At least 111 people were killed after a powerful earthquake struck western Colombia yesterday, toppling buildings across several cities, damaging hospitals and infrastructure and trapping people beneath the rubble in what authorities called the country’s strongest earthquake of the century.
The quake struck just days after Abelardo De La Espriella was sworn in as president, thrusting the new administration into its first major crisis, with memories still fresh of devastating twin earthquakes in neighbouring Venezuela in June.
“The national government has all of its capabilities deployed to protect lives, assist affected communities and deliver aid wherever it is needed,” he said in a national address around 1pm local time, upon declaring a national state of emergency.
De La Espriella said preliminary reports indicated 111 dead and 87 injured, along with dozens of collapsed buildings and damaged homes.
The US Geological Survey said the 7.4 magnitude quake struck at a depth of 107km. Colombia’s geological service said it was the strongest earthquake recorded in the country in the 21st century.
Reports from Choco, near the epicentre, were slowed by communications outages, with some areas still lacking cellphone service hours after the earthquake. Governor Nubia Carolina Cordoba said 12 people had been killed and 84 injured in the largely rural area.
The heaviest casualties appeared 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, 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.
Reuters footage showed rescue workers, police and volunteers shoveling debris by hand and loading rubble into trucks as they searched for survivors trapped beneath collapsed buildings. Other footage showed damage to residential towers and emergency-service facilities, with debris crashing onto ambulances parked below.
Mauricio Andrade, a fireman in Cali, said his team had rescued two adult women and two children from a collapsed building. .
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.
Colombia’s civil aviation authority suspended operations at several airports in the country’s west, including Pereira, Manizales, Quibdo, Armenia, Cartago and Buenaventura, while engineers carried out structural inspections.
The Colombian Geological Service said 21 aftershocks had been recorded later till yesterday and warned that additional tremors were likely.
Colombia’s coffee region was devastated by a magnitude 6.2 earthquake in 1999 that killed more than 1,000 people, particularly around Armenia and Pereira.
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