PEREIRA/CALI: The death toll from Colombia’s powerful earthquake rose to 254 on Tuesday as rescuers raced against time to pull survivors from collapsed buildings across the country’s western region.
The 7.4-magnitude quake, the most devastating to strike Colombia this century, tore through its coffee-growing heartland early on Monday, leaving apartment blocks, homes, schools and health centres cracked, leaning or flattened.
Separate reports from affected cities put the death toll at 254 on Tuesday morning, with 101 people killed in Pereira, deep in coffee country, and 95 in Cali, the country’s third-biggest city.
Many Indigenous communities in the forested Pacific-facing region of Choco close to the quake epicentre are still without power or basic services, complicating rescue efforts.
The earthquake struck just days after the inauguration of new President Abelardo De La Espriella, who travelled to the affected regions and promised economic support to people who lost their homes.
The National Coffee Federation was working on the ground with families to assess damage to farms and rural infrastructure, its chief German Bahamon said on social media.
Meanwhile, rescuers worked through Monday night and Tuesday with cranes, excavators and their bare hands, creating human chains and passing buckets filled with debris as they searched for people still trapped.
Nightmare scenes
Rosa Gonzalez described how she escaped the guest house she ran in Pereira with her husband and 10-month-old baby.
“The structure started creaking and just as we ran outside the building collapsed,” she said, speaking to Reuters as she stroked her cat, who was rescued during the night.
She said that out of a couple of dozen people inside the house eight had made it out alive. An elderly man was trapped on a terrace, and she feared he may be among the dead.
Social media influencer Jose Gallego had just arrived at Pereira airport when the earthquake struck. He was recording a live video, capturing footage of violent shaking as he crouched under a table and parts of the ceiling fell.
“There were people injured, bleeding, screaming and trying to reach their families,” he said. Gallego was unable to sleep and said he was staying in open spaces in case of aftershocks. Nearly 100 aftershocks had been recorded as of early Tuesday morning.
“I crossed the city on foot; it took two hours and the scenes were devastating,” he told Reuters. “It was like a nightmare come to life.”
Thousands of people were left homeless as the earthquake brought down residential complexes and left deep cracks in others. Families were waiting for local authorities to assess whether the buildings were safe to re-enter.
Dog and cat shelters also put out calls for food, medicine and helping hands.
Cheers for rescues
In Cali, residents cooked on the streets and salvaged what they could from the wreckage.
Rescue workers, civilian volunteers and local officials gathered outside the destroyed Torres del Limonar apartment complex, once a pair of multi-storey towers in a genteel, tree-lined neighbourhood. Crowds cheered as rescuers pulled a woman alive from the rubble and she was taken away on a stretcher.
Others were less fortunate. Cali’s public health secretary German Escobar said the city’s morgue was now full and authorities were bringing more bodies off the streets.
The earthquake also knocked out vital infrastructure. Civil aviation authorities closed six airports — Quibdo, Pereira, Manizales, Armenia, Cartago and Buenaventura — due to damage, while dozens of roads were reported to be affected.
Electricity, water, healthcare and phone service remained disrupted in several areas, especially in Choco.
“The physical damages at the moment are unquantifiable,” Choco governor Nubia Cordoba told local TV.
The US said it had allocated $15.5 million for emergency shelter, food, protection and damage assessments, while the Inter-American Development Bank said it had made $50 million immediately available for reconstruction support if requested.
UN representatives said they were working to increase ground presence in the coffee-growing region and had stockpiles of food ready to help people made homeless.
With communications still patchy in some of the worst-hit areas, officials said the full extent of the damage and the final death toll could take days to establish.
