PART 2.

MAYON…. MAGAYON, THE BEAUTIFUL

1985: Getting Acquainted

The proposal for funds to support collaborative work that Ray Punongbayan and I submitted to
Minister Javier in May 1984 had an imposing title: “Philippine Institute of Volcanology—
University of Illinois at Chicago Cooperative Research Program in Volcanology and Related
Fields”, but we had only vague ideas about what our collaboration would entail. In mid-
September after I had returned to Chicago, however, Mount Mayon volcano on southern Luzon
began a month-long eruption, triggering the research that would dominate my next two decades.
(That same month, PHIVOLC was assigned the duty to monitor and study earthquakes as well,
and thenceforth has been PHIVOLCS, the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology.)
Mayon is an explosive volcano, and its eruptions litter its steep slopes with large amounts of
loose, coarse rock debris. September and October are still in the season of the southwest
monsoon and typhoons, and Ray wrote me that the pounding rains were beating the newly
abundant volcanic debris into large, hot, destructive, slurries that were flowing downslope,
transporting large boulders. “Mudflows”, he called the flows, a badly misleading term.
The modern science of volcanology was created by “igneous petrologists”. Igneous comes
from the Greek, “born of fire”; petro, also from the Greek means “rock”. (Remember “…thou art
Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church”?) To the first volcanologists, lavas were all that
really mattered: How, and where, down there, do they form? Why do they emerge at the surface?
How do they behave in flow? How do they crystallize into minerals and solid rock?
But the focus of petrologists on lava detracted their attention from other important things,
and they casually saddled the science with serious misnomers, some of which we seem to be
stuck with forever. For example, the finer volcanic fragments that fall out of eruption columns
are called “ash”. But ash is made by burning something, not by pulverizing rock with
explosions. The confusion persists; an engineer who wanted to design protective structures once
asked me, “What is burning down there that makes so much ash?”
Similarly, in 1984 the flowing slurries were still being called “mudflows”, even though they
consisted mainly of gravel and sand. This was very irritating to “sedimentologists” like me,
because the sizes of sediment particles hold so much information about the journeys they have
undergone. Technically, “mud” is a mixture of the grit finer than sand that we call “silt” and
microscopic grains of clay, each far too tiny to distinguish with the naked eye.
Sloppy usage has real world consequences. Let’s say a volcano erupts after centuries of
dormancy. Local farmers who have never experienced eruptions are warned that ‘mudflows’
would soon come with the monsoon rains. But to them, mud is the friendly stuff in which they
grow rice, so what’s the problem?
Then the rains come, and millions of cubic meters of stampeding flows made of sand, gravel,
and huge boulders bury their ricefields and homes. [Spoiler alert: This actually happened at
Pinatubo in 1991.]
Clearly, calling them mudflows showed beyond doubt that these happenings were still not
well understood, and needed better study.
Sedimentology focuses on how sedimentary rocks form: how pre-existing rocks are
destroyed by weathering, how the debris is eroded, transported, deposited and, over time,
hardened into new rock. Our science is not about rocks as rocks; it’s about how to extract from
them any information about the processes that made them.
It doesn’t take sedimentology, only common sense, to understand that the sizes of objects are
usually is what determine how easily they are moved: sand grains take much less energy to
transport than large boulders. In the 1970s, my Turkish student Tevfik Arguden studied 200
million years old rocks in the eastern U.S. that contain large boulders. We marveled at the forces
and energies that must have moved them.
Now, the opportunity to study such spectacular processes in action on Mayon was
irresistible. And so in January of 1985 Kathy and I took sabbatical leaves from the University
and self-funded a trip to the Philippines. While Kathy did her sociological research at the
agricultural campus of the University of the Philippines in Los Baños, a team of volcanologists
and I began studying Mayon’s lahars – the Indonesian term for rapidly flowing slurries of
volcanic debris suddenly mixed with water. In part because of our work, that’s what Filipinos
and scientists all over the world now call them, not “mudflows”.
 Some Mayon Basics

“Mayon” is short for Magayon, “beautiful” in the local Bicol language, doubtless because of
her grandly curving, symmetrical slopes and regal height: 2,463 meters—a mile and a half—
above sea level. Filipinos proclaim her “the world’s most perfect cone”. Young Pinoys cannot
help thinking “lovely breast” looking at her, especially when her summit is modestly draped in
filmy wisps of cloud.

Mayon is also famous for how often she erupts. Since her eruptions started being
recorded consistently in1800, she has erupted 55 times, sometimes for several years in a row.
The longest period between eruptions was from 1902 to 1928, hardly enough time to store up
enough energy for a devastating eruption. Her worst disaster was in 1814, when some 1,200
people were reported killed in the village of Cagsawa a few kilometers northwest of Legazpi. In
1897 the second most lethal eruption killed 350. Only five other Mayon eruptions killed people
over the four centuries that records have been kept. Thus, Mayon is not only lovely, she is fairly
gentle, as volcanoes go, as close to the ideal Filipina as a volcano can be. Tourists throng to her
eruptions. It is understandable that people fell helplessly in love with her.

Compare that with how Pinatubo stored energy for centuries, then expended it in the
world’s greatest eruption in a century. How very masculine… Malakas “Strong” and Maganda
“Beautiful”, the mythic lovers of Filipino legend come to mind; too bad the conjugal Marcos
dictators Ferdinand and Imelda coopted those titles for themselves.

