Searchers race to find quake survivors under building rubble
Colombian volunteers and rescuers have been sifting through rubble with bare hands and buckets into Monday evening, hunting for survivors after the huge quake in the country’s west that left at least 111 people dead.
Colombia’s new president, Abelardo de la Espriella, declared a state of emergency and vowed a concerted rescue effort.
In the city of Cali, volunteers quickly went to work with picks, basic tools and their own hands to try to find survivors.
Andres Felipe Mejia was among those who joined a make-shift crew, telling Agence France-Presse:
We are trying to get everyone out alive. One of the rescuers asked anyone trapped to whistle, and someone whistled back.
“They pulled out a man and a baby, but the wife is still in there,” he said near a collapsed multi-story building.
Rescuers work at the site of a collapsed building in Cali, western Colombia, on Monday evening. Photograph: Sergio Acero/Reuters
Rescuers formed human chains to remove bricks and masonry, stopping every few minutes to listen for signs of life from those trapped below.
Mejia said:
A lot of people have come, with supplies, with food, helping the firefighters, helping the people.
Hospitals in five Colombian cities were put on red alert on Monday and a nighttime curfew was declared in Cali, according to local authorities. At least six local airports suspended operations, the civil aeronautics agency said.
The quake was felt across Colombia including Bogotá, the capital, where crowds of people rushed out into the street in their pyjamas.
More reports are emerging of the chaotic scenes that followed the earthquake that struck several cities across Colombia’s picturesque coffee region and Pacific, sending panicked residents on to the streets and damaging at least 1,500 buildings.
“People ran out naked, people jumped from the second floor of their homes” Wilmer Cuesta, a law student in Quibdo, told Agence France-Presse, recounting violent shaking.
An aerial photograph of civilians searching through rubble of a building destroyed in Quibdo. Photograph: Jean Arriaga/EPA
Dentist Julian Pena was at home in Quibdo when he felt “very, very strong” shaking.
“People were praying in the street. It was overwhelming,” he told AFP. “I ran outside carrying nothing and found hundreds of people there.”
There are many buildings with gaps, with cracks. There are others that have completely collapsed.
There were scenes of destruction in several cities, with furniture and fabrics sandwiched between concrete, walls and floors tossed into irregular angles, and cabling strewn across roads.
Here are some of the latest images coming in from western Colombia as searches continue through the rubble of damaged buildings after the 7.4-magnitude earthquake – the country’s strongest recorded this century.
People and rescuers search for victims amid debris of a collapsed seven-story building at Plaza Bolivar in Pereira, Colombia. Photograph: Gabriel Aponte/Getty Images
Rubble is moved amid the search at Plaza Bolivar. Photograph: Gabriel Aponte/Getty Images
People raise their fists to call for silence to locate victims at the site of a collapsed building in Cali. Photograph: Sergio Acero/Reuters
Rescuers at work in Cali. Photograph: Sergio Acero/Reuters
Damaged homes in Pereira, where mayor Mauricio Salazar on Monday declared a curfew in areas from 6pm to 5am ‘to protect the city’s businesses’. Photograph: Leonardo Castaneda/EPA
People distribute packs of bottled water in Cali. Photograph: Sergio Acero/Reuters
People remove a refrigerator from a damaged home in Pereira. Photograph: Leonardo Castaneda/EPA
Colombian president says aid allocated to quake victims
Colombia’s president says the national government “stands with the people of Chocó” and that “immediate economic resources and humanitarian aid have already been allocated to support the more than 1,400 affected families and individuals”.
Abelardo de la Espriella – facing his first major crisis as president – also said on X that injured people and those requiring priority medical attention were being transferred to Medellín “with all available hospital capacity”.
His post said (in a translation):
Additionally, temporary rental subsidies will be implemented for families whose homes were damaged.
Our priority is and will continue to be the lives and well-being of the affected communities.
De la Espriella finished his post:
¡Firme por la Patria!” (Steadfast for the Homeland)
New president Abelardo de la Espriella (C) at a meeting with the armed forces on Monday after the 7.4-magnitude quake. Photograph: Colombian presidency/AFP/Getty Images
The US has announced $15.5m in earthquake aid for Colombia and said it is ready to support the new president’s response.
The state department said on social media the funding would go to “emergency shelter, food, protection and earthquake assessments”.
The post said:
We are united in prayer with the Colombian people and stand ready to support President [Abelardo de la Espriella] and his government as they assess the needs on the ground.
At the weekend the state department announced the Trump administration would provide $1bn in security assistance to the government of the new rightwing president, who used his inaugural speech to pledge a fight against drug trafficking as well as austerity measures to restore economic confidence.
Further to the last post: Mauricio Andrade, a firefighter in Colombia’s third-largest city of Cali, said his team had rescued two adult women and two children from a collapsed building.
