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Eruption of El Ruiz Volcano, Colombia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 June 2012

Miguel Gueri
Miguel Gueri
Affiliation:
Pan American Health Organization, Washington, D.C., U.S.A.
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Extract

The Republic of Colombia is situated in the northern part of South America, with coasts to both the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans. It has a long history of natural disasters: hurricanes from the Caribbean sea have lashed the eastern seaboard more than once, while the western part of the country belongs to the so called “Pacific Fire Belt.” Being in the zone of contact between the Nazca and the South American Techtonic Plates, where the former gets under the latter, it suffers from volcanic eruptions and earthquakes (Figures 1 and 2). The more recent major earthquakes were those in Tumaco in 1979 and Popayan in 1983. In Tumaco, the combined action of the earth movement (magnitude 7.9 in the Richter scale) and the subsequent Tsunami caused an estimated 500 deaths (Gueri et al). Popayan was almost totally destroyed by an earthquake of 5.3 magnitude in which over 100 people died (Gueri and Alzate).

Type
Papers from the Second International Assembly on Emergency Medical Services: Focus on Disasters, Baltimore, Maryland, April, 1986
Information
Prehospital and Disaster Medicine , Volume 2 , Issue 1-4: Contributions from the Second International Assembly on Emergency Medical Services-Focus on Disaster, Baltimore, Md., USA, 1986 and 4th World Congress on Emergency and Disaster Medicine Brighton, U.K. June, 1985 , 1986 , pp. 50 - 53
Copyright
Copyright © World Association for Disaster and Emergency Medicine 1986

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References

REFERENCES

Gueri, M. et al. (1983) “Health implications of the Tumaco earthquake, Colombia, 1979”. Disasters 7: 174–179.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gueri, M.; Alzate, H.. (1984) “The Popayan earthquake, a preliminary report on its effects on health”. Disasters 8: 18–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gueri, M.; Pérez, L. J. (1986) “Medical Aspects of ‘;El Ruiz’ Disaster, Colombia”, Disasters (In Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Simkin, T. et al. “Volcanoes of the World”. Smithsonian Institution, Hutchinson Ross Publishing Co., Strondsburg, Pennsylvania 1981, pp. 95.Google Scholar
Tomblin, J. “Ruiz Volcano, Colombia. Report of a Mission September-October 1985”, UNDRO, Geneva Oct. 1985.Google Scholar
UNDRO: “Nevado del Ruiz”, a sleeping giant awakens”, UNDRO News, Geneva, Nov./Dec. 1985 pp. 5–6.Google Scholar