If you study Mayon scientifically, your increased insight may cause you to inadvertently
feminize her even more. Emmanuel Ramos, who was Deputy Director of Phivolcs at the time,
found that her 1984 explosions were sensitive to the lunar cycle, responding vigorously to the
strengthened kneading of gravity during Full and New moons.

Every Mayon eruption affects only a limited sector, and so her remarkable symmetry
requires that, over time, each sector must eventually receive its full measure of outpourings. In
the modern era, it is the turn of the southeastern and eastern sectors to be built up.

The 1984 eruption was a “moderate” eruption. As usual, lava flows did not extend below
the upper slopes, which are kept steep by the strong rocks that the flows become when they cool
and harden. Here is a picture of lava flowing out of the Mayon summit during the 2009
eruption, one of similar magnitude as the 1984 event. The thread-like streaks left and right of the
main mass probably are not lava, but mark the paths of glowing bodies of rock in free-fall.
 Mayon extruded an estimated 20 million tons of lava in 1984. This was dwarfed by the
50 million tons of rock debris blown out by the eruption. Minor portions falling out of the
eruption clouds were thinly spread all over the landscape in the form of fine-grained “ash”. That
word again…. Some scientists, including me, have tried to fix the situation by referring to it as
“fine-grained tephra”. But that really doesn’t help much, because tephra means “ashes” in
Greek. Oh well….

Most of the tephra came down as pyroclastic flows. As long as we’re tracing terms to
their ancient roots: pyro- means “fire”; -clastic, “broken”. While erupting, a volcano like Mayon
forcefully spews up tall eruption columns of very hot gas mixed with hot, fragmented –
pyroclastic – rock. Inevitably, as an eruption column rises, the pull of gravity overcomes the
eruptive force, the hot mixture slows, stops, then accelerates back down until it forcefully slams
the volcano flanks. Rushing downslope, the pyroclastic flow can go faster than 80 kilometers per
hour (50 MPH). Speeds of 700 kilometers per hour have been reported during eruptions
elsewhere.

Many people think that lava flows are the greatest volcanic hazard. Not so; on explosive
volcanos like Mayon, lavas can flow only a few meters per hour, high up the slopes and far away
from people. The worst killer are pyroclastic flows, which can travel great distances downslope
to communities. Their temperatures can be as high as 1,000 °C—over 1,800 °F, so your first
breath would sear your lungs, mercifully killing you instantly. Judging from the many casualties
in 1814, pyroclastic flows were to blame, and in 1897 as well.

The 1984 pyroclastic flows of the were not very large, but they tore out deep ravines into
the eastern and southeastern flanks. Below each, the pyroclastic flows left fan-shaped deposits.
Fortunately, they stopped flowing 300 meters above sea level, several kilometers above any
community.
 Pyroclastic flows emerging from the ravines and flowing downslope are hidden under the
two large dust clouds in this photograph taken by Chris Newhall of the U.S. Geological Survey
during the 1984 eruption. The large one is moving southeastward, the smaller one, more distant
headed east. The clouds are formed by friction of the overlying air with the rapidly moving
flows.

Underneath the two clouds, pyroclastic flows are slowing down and stopping, depositing
fields of tephra that widen downslope, named Bonga and Basud Fans in the map on the next
page, which shows the area that our team of volcanologists would study for the next five years.
We will have occasion to refer to it again. The elevation lines are labeled in hundreds of meters
above sea level. Solidified lavas at the summit are colored orange. The red triangles on the
pyroclastic fans mark where we gathered rain data in the late 80s; the one at Legazpi Airport is
the government weather station where rainfall is also measured. Our headquarters was the
Phivolcs observatory at Sta. Misericordia. “Misery”, we called it, but it was quite comfortable,
as field stations go.

Torrential typhoon and monsoon rains during the eruption whipped fresh debris on the
pyroclastic fans into hot lahars. In the following years, seasonal rains on the fans were expected
to send cold lahars down the volcano. Worrisomely, the larger Bonga Fan faced Legazpi,
Albay’s provincial capital and largest city.
 We worked on the Basud Channel first, refining our mapping techniques there because it
was conveniently near Misery. But if any community faced new hazards from the newly
configured post-eruption Mayon, it was clearly Legazpi City, with more than 100,000 people.
So, naturally, we were soon mapping Matanag Channel, and planned to follow it with Mabinit
Channel as soon as we could.

To save travel time and gasoline, we would camp for a week on the volcano wherever we
happened to be working. We would come into Legazpi on Saturdays so I could phone Kathy in
Chicago, and we could enjoy a restaurant meal and much beer while listening to live music at a
nightclub, then sleep at Misery. February and March are the dry season, but we hoped that
occasional thunderstorms might trigger lahars, and camping in the field would enhance our
chances to observe them.

On land, most sediment is transported and deposited by rivers and streams. High in the
mountains, water flowing down steep stream valleys can move everything but the largest
boulders.
As the valleys progressively become less steep downstream, the water flows less energetically
and carries smaller and smaller rocks. Reaching the plains, rivers flow over beds of gravel and
sand, and the waters carry sand, silt and clay out to sea. At the shore, waves winnow the
sediment, leaving sands at the beaches and carrying the silt and clay offshore.

The progression from large boulders in the mountains to finer and finer sizes as sediment
travels downstream is all very logical and understandable, and the ancient rocks that they have
hardened into can be interpreted in the same way. But lahars and their deposits don’t behave in
that orderly way, and for anyone used to dealing with more normal stream sediments and
sedimentary rocks, lahar deposits were very puzzling; large boulders strewn chaotically
everywhere, contained in or sitting upon sand and gravel all mixed together. In the Philippines,
typhoon and monsoon rains usually end by January. Thus, in January 1985 we could not study
lahars by watching them in action. All we could do was examine their deposits in detail for clues
as to how they behave.

