Two Americans WARNED That Peru's Highest Mountain Would Bury a Town (Peru Threatened Them Instead)

At twenty past three on Sunday the thirty-first of May, 1970, a slab of rock and ice about 800 metres wide still hung from the west face of Huascarán, the highest mountain in Peru. Eight years earlier, two young American climbers had looked at that slab and come down with a warning: if it ever broke loose, big enough and fast enough, it could jump the ridge that protected the town below and bury Yungay. Peru's authorities called their warning outlandish, threatened anyone who repeated it, and, by one of the climbers' own account, told them to retract it or go to prison. This is the full story of the 1970 Huascarán avalanche: the 1962 warning in a Lima newspaper, the official expert who said Yungay was safe behind its ridge, the Ancash earthquake that shook the mountain at 3:23 p.m., and the few minutes in which ice, rock and mud came down on the town. We follow the children at the travelling circus by the football ground, the clown who, by one account, shouted the warning at the gate, the handful of people who reached Cemetery Hill, and the long argument over how many died, from the often repeated twenty thousand to census-based estimates near six thousand. Have you heard of Yungay before today? Was it nature, or was it the men who silenced the warning? Tell us in the comments, and if your family lived through an earthquake, a flood or an avalanche, share their story. Those memories deserve to be kept. Subscribe for more disasters history keeps forgetting, told from the warning to the last minute. Today, old Yungay is a national cemetery where nobody may dig. A white statue of Christ stands on the cemetery hill, crosses mark where houses stood, and the tops of four palm trees rise from the ground where the plaza used to be. Peru built a national civil defence system less than two years later, so that the next warning would have somewhere to go. The question Yungay leaves us with is not whether the warning will come. It is whether anyone will be allowed to say it out loud. #Yungay #Huascaran #Peru1970 #AvalancheDisaster #DisasterDocumentary