks, after all, without the volcano having shown the slightest sign of erupting.

The scientists in the caldera now split up into small groups to carry out a variety of tasks and observations. Geoff Brown, the British gravity expert, led a group around the rim of the crater. They took measurements of gravity as they went, using a bulky but highly sensitive piece of equipment that they had lugged up the cone. Several other members of the group, including the chemist Andrew Macfarlane, gathered at the Deformes fumaroles to measure the temperature of the emitted gases and to collect samples for later analysis in the laboratory. The various tasks kept the scientists busy for a couple of hours.

Around noon, two members of the party climbed down into the crater itself. These were two chemists, the Russian Igor Menyailov and the Colombian Nestor Garcia. They had finished sampling at the Deformes fumaroles and wanted to take more samples at the vents within the crater. The other scientists, including Williams, were content to watch from the crater rim. Williams took the opportunity to chat with the three hikers. About an hour later, most of the scientists began their return trip to the rim of the caldera – a trip that involved the descent of the central cone, the crossing of the moat, and the strenuous ascent of the 400ft-high caldera wall.

At 1.41pm, the members of the party were positioned thus: one Colombian, Alfredo Roldan, had just completed the journey and was standing on the caldera rim giving an interview to reporters from a local television station. Two other Colombians, Fabio Garcia and Carlos Estrada, were in the process of climbing the caldera wall with the aid of the fixed rope. Andy Adams, the safety-conscious Los Alamos employee, was at the base of the caldera wall, preparing to start the climb. Eight other men – Williams, Macfarlane, Arles, an Ecuadorian geochemist named Luis LeMarie, an American geochemist named Mike Conway, and the three local hikers – were at various points between the top and the base of the central cone. Geoff Brown and the Colombians Carlos Trujillo and Fernando Cuenca were standing on the opposite, western, side of the crater rim, far from the trail that led out of the caldera. Igor Menyailov and Nestor Garcia were still on the floor of the crater.