Tradition says that science done properly follows a “scientific method”: From initial
observations, formulate a question; then make a “hypothesis”, a tentative answer to the question
that can be tested; test the hypothesis with experiments; from the results, confirm, modify, or
discard the hypothesis altogether.
That’s not how we began to study lahars. It’s hard to think about doing geology that way.
Nature and the geological world are just too complicated, too big, too old. Much of our work
consisted of making many, many observations, before we could even know enough frame a
testable answer. In geology, it is best to first approach nature humbly, seek out and look intently
at anything she displays, and not force her to fit your ideas before you have gathered much data.
 So how can you study lahars? Their channels and fields of deposit are kilometers long and
football-fields wide. Bird’s-eye views would have helped greatly, but readily-available satellite
imagery was still decades in the future. The government military had aircraft, but Mayon was a
stronghold of the New People’s Army back then, and the air force would not casually expose
their helicopters to ground-fire on scientific frivolities. Drones would have come in so handily…
sana, Pinoys say, if only…
Limited to working on the ground, we mapped the lahar channels and deposit fields as
precisely, efficiently and in as much detail as possible. These days, mapping is done with
computerized “total station” equipment that measure distances with infrared rays and
communicate those data to a laptop, which can be easily used to draw the map at any stage. But
total stations were still in their infancy and not yet widely available. All we had were an old
plane table and alidade, and surveyor’s stadia rods.
A plane table is simply a drawing-board mounted on a tripod. An alidade is a surveyor’s
telescopic transit without legs that can be slid freely over a map taped to the plane table. Away
from the table, standing on a feature to be mapped, a geologist holds a “stadia rod”, which is just
a long centimeter ruler. “Parallax”: The farther an object is, the smaller it looks. Looking
through the telescope, the alidade operator measures the distance to the rod by counting how
many centimeters lie between the “stadia” – the horizontal lines above and below the central
crosshair, and plots the point on the map. The geologist then goes to the table to sketch in the
feature. And so the map is fleshed out right there in the field.

To be sure that our maps would capture even fairly small features, we mapped at a scale of
1:1,000. Thus, the map of a kilometer-long stretch of lahar channel would be a meter long. The
map of Matanag Channel, reduced to fit on page [6], distills many long tedious weeks of labor,
shrinking to a few centimeters our original map that was over five meters long. But mapping at
that large scale forced us to go very slowly while we still knew very little about lahars. The
leisurely pace made us observe very carefully and incorporate many fine details of the lahar
surface.
Lunches in the field are especially pleasant memories. At noon, we would stop to eat
wherever we were. Banana trees were everywhere; we would cut down a couple of their broad
leaves, spread them on the ground and on them make a large mound of the rice cooked early that
morning, topped by chicken, pork or fish, also pre-cooked, or, more commonly, several cans of
sardines and corned beef.
Squatting around the food, we would eat with our bare hands, comporting ourselves with a
curious combination of Filipino politeness and the greed induced by healthy field appetites. The
meal would take no more than ten minutes, after which a half hour of rest and a cigarette or two
before returrning to work.

A funny way to get sad news

In early February I left Mayon briefly to visit Mom in Zambales to try to cheer her up. Age and
illness had forced her to retire from her decades of being the Principal of the high school she and
Dad had founded in 1948. She was terribly worn down by her declining health and by the sheer
exhaustion of a long and difficult life, and I was afraid I’d never see her again.
She had undergone cataract surgery in 1981, but her eyes were failing her again, and could
no longer be fixed. A voracious reader all her life, she was giving up, now that she no longer
could. My alternate pep talks and scolds no longer helped.
But before I left to return to Mayon, she said, “Son, will you do me a big favor? I don’t have
any cigarettes, and your sister disapproves of my smoking, so I shouldn’t ask her.”
What the hell, I thought, she’s 85 years old, and her daily four or five cigarettes are among
her few remaining pleasures.
And so I bought her two packs of Hope, her favorite mentholated brand, and said good bye.
Two weeks later, we were on Mayon, plane-tabling Matanag Channel high up its western
rim, when a two-way radio message for me from Manila came to Misericordia. Alex, one of the
observers, came to deliver it, and left the jeep on the road to climb up the mountain to us. But he
came up the wrong side of the deep channel. He was a couple of hundred meters away from
where I stood by the plane table when I saw him.
”O, ANO, ALEX, KUMUSTA NA?” I greeted him, yelling across the channel. He yelled
something back, but he was too far away to understand.
“ANO?” “WHAT?” He answered again, yelling harder, but still too faintly. More back and
forth, until Jessie, the alidade operator, finally got a stricken look on his face.
“What’s he yelling, Jessie?” Jessie mumbled something.

“What, Jessie?”

“Mumble…”
 “What?”

Finally: “Sir, he is shouting ‘YOUR MOTHER DIED!’”

This was already a funny story when it happened; I cried and laughed at the same time, and
have told it often, a joke at my own expense.
So I went home for Mom’s week-long vigil and funeral. She had left notes around the house,
saying how she wished the service to be in the Philippine Independent Church, and that she
wanted to be buried next to Dad in the secular cemetery.
Her funeral was attended by throngs of her many friends and former students, young and old.
Apo Puraw, people used to call her, “White Grandmother”.
Over the two weeks I was gone, she had smoked one pack of the cigarettes I’d bought her
and left six in the other. I smoked, of course, like a good Ilocano, rather than waste them.

