Life's unpredictability. Omayra Sanchez aged 12. Armero Colombia, Natural Disaster RIP.

This is about the wrath of nature, how I was emotionally impacted by trajedy and learning compassion in difficult times.

The disappearance of over 20,000 people in just 2 hours - Volcano eruption.

The Colombian farmers in the Cauca Valley were very efficient and we soon had a thriving export market of high quality tobacco.? After a few years demand continued to grow and we decided to expand our activities to the State of Tolima, an important sesame and? rice growing area the country.

Before establishing our office headquarters in that area, I sent two teams of my leading agronomists to scout the area. Dividing the area into two, I asked each team to give me a report on their finds.

They were away for two weeks gathering such information as demographics, land quality, infrastructure, warehousing and so forth.

?After their return I visited Espinal with my team to quantify and calculate the logistics of what we would need and how we would go about establishing our office, since the results of the survey seemed to favor Espinal. I spent a week there touring the areas including another week in the Armero region just to see that nothing had been missed in their findings and to make a clear judgement.

I returned from Tolima and met with the Board of Directors to update them on our findings and to get their approval to establish in Espinal.

We ended our meeting and each director went home for the week end.

Two days later the tragedy of Armero became an international front page horror. Over 20,000 people perished in the mudslide caused by the melting snow and larva from the volcano known as the Nevado del Ruiz. The news was in itself numbing, but to think that only a couple of days earlier my team and I had been touring the area was chilling. I again thought about how lucky my team and I had been. Another couple of days and I would have perished as a statistic in the worst natural disaster to have hit Colombia. Armero, Colombia - 1985

The?Armero tragedy? was one of the major consequences of the eruption of the Nevado del Ruiz stratovolcano in Tolima, Colombia on November 13, 1985. After 69 years of dormancy, the volcano's eruption caught nearby towns unaware, even though the government had received warnings to evacuate the area from multiple volcanological organizations when volcanic activity had been detected in September 1985.

As pyroclastic flows erupted from the volcano's crater, they melted the mountain's glaciers, sending four enormous lahars (volcanically induced mudslides, landslides, and debris flows) down its slopes at 60?kilometers per hour (40 miles per hour). The lahars picked up speed in gullies and coursed into the six major rivers at the base of the volcano; they engulfed the town of Armero, killing more than 20,000 of its almost 29,000?inhabitants.]?Casualties in other towns, particularly Chinchiná, brought the overall death toll to 23,000. Footage and photographs of Omayra Sánchez, a young victim of the tragedy, were published around the world. Other photographs of the lahars and the impact of the disaster captured attention worldwide and led to controversy over the degree to which the Colombian government was responsible for the disaster. A banner at a mass funeral in Ibague read, "The volcano didn't kill 22,000?people. The government killed them." – google information about the tragedy.

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In a couple of hours the entire town of Armero disappeared under a mountain of mud. There was absolutely nothing left of the town. Homes, people, animals, trees, absolutely everything disappeared. 20,000 people gone, in less than 2 hours, really unimaginable.

I had only read about natural tragedies somewhere around the world, but here I had actually met some of the people who had disappeared and I had just visited the area so the memories of what I had seen were very recent.

At? 5.00 AM, first light, the first news began to filter from there, where a helicopter pilot reported seeing hundreds of acres of mud where the town had been.? The immensity of the tragedy was immeasurable. I don’t think anyone could grasp the magnitude, of not only the actual tragedy but the ramifications and repercussions. Within a few hours people flocked to the area in the desperate hope of finding their loved ones.

By 10.00 AM the army had been flown to the area, to direct rescue operations. Pictures on the news channels showed the roads jammed for miles with cars filled with people trying desperately to drive to the area in the hope of finding their families.

Within days the stench from rotting carcasses of humans, horses, cows and any livestock could be smelt for miles. The simple common dominator and equalizer of everything, death, was everywhere, making it necessary to declare the entire area a cemetery.

So many personal tragedies came to light, like 12 year old Omaira Sanchez who was completely trapped up to her neck and therefore immobile in sludge for more than 60 hours, not sure whether she would make it. The round the clock efforts to extricate her without her losing her limbs caught the deep emotions of every father, mother, sister and brother who relived those painful hours. Her death awakened the conscience of many as to the unpredictability, of life and the impotence of man against the wrath of nature.

If this had happened 40 years earlier only the immediate people involved would have shared the agony and heartbreak of this individual tragedy, but with communications being able to capture video events and beam them across the world in real time this became an international heart wrencher in the house of everyone watching news.

Picture power: Tragedy of Omayra Sanchez,

Red Cross rescue workers had apparently repeatedly appealed to the government for a pump to lower the water level and for other help to free the girl. Finally rescuers gave up and spent their remaining time with her, comforting her and praying with her. She died of exposure after about 60 hours.

The picture had tremendous impact when it was published. Television cameras had already relayed Omayra's agony into homes around the world.

When the photo was published, many were appalled at witnessing so intimately what transpired to be the last few hours of Omayra's life. They pointed out that technology had been able to capture her image for all time and transmit it around the globe, but was unable to save her life.

My spiritual beliefs were once again touched and I began to think more seriously about my privileged life and my mortality. How easy it was to take life for granted and just assume that things would be fine without reflecting on the thin line between life and death. How inadvertently I could have sent members of my team to their deaths, with the repercussions this would have meant for their respective families.

Once again I was humbled to gratitude and an overwhelming feeling of relief. The unpredictability of life and the decisions made which could mean life or death became even more apparent.

Let me have your thoughts.