Nevado del Ruiz

The ancient Indonesian city of Tambora, destroyed and buried by the 1815 eruption that caused the year without a summer.

Amero in Colombia buried under 15 feet of mud when Nevado del Ruiz erupted in 1985, killing 23,000 people in a matter of hours.

Volcanic lajas are particularly devastating because they don't just bury things, they infiltrate.

Mud flows into every opening, fills every space and then hardens like concrete.

Wow.

You know, I do have other cases of people who are like involved in disasters and wouldn't or couldn't be missed because like the volcano, the Nevada del Ruiz volcano buried some 21,000 people under feet of mud.

Contactee I talked to was involved in a rescue of some of these people.

Yeah, they're not being brought back.

The fourth installment of Father Edward Black's account follows Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre into Colombia in November 1985, where the travelers arrived amid extraordinary national turmoil.

Bogota was still reeling from the deadly eruption of Nevado del Ruiz and the recent siege of the Palace of Justice, creating such heightened security that Archbishop Lefebvre and his companions were met at the airport by armed plainclothes police and encountered soldiers throughout the capital.

The most fascinating detail comes near the end of Father Black's recollections.

During a visit to the town of Pereira, he toured a church that had been built by the family of Archbishop Lefebvre's sister for workers at their factory.

They bury everything beneath thick deposits of mud and debris.

The 1985 eruption of Nevado del Ruiz in Colombia melted glacial ice, generating lahars that traveled more than 30 miles down river valleys.

The town of Armero, home to 29,000 people, lay in the path of one of these flows.

Most of the town's residents were asleep when the lahar arrived at night, burying the community beneath several meters of mud and killing more than 23,000 people.