Our first lahar

Mapping and describing lahars deposits is not a very satisfactory way to learn how they
behave; pretty much like trying to learn how living bodies function by studying corpses. All that
first field season, we kept hoping that a cloudburst would trigger one for us to watch, but the
weather did not oblige.
Kathy and I were scheduled to return to Chicago in late March. At Matanag Channel where
we were mapping on our last day in the field, the weather was fine, but heavy clouds did come in
to shroud the summit around noon. Then it must have rained heavily up there, because in late
afternoon when we had almost finishing breaking camp and packing our gear, there was a distant
rumbling high up the channel, rapidly growing louder.
“Lahar!”, I yelled, elated. “Move the jeep out! Get your cameras! Lay the long tape out
along the channel so we can measure its speed!” But before we were done spreading the tape,
about ten minutes after we first heard the lahar, its front wall came roaring down into view above
us, a dam of tumbling boulders a meter or so tall, moving several kilometers per hour. Every
man for himself scrambled to what he thought was a safe vantage point. Mine was a jumble of
boulders left by an earlier lahar at the side of the channel.
Throughout my career, Nature has been a powerful but uncommonly gentle tutor, sparing my
life several times. My first lahar lesson: What a lahar can deposit, another lahar can incorporate
and move again. As the lahar front reached my rock pile, it incorporated many of its boulders as
it swept past. Only the largest one, about two meters tall, was left for me to stand on when the
lahar began to abate. Had it been much stronger and lasted longer, I too might have been swept
away too. Good that it was only an off-season, cloud-burst lahar, no larger than a few thousand
tons.
 Lahar

To Indonesians, the word means a loudly roaring slurry, or mixture of water and volcanic
debris, flowing rapidly down a volcano. It is the volcanic form of the debris flow. Abundant
rock debris lying loosely on any steep mountain slope or in a mountain canyon can be mobilized
into a debris flow if a lot of water suddenly hits and mixes with it. Debris flows occur on non-
volcanic mountains, like the disastrous one described in Chapter 14, triggered by the rains of
Super Typhoon Pablo in 2012, that killed more than 600 people in Mindanao. But lahars refer
specifically to debris flows on volcanoes.
A lahar event has two phases. First, it begins to form and grow while flowing in a channel on
the volcano, which is what we experienced that March day in 1985. The second phase happens
when it emerges from the channel, slows down, and spreads out, burying everything in its path.
We would experience that second, destructive phase many times at Pinatubo in the Nineties, but
at Mayon most of what we saw and studied was the initial, channelized phase.
Lahars and other debris flows are uncannily lifelike in how they actively govern their own
behavior. They grow by eating their own channels, sometimes digging down into its bed,
sometimes chewing sideways at its banks. Like a sidewinding snake, a lahar changes its sinuous
shape by depositing at one side in some places while eroding the opposite bank.
A lahar has a head, a body and a tail. The head consisting mainly of boulders it accumulates
as it rumbles down its channel. Together, the boulders act as a moving dam that contains the
main body behind it. The thickness of that body depends on how high the head is—how big its
boulders are. In turn, the main body is pushing the boulder front forward, and how thick it is
affects how hard it pushes, how large the boulders it transports, and how fast the whole lahar
moves.
Ignoring the boulders, lahars consist mostly of gravel and sand, mixed into a slurry with
remarkably little water, weighing no more than 25 percent or even as little as 10 percent of the
mixture – just enough to give it mobility. Think back to when you last observed freshly-mixed
concrete pouring down the chute of a delivery truck. That is the consistency of the main body of
a lahar, twice as dense as water, and twice as buoyant.
Now, imagine flows with that consistency, from hundreds up to millions of truckloads in
size; the larger ones moving as fast as 50 kilometers per hour, five times or so faster than typical
floods, as it moves huge boulders. Understandably, lahars batter and damage bridges, channels
and buildings much more strongly than floodwater does.
 It’s too bad that lahar-dike designers insist on the fiction that lahars and debris flows can be
contained by flood-control structures. Worse, that the government funds them, failure after
failure. … But I forget myself; more about that later.
While flowing in the channel, one of the most spectacular ways a debris flow behaves
differently from a water flood is how easily it transports large boulders. Sedimentologists say: In
streams and rivers, the water carries the sediment; in debris flows, the sediment carries the water.
Not only does the boulder front grow by entraining rocks in its path; it receives boulders fed
forward by the main flow acting like a conveyor belt. This is partly due to the extra buoyancy
provided by the high density of the slurry. Another important reason is that the flow is slowed
down by friction at the sides and floor of the channel, and is faster in the central, near-surface
“plug” of the flow away from the channel, where friction is less. Boulders repeatedly bounce
away from the channel floor and sides into the fast-flowing center, and migrate forward to join
the moving dam at the head of the lahar.
Behind the moving frontal dam, the main body of the lahar progressively becomes more
dilute, and has less coarse and more fine sediments toward the rear. The lahar eventually
undergoes a transition, from a boulder-rich “true” debris flow into a tail in which the solids are
mainly sand, silt and clay.
Geologists call these more dilute, finer-grained lahar flows “hyperconcentrated flows”,
creating some confusion. They are “hyper” not because they are the densest lahars, but because
they carry much more sediment than normal streams do. Educating in Pilipino at the grassroots,
we got around this confusion by calling them “lahar na malabnaw”, -- “dilute, runny lahars”, as
opposed to “lahar na malapot”, or “thicker, more viscous lahars” in referring to the true debris
flows.
Lahar na malabnaw look little different from normal, turbid flood waters, and can transport
gravel only by pushing and rolling it along its bed. But truck drivers get into trouble if they try
to cross them, because sediment provides up to 75 percent of their weight, and they flow 7 to 10
kilometers per hour, at least twice as fast as flood waters, strong enough to topple trucks and
buses.
Finally, at the very tail end of the lahar the malabnaw lahars fade into the muddy floodwaters
familiar to everyone.
The second major phase of a large, major lahar begins as it or overflows from its channel or
emerges from its end, spreading out, slowing down, and blanketing an area with sand, gravel,
cobbles and scattered boulders. At Mayon during the years we studied them, the typical lahar
depositional areas usually were not very large, only several boulder-studded hectares. Very
small, compared to the great swaths of land that Mount Pinatubo was to bury with its lahars in
the 1990s.
But that’s another story, already partly told, with yet more to tell.
 Looking back in March 2017

