Smell of Death Lingers Over Scene of Eruption : Few Survivors Cling to Belongings, Hope

ARMERO, Colombia — Ricardo Orozco paced a hilltop overlooking this graveyard of a town and insisted that he would not leave without the television sets, colonial bed and floor-polisher he had painstakingly retrieved from his inundated house.

Nearby, Julio Macia had stacked his belongings--six burlap sacks of coffee beans, a green bicycle, a caged parrot, half a dozen hens and a cardboard box full of clothes. He, too, refused to leave without them.

The nauseating odor of death rose from the town, where about 20,000 people lie buried in mud that poured down the slopes of the Nevado del Ruiz volcano when it erupted late last Wednesday. Orozco, Macia and a handful of others covered their noses against the smell but would not budge.

“If you don’t take my things with me, I’m not leaving,” Orozco, 22, told a Red Cross worker who tried to persuade him otherwise.

“They say there are too many people to take our things in the helicopter. But this is all I have left,” said Macia, 52.

Orozco, whose six brothers and sisters are buried below, already had spent four nights on the narrow hilltop. Still stunned by the tragedy, he stared down at the giant burial ground, determined to wait for the rescue workers to change their minds.

Most Evacuated

By Sunday, most of the other survivors had been evacuated, except for a few whom rescue workers struggled to free from collapsed houses.

Red Cross physician Carlos Fernando Munoz, who coordinated one of the rescue teams, said workers would stay in the ghostly town as long as they believe there is a chance of finding someone alive.

“When we see there is no one alive, we’ll leave,” Munoz said. Until that time, he seemed content to let Orozco, Macias and the other few remain on the hilltop with their belongings.

On Sunday night, Colombian Health Minister Rafael de Zubiria said he believes all people trapped in Armero had been rescued and that he would like to begin fumigating the area to prevent the spread of disease from the decaying bodies.

‘No One Is Left There’

“I believe no one is left there,” Zubiria said in a radio interview.

But Victor G. Ricardo, chairman of the National Emergency Committee, said he would not stop the helicopter searches.

Rescue workers in Armero said the buried bodies will be left where they are and that those half submerged or lying atop the rivers of mud will be covered with lime.

Military and civilian helicopters combed the area for survivors Sunday, stirring winds that blew metal rooftops about as if they were gum wrappers. The site of the town is a sea of mud, strewn with uprooted trees, boulders, overturned automobiles and corpses.

An island of several city blocks pokes out of the mud. That and a few hills provided safety for several thousand survivors.

On Sunday morning, a rescue team found a middle-aged woman who had been lying face down beneath a fallen house and a 14-year-old girl wandering a hillside. The girl, who gave her name only as Ana Daisy, said she had been alone for three days, walking in the brush without food or water.

‘Very Happy to Be Here’

Her face and body were covered with scabby scratches, from what she described as a terrifying ride through a torrent of mud when the town was flooded. As nurses in nearby Lerida swabbed her wounds with disinfectant, she said weakly, “I am very happy to be here.”

Many of those who survived the nightmare in Armero said they knew they were lucky to be alive, rather than entombed in the mud.

But there was little joy in the faces of those who now must pick up their lives without homes or jobs. Many are widows or orphans now, or missing much of their family. Others are missing arms and legs that had to be amputated after infection set into wounds after days of exposure.

Janeth Moreno de Hernandez stood in the courtyard of the Lerida Central School, where she had slept in a second-floor classroom for two nights. Moreno, her husband and 14-month-old baby huddled with a box of clothes that had been given to them.

They had been told, along with others, that they would be sent to stay with family members. But Moreno said, “Who knows what they plan to do with us. We don’t have any family any more.”

Screaming Nightmares

Moreno’s husband, Jose Manuel Hernandez, said he had not been able to sleep at night because one of the other men in the classroom with them awakened him with screaming nightmares.

In a nearby church, Paulina Sanchez Rojas, 35, and her 8-year-old daughter spent the last few nights sleeping on two pews pushed together. “My mother and father and my brother are missing. I don’t know where my husband is,” Rojas said.

“I am going to wait here to see if my mother and father come out soon. If they don’t, we are all alone,” she said, breaking into tears.

At a child care center in the nearby town of Benadillo, 5-year-old Silvia Milena Mendoza sat on a tiny chair, saying nothing. A small pony tail on top of her head kept the hair away from her wounds and out of her bloodshot eyes.

Mendoza lived with her grandmother, who died in Armero, and no one knows where her parents are.

Checking Photographs

At the Child Welfare Department in Ibague, the capital of the state of Tolima, northwest of the capital, scores of people scanned lists of 4,800 rescued, wounded and dead who have been identified. A stream of men and women checked a board with photographs of unnamed babies who had been rescued.

The child center had received 102 rescued children, about 43 of whom had been reunited with relatives.

Carlos Milciades was one of those, having recovered his niece--3-year-old Diana Caroline. “Oh, God, when I saw her,” he said, choking on tears.

Oscar Ariza, 10, lay on a mattress playing with a red balloon two days after his gangrenous right leg had been amputated and spoke proudly of his father’s rescue of the family from their collapsed house.

‘My Little Brother Died’

“He dug us out and took us up to the hill. Everyone but my little brother, who died,” the boy said. “I had a big cut on my leg and they couldn’t clean it, so they had to cut the leg off.”

His roommate, Francisco Diego Guzman, 11, lost his left leg in the disaster, which also killed his mother.

“They took me out by helicopter,” he said, becoming pensive. “Where are the helicopters now? What are they doing?”

Told they still were rescuing people like him from Armero, he began to cry.

“Will they rescue my mother? I want to see my mother.”