A Letter from the Publisher

By John A. Meyer

When Nevado del Ruiz, the Colombian volcano, blew up last week after 400 years of dormancy, the news did not take long to reach B. William Mader, TIME's deputy chief of correspondents. Already up and around at 6 a.m. in his New York City apartment, Mader dispatched Caribbean Bureau Chief Bernard Diederich to Colombia, then quickly ascertained that TIME's Tom Quinn, who works out of Bogota, was already on the story. As the death toll mounted, Mader decided to send Rio de Janeiro Bureau Chief Gavin Scott, who was covering Halley's comet, to Bogota to join the TIME team. Unlike Mexico City immediately after its earthquake, Bogota had a functioning airport and telex and telephone lines were intact. Still, to get to the Nevado del Ruiz area, Diederich had to hitch a ride on a Colombian helicopter carrying fuel to the disaster area.

Mader, who coordinates TIME's foreign coverage, is an expert at getting reporters in and out of hot spots. In the past five years he has staffed situations as formidable as the Falklands war, the invasion of Lebanon and the hijacking of the Achille Lauro. Says Mader, a veteran State Department and European correspondent: "Although the initial indications were that only 40 or 50 people were dead in Colombia, I sensed a potential calamity and a major story, possibly even a crash cover."

Mader's instincts were on target. On Friday morning, Managing Editor Jason McManus decided to put the Colombian disaster on the magazine's cover. World Senior Editor Henry Muller quickly mustered a team of editors, writers and reporter-researchers to deal with the mass of information. Says Muller: "Each hour we got a better idea of the extent of the tragedy. We tore up the World section and changed the whole direction of the week's effort."

Associate Editor George Russell, who wrote the cover story, served as Buenos Aires bureau chief for TIME from 1979 to 1981 and covered Colombia, although he never visited Nevado del Ruiz. Says he: "Colombia is a beautiful, untamed country, where violence lurks around every corner. This week's violence, though, was of a completely different order."

To illustrate the story, TIME flew four photographers to the scene. By late Friday they had sent much of their film by commercial and chartered jets to New York City. On Saturday at 3 a.m., Deputy Picture Editor Michele Stephenson began the process of examining the 50 photographic rolls. The cover picture was selected at 4:45 a.m. Says Stephenson: "We worked on layouts through the night. The images were devastating."

John A. Meyer