Here is our plane table team in 1986, posing on a boulder-studded lahar deposit where we were
mapping and camping. From left to right, the six people clustered around the plane table are:
Renato (“Rene”) Solidum in the white shirt; Jesse Daligdig fussing with the alidade; Rosalito
“(Boy”) Alonso pumping his fist; Amelia (Amy) de Guzman; Jesse (“Jess”) Umbal; and
Hernulfo (“Nonoy”) Ruelo.
Rene Solidum earned his Masters degree with me in Chicago in 1992. He went on to get his
PhD at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 2002, before returning to PHIVOLCS where
he became Director in 2003.  On February 27, 2018 he was named the Department of Science
and Technology’s Undersecretary for Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change Adaptation,
while remaining PHIVOLCS Director.
 Jesse Daligdig joined our Pinatubo lahar taskforce briefly during the Pinatubo eruption in
1991. He was still a PHIVOLCS geologist when he died with Ray Punongbayan on April 28,
2005 when their helicopter crashed while they were reconnoitering landslides.
Boy Alonso worked with me at Pinatubo for several years, then joined private industry as a
mining geologist in 1996. He is currently the manager for a venture exploring for and mining
gold and copper in Zambales Province.
Amy de Guzman was with the team only in 1986. Later that year she left Phivolcs for
the Department of Energy, where she is now Director of the Energy Research and Testing
Laboratory Services.

Jess Umbal earned his Masters degree with me in Chicago, writing a superb Masters thesis
after monitoring the birth and development of a lake that was created during the 1991 Pinatubo
eruption when lahars dammed a river. He left Phivolcs in the mid-1990s to work for mining
companies, interrupted briefly by stints with an environmental firm and with the government’s
Mines and Geosciences Bureau. His volcanologic expertise served him well in the search for
industrial and precious metals in Indonesia, Malaysia and Africa. Now he works closer to home
as a mining geologist in Mindanao.
Nonoy Ruelo lives and works in Dumaguete City on Negros island. In addition to his private
consulting for various mining companies, he is working to improve the undergraduate geology
program at Negros Oriental State University.
Rene and Jess were studying for their Masters degrees with me in Chicago in June 1991
when Pinatubo started erupting. The three of us went to the volcano to study where and how its
lahars might endanger communities. Boy and Nonoy joined us in Zambales, west of Pinatubo, in
time to experience and survive the horrendous climactic explosions of June 15. That story, and
the enormous lahars while the eruption continued into September, has already been told in my
1995 book, “Pinatubo and the Politics of Lahar”.
At Mayon, we had longed for more active lahars to observe; at Pinatubo during the eruption
and for years afterwards we got a bellyful of them. But we did come well-armed with the
understanding of lahars we gleaned at Mayon.

1986
Kathy and I returned to Chicago in March 1985. Immediately, buoyed with the knowledge
and confidence earned by our first mapping efforts, I wrote and submitted a proposal to the
National Science Foundation in Washington to fund two years of research: “U.S. Philippines
Cooperative Research on Volcanic Deposits of the 1984 Mayon Volcanic Eruption”.
 Later that year, another strangely timed happenstance elsewhere in the world furthered
my plans.

