When Julio Cesar Largo’s daughter failed to show up for her son’s birthday celebration, his worst fears took hold.
On the same day, a powerful earthquake had ripped through a large part of Colombia. The 7.4-magnitude quake struck on Monday, the strongest the South American country has seen in decades. At least 250 people have been killed, with many more injured or still missing.
Largo hoped his daughter, 32-year-old Daniela, had simply been delayed on the bus ride home to Riosucio, a town in Caldas province in western Colombia. But as the hours dragged on and her phone stayed silent, dread gave way to certainty.
“I knew something had happened to her,” the woman’s father said.
Largo and his wife began searching for the missing woman with a poster bearing her photograph. People who saw it told them they had seen Daniela on the morning of the earthquake.
“We came looking for her when she didn’t arrive at our house, on the very day her son was turning 12,” he told Reuters. Instead, Daniela spent nearly 38 hours trapped beneath slabs of concrete after the four-storey building she was in pancaked to the ground. Rescuers found her almost by accident while searching for another man who, as of yesterday morning, was still believed to be under the rubble. Freeing her took 10 gruelling hours. Dozens of rescue specialists and around 50 volunteers worked to reach Daniela, whose arm was pinned by a metal door.
When she finally emerged alive on a stretcher and was lifted into an ambulance headed to San Jorge Hospital, the crowd around the site erupted in cheers and applause.
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