CALI, Colombia — A magnitude 7.4 earthquake struck Colombia on Monday, killing at least 224 people and leaving thousands missing as rescue teams worked through rubble in the hardest-hit areas. The disaster forced the evacuation of multiple health facilities across Cali, the country's third-largest city, and set off a desperate search for survivors in collapsed buildings.
One of the gravest situations unfolded at a Cali hospital where one wing partially collapsed, trapping patients inside. Hospital director Irene Torres Castro told Caracol Television that roughly 600 patients had to be treated on a street covered in rubble while staff worked to reach those still inside. Medical workers carried patients on stretchers through debris-filled corridors and relocated them to outdoor areas after the building was deemed unsafe.
Public health officials declared a health emergency in the city, citing the evacuation of four separate health facilities. At least 22 patients in critical condition required urgent transfers to institutions outside the immediate area, officials said. Structural damage and the volume of casualties placed an immediate strain on the region's medical capacity.
Families gathered outside the collapsed hospital wing waiting for word on relatives. Carmen Yasmin Garcia, 43, a Cali resident who joined volunteer rescue teams, said her group pulled seven people alive from the rubble. She and others worked alongside official emergency services as the search continued into the night.
Officials confirmed people remained trapped inside at least one residential building in addition to the hospital, with a rescue operation ongoing. The scale of the collapse and the number of missing made it one of the deadliest natural disasters to hit Colombia in recent memory.
The earthquake sent tremors across a wide area of western Colombia. Cali, a city of roughly 2.2 million people, sits in an active corridor along the Andes. The region has experienced destructive earthquakes before, but the combination of magnitude and depth brought down structures in multiple neighborhoods simultaneously.
Local authorities scrambled to triage the injured and identify the dead as the official toll climbed. The figure of 224 confirmed deaths came from officials, who cautioned the number was expected to rise as rescue teams reached areas where communication had been cut. Thousands of people remained unaccounted for across the affected zone.
Hospital workers continued operating under damaged infrastructure, treating patients in parking areas and on sidewalks while engineers assessed whether any part of the facility could safely be reoccupied. Torres Castro said staff worked through the night to keep critical patients alive outside the building.
The government deployed emergency personnel and military units to assist with search and rescue. Officials gave no timeline for when the operation to reach trapped survivors might conclude, citing the extent of structural damage and the difficulty of safely removing rubble without causing further collapses.