The Lahar Disaster in Armero, Colombia

On November 13, 1985, while I was still awaiting the decision on my NSF proposal, the
Colombian volcano Nevado del Ruiz erupted, generating lahars that obliterated the town of
Armero. More than 20,000 of its 29,000 inhabitants were buried alive in their homes.
Nevado del Ruiz, peaking 5,300-meters (17,400 feet) above sea level, is the tallest of Los
Nevados – “The Snowy Ones”, eight volcanoes strung out along 600 kilometers of South
America’s Andes mountain range. At their high elevations, the frigid air maintains permanent
caps of snow and ice on the Nevados, even though they are situated closer to the Equator than
the Philippines. The latitude of Nevado del Ruiz is only about 5° North.
The eruption ejected 35 million tonnes of lava and tephra -- not very much, as eruptions
go; after all, Mount Pinatubo blew out 11 billion tonnes in 1991. But the exceedingly hot
mixtures of gases, blobs of lava and explosion debris that it belched out melted huge amounts of
its cap of ice and snow. The hot debris rapidly mixed with the meltwater to form boiling-hot
slurries. These formed four large lahars that flowed rapidly down the northeastern flank of the
volcano. Picking up speed as they went, they grew ever larger by eroding and incorporating
much rock, soil and vegetation along the way.
Kilometers below the summit, the lahars funneled into six major rivers that drain the
eastern base of the mountain. Flowing faster than 42 kilometers per hour, they engulfed the town
of Armero on the plains, more than 70 kilometers east of the volcano summit, killing more than
20,000 of its 29,000 inhabitants. Armero lies buried in the center of this photograph taken by
USGS geologist Jeffrey Marso later that month.
Like far too many Philippine catast-
rophes, the Armero disaster was a “perfect
storm” of terrible coincidences, some natural
and unavoidable, others born of human error. I
discussed the catastrophe at length in my 1995
book Pinatubo and the Politics of Lahar, and
will treat it more briefly here. But I cannot
resist quoting again my volcanologist friend
Barry Voight (older brother of actor Jon): “. .
.the cata-
strophe was not caused by technological ineffectiveness or defectiveness, not by an
overwhelming eruption, or by an improbable run of bad luck, but rather by cumulative human
error -- by misjudgment, indecision and bureaucratic shortsightedness.”
 The natural circumstances: The volcano erupted at night shortly after 9 PM, when it was
too dark to be seen from Armero. For whatever coincidental reason, there was no electric power
and radios went silent. Most people were asleep anyway, about two and a half hours later, at
11:30, when the first lahar hit the town.
In the aftermath, there was much futile finger-pointing in Colombia to assign blame for
the tragedy. That also follows every such tragedy in the Philippines, as I was to learn. Beyond
pointing out that authorities knew that Armero, having been rebuilt on lahar deposits that had
buried it in 1595 and 1845, should have known what might have been in store. I will not rehash
the other controversies here, having had a bellyful of such in my work at Mayon and Pinatubo.
The tragedy grabbed the world’s attention, especially with the media attention paid to the
ordeal of courageous 13 year-old Omayra Sanchez while she remained submerged in water for
three days, trapped in lahar deposits in the wreckage of her home. This picture of Omayra, taken
shortly before she died in agony, won photographer Frank Fournier the World Press Photo award
that year.

There is a Spanish saying: “There is no bad out of which some good will come”. In my
case, lahars were suddenly a hot topic, and the NSF approved my first grant proposal for lahar
research on Mayon.
In December 1985 I returned to Manila and to studying and mapping Mayon lahar deposits. But
in early 1986 our work was interrupted by the political crisis of the national election and the
“People Power” revolution that overthrew of the Marcos conjugal dictatorship by. Rather than
relating what transpired then, my involvement in those events is best relegated to Part 3 of this
book.
 Reminisces, 1985 to1989
The Bicolanos living on Mayon are happy people. In part, this may be because they farm very
fertile soils. Under the humid tropical conditions, volcanic debris weathers rapidly into soils with
potash and phosphorus contents that serve as natural fertilizers, plus every trace element that any
plant might require.
Bicolanos have long been well adapted to the frequent eruptions since pre-Hispanic times.
They evacuate reluctantly during eruptions, and long before the authorities declare the
emergency over, they are petitioned by the evacuees to let them return to their barangays where
they can again enjoy their Friday-night dances (baile).
Most Mayon eruptions are small, as eruptions go, and most of their lahars cover
comparatively small areas. Days after a lahar, farmers plant rice and gabi—taro—around the
newly arrived boulders.
Coconut trees are abundant on Mayon’s lower slopes, and gatá, coconut milk squeezed out of
the grated meat of the mature nuts – is a staple in the Bicolano cuisine. Once, in hopes of
witnessing and documenting an active lahar, we camped at Mabinit Channel. We hired a man
nicknamed “Kapitan”, a former barangay head, as our cook, as a condition for being allowed to
camp on what we told was on his land.
Our campsite wasn’t really Kapitan’s property, we later learned, but not before he had
cooked us 37 straight meals -- everything in gatá: Chicken in gatá. Pork in gatá. Fresh fish in
gatá. Salted dried fish in gatá. Canned sardines in gatá. Spam in gatá. Purpagulong (wing
beans) in gatá. Mung beans in gatá. Gabi (taro) tubers in gatá. Spiced gabi leaves in gatá.
Once, he cut a coconut tree down, and cooked the palm heart in gatá.
The dreaded sound of coconut being grated would wake us up every morning. Finally, I hurt
Kapitan’s feelings when I asked him if it would be possible, just once, not to cook with gatá.

“Nice People Around”

