Omayra Sanchez: The Haunting Story of Tragic Resilience
In order to commemorate the fifth year of its anniversary, EIS has decided to dedicate the gritty yet nerve-wracking tale of 13-yr-old Omayra Sanchez of Columbia; her exemplary courage, resilience and calm acceptance of destiny when faced with DEATH, has evoked universal praise and awe… Prasanta Paul revisits the past to revive her rebellious defiance of death.
Darkness deep descended on the dead and drowned bodies save Omayra Sanchez, who desperately clutched to a wooden plank in a giant vat of debris and sludge, hoping to defeat the claws of doom.
A cruel night made a very slow progress towards a devastating dawn; Omayra lost count of seconds, minutes and hours as she could barely witness her little village-cum-valley of death.
“Save me please, save me,” was the lone, muffled yet desperate voice that caught the attention of the rescuers of Red Cross as they struggled to wade through a river of mud, earth and tonnes of boulders and debris.
The volunteers, struck by the sudden burst of a voice amidst the wide swathe of rubble and sludge, rushed to its source and discovered Omayra, buried neck deep in putrid waters, holding on to a wooden plank.
The moment some of them tried to haul her out, her piercing cries of pain left them motionless; the cold realisation dawned. The hapless girl’s legs were stuck and buried deep into the heap of boulders and broken beams.
The Haunting Tale of Omayra Sanchez
Armero, a rural town nestled in the valley of a semi-active Nevado del Ruiz volcano around 160 kms west of Columbian capital of Bogota, failed to notice the blowhole had suddenly been showing signs of life after a hiatus of 79 years.
On November 13, 1985, shortly after noon, Omayra, the 13-year-old chirpy girl, was helping her father and elder brother stack the harvested crop into the store; her mother was away at Bogota to attend an urgent nursing assignment.
Intermittent drizzle kept leaking from the overcast sky; but sudden booming sounds from the west (location of the volcano) were obviously mistaken as lightning and thunderbolts.
None of the odd 31,000 Armero residents had any inkling that the ‘sleeping giant’ at 17,500 above the sea level which had triggered some bouts of tremor a couple of months back, could in reality break the long-awaited voodoo.
Ironically though, the Columbian Institute of Mining & Geology had, in one of its breakthrough studies, indicated barely a month ago about the likely eruption in Nevado.
And the ‘giant’ did finally erupt shortly after 9 pm on that very night, blowing away its snow-capped cover of Arenas crater, taking the residents completely unawares.
A devastating ‘lahar’ (mudflow), running at a speed of roughly 25 mph, reached Armero, 30 miles east of the crater and covered 85 percent of the small town in thick, heavy sludge. The roadways, houses, and bridges were destroyed, engulfed by a gushing mix of wood, boulders and mudflows up to a mile wide.
Unfortunately, the entire town went dark nearly half an hour before the tragedy struck; as a result, the townspeople had little wherewithal to sense the gamut of devastation and destruction awaiting them.
Hundreds and thousands of tiny torchlights that scurried here and there either from rooftops or the road, miserably failed to detect the 20 feet high torrent of sludge, rushing towards them at a breakneck speed.
The incredible devastation erased nearly 80 per cent of the households from the face of the earth, taking a toll of 21,000 and leaving the rest terribly battered and bruised to the bone.
A silence of the graveyard enveloped Armero even as the initial rescue efforts took several hours to begin. Omayra and her aunt, trapped under the rubble, managed to survive the night of horror, grabbing a broken wooden plank.
As rain renewed its vigour, feeble cries of some of the trapped people around reached the duo. As the first light of dawn broke, Omayra suddenly saw her aunt sinking in the sludge and sliding into the abyss of the debris.
An utterly callous Colombian government apparently developed a cold feet to rush emergency relief and rescue personnel. Before their arrival, the team from Red Cross reached the site where Omayra had already begun counting her last days, nay hours.
Day Two
Amidst a deadly spectacle of death and destruction, an overawed Omayra managed to hold her nerve till the volunteers managed to free her– chest to waist – from the rubble.
On the second day, the Red Cross requisitioned a diver to assess the chances of extrication of the little girl’s legs out of the sludge and boulders under the water.
As the diver finally dived under the slush, a cold shudder ran down his spine. He was horrified to discover that Omayra’s aunt, in a deadly clasp, was clinging to her little legs which were caught in between a pair of heavily mangled concrete beams and the hands of the dead lady.
Any attempt to separate the legs from the beams would result in severing the limbs from the body as they had already been crushed under weight of the concrete.
The diver’s sordid account left the Red Cross team head almost in tears; forthwith, he began sending SOS for a gas cutter and a pump in a last ditch effort to save Omayra.
Meanwhile, photojournalist Frank Fournie who arrived at the scene after a five-hour drive and a harrowing two and a half hour walk, started to chronicle the saga of Omayra’s rescue efforts after a farmer tipped him off about the girl’s heroic struggle. Fournie was shortly joined by Santa Maria Barragan, five-time winner of the National Journalism award in Columbia.
Day Three
A pair of air-filled tubes were inserted under the hands of Omayra to enable her to float with little ease. Then the unbelievable happened; the gritty girl conserved enough energy to initiate some broken conversation, having been fed with a tube by a team of volunteers.
Even as the rescuers were toying with the idea of conducting a near-impossible under-the-water surgery to amputate her legs and free her from the vicious grip of the concrete, Omayra, oblivious of her pain and accompanied pathos, resorted to retelling a plethora of lullabies to Santa Maria. She would even endeavour to sing, but failed.
However, when the attending Red Cross doctors firmly ruled out the possibility of any surgery in apprehension of a rapid breakout of gangrene in putrid waters, rescuers lost all hope of getting the girl out of the morass alive.
The Final Countdown
The grim reality compelled the Red Cross to forthwith suspend all rescue efforts of the hapless girl; instead, the team decided to allow the claws of death to gradually claim the girl’s life as quickly as possible.
Omayra must have been grievously tired after a non-stop, gritty fight with death for more than 55 hours; that she required some rest, at least for now, was the unanimous opinion.
And lo, what an irony! Omayra too was requesting the rescuers et all to steal some rest; for they too, she felt, were too tired to continue….! Her words were laced with such a universal concern and empathy as they brought tears into the eyes of the Red Cross members.
Fournie kept his lense busy capturing the final moments of Sanchez; her eyes lost the fervour and gradually began sinking and browning. Shortly thereafter, death rang the bell at around 10:15 am. on November 16, 1985.
The photograph of Omayra parting her vanquished existence from this world triggered a worldwide condemnation and protest against the Colombian government with hundreds and thousands of rallyists holding placards and marching through the streets of Bogota.
“Not Nevado the volcano, but a hungry man eater, the Colombian government, snatched the lives of 21,000 residents,” the placards read.
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