As he spoke, his team was preparing to rescue more people from the rubble.
“They are alive,” he told Reuters. “We are making space so we can free them and get them out.”
Juan Carlos Osorio told Caracol Television that the collapse of one building “sounded like a bomb”, as he helped remove debris from a collapsed structure in Cali.
All of us neighbours are working together, forming human chains. We need heavy equipment. There are many people trapped.
Reports from Chocó, near the epicentre of the quake, have been slowed by communications outages, with some areas still lacking mobile phone service hours after the earthquake.
Governor Nubia Carolina Cordoba said 12 people had been killed and 84 injured in the largely rural area.
The quake’s heaviest casualties appeared to be concentrated in Risaralda, part of Colombia’s coffee-growing region. Pereira, the department’s capital, suffered extensive damage, with rescue workers continuing to search collapsed buildings for survivors.
A four-story building crumbled in Pereira during the quake, according to Reuters-verified video, while footage from Manizales showed one of the side towers of the city’s landmark neo-Gothic cathedral collapsing and scattering debris onto nearby streets.
Residents in Pereira dig through the debris of a collapsed building after the quake. Photograph: Juan David Duque/Reuters
Reuters footage showed rescue workers, police and volunteers shovelling debris by hand and loading rubble into trucks as they searched for trapped survivors. Other footage showed damage to residential towers and emergency-service facilities, with debris crashing onto ambulances parked below.
Colombia’s Pacific region around the epicentre of the earthquake lies along the Ring of Fire, the line of seismic faults encircling the Pacific Ocean where most of the world’s quakes occur.
The Pacific, particularly the Chocó region where the quake hit, is one of Colombia’s poorest and is nestled in dense jungle. Much of the region is reachable only by boat or plane, which may pose a problem for authorities in assessing the wider toll, as the AP reports.
Northwestern University seismologist Suzan van der Lee said the quake’s powerful magnitude, inland location and strike-slip motion may have amplified damage in populated valleys despite its considerable depth.
“This one was far below the crust, and in theory it shouldn’t cause as much shaking,” she said, quoted by Reuters. “At this magnitude, it did actually cause a lot of shaking.”
The Colombia earthquake has left many people trapped under the debris of damaged buildings as their loved ones and rescue workers search through the rubble.
Search teams and civilians picked through the remains of destroyed buildings in the country’s third-largest city, Cali, passing large pieces of concrete and other rubble down a long line of volunteers.
“Our building has basically been left in ruins, and the building next to ours? Completely collapsed,” said Álvaro López, who cradled his dog as he watched the search.
Residents digging through the debris of a collapsed building in Cali. Photograph: Christian EscobarMora/Reuters
The desperate scene recalled the searches still ongoing in neighbouring Venezuela weeks after that country was devastated by back-to-back quakes in June, the Associated Press reports.
Besides Cali, the quake-ravaged cities across western Colombia including Pereira, Quibdo and Manizales and was felt in neighboring Ecuador and Panama.
At least 111 have died and 87 people injured after dozens of buildings collapsed following a 7.4 magnitude earthquake that struck western Colombia on Monday morning – the largest to hit the country so far this century. After declaring a state of national disaster, Colombia’s new president, Abelardo de la Espriella, said in an address to the nation that his government had deployed all of its capabilities “to protect lives, assist affected communities and deliver aid wherever it is needed”. “The first priority is rescuing the people trapped under the rubble,” he said after around 1,600 buildings had been damaged, including at least 61 that completely collapsed.
The president declared an emergency to expedite funding for the quake recovery while saying he would visit the disaster zone. “We aren’t going to leave people alone. They are in our hearts and we are going to tend to people with our full determination,” he said.
The quake hit the remote Chocó region around 7.30am local time on Monday morning and was felt as far as the capital Bogotá (250 miles away), as well as neighbouring countries Ecuador, Venezuela and Panama. The epicentre was in San Jose Del Palmar, a community of about 4,800 people, and the initial quake was followed by two 2.8 and 4.8 magnitude aftershocks.
Local officials confirmed deaths across several regions, including the coffee region of Risaralda and in Valle del Cauca, while rescue teams race to free people trapped under debris of collapsed buildings. Among the worst-hit areas was the city of Pereira, where at least 40 people have been killed, according to the mayor. In the department of Chocó, at least 12 people were killed, according to the local governor there, and at least 27 deaths have been reported in the neighbouring Valle del Cauca department, including at least three children and including 15 people in Cali, Colombia’s third-largest city.
The United States and countries across Europe and Latin America offered support. The Trump administration is “closely monitoring” the earthquake, US secretary of state Marco Rubio said earlier, adding that Washington “stands ready to support” the people and the pro-Trump government. Other countries including Ecuador, France, Mexico and Brazil also offered support.
It all comes less than two months after two earthquakes devastated parts of Venezuela, killing more than 6,100 people.