In the 1980s, the conjugal Marcos dictatorship faced growing unrest, and the New People’s
Army grew with it. Part One of this book describes the state of affairs in Ilocandia, Marcos’
northern Luzon baliwick. But the NPA was even stronger at Mayon.
The “Neps” clearly had the confidence of the people. Wherever we were mapping was
always the tambayan, the hangout and playground of the neighborhood children, and we were
their entertainment. They all wanted to peer through the alidade telescope and run whatever
small errands we might have. Eventually the older kids would confide in us that they were
“pasa bilis”, the “pass it quickly”, the local telegraph; if soldiers were approaching, the kids
were supposed to inconspicuously run and relay the word along to the Neps. Hanging around us,
they surely learned whatever might be worth passing along about us.
Signs of the NPA presence were everywhere. Many small creeks drain the volcano, and the
roads along its base cross them with small concrete bridges. The Neps used them as billboards:
In red paint, besides anti-Marcos slogans, bans on bad behavior. “DO NOT BEAT YOUR
WIFE” and “NO GAMBLING” were common messages.
Women, amazonas, were well represented and full equals in the NPA ranks. If a man had the
reputation of wife beater, several amazonas would visit his barangay sooner or later. Politely:
“We have heard, po, that you beat your wife. No, no, please don’t deny it; listen first. Please
don’t do it anymore, po, because if you do, we will have to return to administer Peoples’
Justice.” That warning usually had the desired effect.
The NPA were Maoists, ‘moving amongst the people as fish swimming in the sea’; hence,
they were always polite and respectful toward the local folk; those who spoke some English
furtively referred to them as the “Nice People Around”.
The Neps taught that gambling encourages laziness, thievery and bad blood among
neighbors. Once, during one of our field seasons, an army squad was assigned a reconnaissance
probe above Misericordia. No fools, like any soldiers they were reluctant to climb up the
mountain toward where the NPA held the high ground. And so instead, they whiled the day
away at the Misericordia volcano observatory playing pusoy dos—Filipino poker—with Alex the
volcano observer, who cleaned them out.
But Alex was in big trouble when the NPA found out. Not only had he fraternized with the
enemy, his gambling was setting a bad example. Word reached the observatory before peoples’
justice could be administered, and Alex was temporarily assigned to the central office in Quezon
City until things cooled off.
We were often asked if working on Mayon was not dangerous because of the NPA. But we
also behaved ‘like fish in the sea of fish’; we respected and were friendly with the local folk. We
paid our bearers and other casual laborers well, and shared our lunches with them. Besides,
because Mayon was the NPA stronghold and sanctuary, they liked having scientists around to
monitor the volcanic activity closely. And so they mostly left us alone.
The local people warned us not to accommodate hitch-hiking soldiers, because that would
make our driver a target for ambush. So we learned to fill any remaining space in our vehicle
with empty cardboard boxes, smile apologetically at soldiers thumbing rides, pointing back at the
filled rear while we kept going.
At last, Tevfik Arguden had direct contact with the NPA in 1989, late in our work, when he
was working alone on Mayon, finishing his dissertation research on how hot and cold lahars
behave differently. He finally convinced the local air force commander to schedule a helicopter
overflight ten days in advance. Well before the flight, he had night visitors.
 “We hear you are going to be flying over the volcano.” Polite as ever, they interrogated him
closely about the flight; the need for it; whether the helicopter would be armed. They must have
been convinced that the flight was not a threat to them, because it happened without incident.
Clearly, however, NPA intelligence extended into the general’s office.

Getting to know Public Works and Highways

We never attended NPA education sessions, but they taught the local people about “three evil
isms”: Feudalism, Imperialism, and Bureaucratic Capitalism. Feudalism, of course, is a lasting
Prehispanic social ill, perpetuated on the Spanish haciendas. Imperialism was brought by the
Spaniards, who handed the country over to the Americans, who lost it temporarily to the
Japanese during World War II. After the war, the United States granted Philippine independence,
but American colonialism remained in large American military bases and economic domination.
But my favorite NPA “ism” was “Bureaucratic Capitalism”, the corrupt connivance between
government officials and their cronies in private business in constructing expensive and flimsy
infrastructure. This was very well developed in what was then the Ministry of Public Works and
Highways. After People Power in 1986, it reverted back to a Department, but the corruption
survived vigorously after the name change. Indeed, during the administration of Benigno
Aquino Jr., it was actually formalized into the “Public-Private Program”.
My introduction to MPWH came early in our work. We needed solid data about lahars and
their sizes. Having learned the specific date when lahars had come down Basud and Matanag
channels, it occurred to us that the local MPWH headquarters afterwards must have had to clear
the roads and highways; surely, they had records of how many truckloads of debris they had
moved. The Matanag lahars had crossed two roads; comparing how much was cleared from each
site would be especially valuable. And so we visited the local MPWH office.
We were unprepared for the stifled horror and panic of the head engineer when we asked for
the data. He served us coffee, but no data.
Why did he not want to share their data? Had they been charging for more fuel, for more
truckloads allegedly transported? Whole phantom bulldozers, copiously fueled? For illegally
using equipment on private projects? Who can tell, without honest records?
At Mayon and elsewhere, the greatest corruption is not in clearing highways of landslides
and lahars, but in building shoddy highways and expensive, useless structures to contain hazards.
So, early on, we got to share the wide public recognition of Public Works as the most corrupt of
government offices. That assessment may not be fair to DPWH, without detailed comparison to
Customs, or Immigration, or the Armed Forces. But if a kurakot at kupit tournament were to be
held between Government agencies, I know which rooster I’d back.
 The word kurakot, catching nastily in the throat, loosely means government corruption,
“plunder” in Philippine legalese, the crime for which two former presidents were imprisoned. In
my youth they called it “graft and corruption”. Accused of such back then in the 1960s, a
famous Visayan politician once responded, bewilderedly, “But what are we in power for?”
Kupit is more petty, but also more widespread; for example, cement is filched from a flood-
control project, all the way from the budget manipulator at the top down to the foreman taking
home a couple of bags, and the casual laborer who steals a few kilos to fix his hut. The
cumulative effect is to build the dikes weakly, even to fatal effect. But money will be allocated
for repairs next year, and so the games of kurakot and kupit go on forever.
Even worse is the unwillingness of the engineers to learn anything about the lahars that they
engineer against. The government engineers had been trained to build against water floods, and
to ostensibly contain lahars, they built dikes hardly suitable for water floods. When they fail,
they simply build them again; the game goes on; nothing changes.
The engineering on Mayon ignores her simplest, most fundamental behavior: her beautiful
symmetry is not static and unchanging, it is maintained actively, preserved by constantly shifting
which part of her cone she builds. How else could she remain symmetric? Unlike rivers on
floodplains that dikes can contain in fairly permanent positions, every channel draining Mayon
becomes obsolete sooner or later, and to assume otherwise is folly. Rather than spending money
on dikes, it would be more efficient to clear the roads wherever lahars bury them. But there is
more kurakot to be made on dikes…
Early in our work, we saw graphic evidence of the futility of the dike building. The map on
page [6] shows remnants of broken dikes on either side of Bonga channel that were built before
the 1984 eruption, to protect barangays Bonga and Matanag from lahars. When the eruption
deposited the large Bonga Pyroclastic fan, of course, everything was drastically changed. Bonga
channel became inactive, replaced by new Mabinit and Matanag channels respectively draining
lahars off the western and eastern edges of the fan. Parts of the Bonga dikes were broken and
useless; the parts of the dike that survived were no longer containing an active channel.
The greatest mistake in trying to contain lahars as if they are water floods is that they are so
much more powerful.
Over the years, things got pretty nasty between the local DPWH office and me. More than
once, they threatened to sue me for saying their dikes were expensive and useless. But the dike-
building and kurakot went on for years, long after my work on Mayon was done. And over the
years, more and more people built their houses behind the dikes, believing in the security they
falsely offered.
Then Supertyphoon Reming hit Mayon in 2006.
 Reming

The typhoon was first detected as a tropical disturbance in the western Pacific on November 24
and matured into a tropical storm by the 26th. By the 28th it had strengthened into a typhoon that
was given the international name of Durian. It entered the Philippine Area of responsibility early
on the 28th and was named Reming by PAGASA, the Philippine meteorological agency. Reming
rapidly intensified into a Category 4 Supertyphoon by the 29th and made landfall at 8am local
time on the 30th, packing sustained winds of 190 kilometers per hour.
In the 18 hours between 6 pm on the 29th to noon on the 30th of November, 2006, Reming
delivered almost half a meter of rain to the Legazpi airport, at rates as high as 47.5 millimeters
per hour. By itself, that number doesn’t mean much, but you can’t drive in such a deluge
because even if your wipers are working at top speed, the rain instantly blurs your windshield
between each swipe.
Doubtless, rain was hitting the volcano slopes even more strongly. The Reming winds
blowing over the tropical ocean toward the volcano were as warm and humid as they possibly
could be. Hitting the volcano, they were forced to rise. The atmosphere everywhere gets cooler
with height above the Earth’s surface, and so as the Reming winds rapidly rose and cooled, their
water vapor was condensed quickly into torrents of fiercely driving rain that battered the volcano
slopes, churning its pyroclastic deposits into great volumes of slurry that flowed down the slopes
and its ravines like concrete pouring out of gargantuan delivery trucks.
In the late 1980s, Tevfik Arguden and I had determined how quickly and for how long rain
must fall on the pyroclastic fans to trigger lahars. Common sense: To trigger lahars, rain must
not only fall strongly, it must also last long enough; and furthermore, the stronger the rain falls,
the less time it needs to last before the lahars start to flow. With great hardship and expense, we
established and occupied rain-gauging stations high up on the fans, marked as red triangles on
the map of Page [6]. We were able to establish every given combination of intensity and duration
that would trigger Mayon lahars.
Our data showed that the rains up there typically fall twice, as fast -- and once five times as
strongly -- as at the Legazpi airport, and so monitoring the rain there would be useless for
anticipating lahars. Had permanent rain gauges been established on the fans to radio warnings
down to the towns when lahars were imminent, they would have saved many lives at a small
fraction of the money spent on building and repairing a single dike. Sayang, as Filipinos say,
what a pity, if only…
The combined intensity and duration of the Reming rain even at the rates they fell at the
Legaspi City airport, was much greater than necessary to unleash lahars,.
Engielle Paguican, a petite and very energetic young geologist, led our forensic fieldwork to
evaluate the Durian catastrophe. Much of the work consisted in mapping out the extents of the
lahar deposits, and evaluating where and to what extents the lahar dikes were breached. Unlike
much geologic field work, however, forensic analysis after a disaster involves hearing the heart-
wrenching stories of the survivors, of a mother forced to let go of and sacrifice one child to a
lahar in order to hang onto and save another, of old parents buried and never recovered.…
Engielle published our findings in 2007 in the Bulletin of Volcanology. Six communities
were hardest hit by the lahars, including the four on the southeastern and flanks of the volcano
that we had concentrated our studies on in the 1980s.

The first lahars may have already been flowing early on 30 November, but the killer debris
flows all formed and descended almost simultaneously, arriving to wreak their havoc at about 2
in the afternoon. They overtopped river bends and easily breached six dikes that were built
much too weakly to even contain rainstorm floods.
Even without overtopping, concrete armor only a few centimeters thick, with minimal
cement and without reinforcing steel rods, cannot withstand the impact of boulders rafted by
lahars, or even logs flung against it by storm floods.
Stampeding though the broken dikes, they cut new paths through rice fields, coconut groves,
and villages. Most of the 1,266 recorded fatalities were people who chose to stay in their homes
behind the dikes, lulled by the security falsely promised by their builders.
Government apologists for the failed dikes argued that the Durian/Reming event was
exceptional. But containment structures must be built to withstand worst-case events.
And no one, no government agency, was ever held accountable for the deaths toward which
the bad dikes had contributed.
While we were in the field studying the disaster, DPWH bulldozers were already pushing
lahar debris into mounds for new dikes, doubtlessly to be armored as weakly as before.
For there was contractor money to be made, and kurakot to be collected.