Colombia earthquake death toll rises to 331, with 240 still missing

Colombia’s National Unit for Disaster Risk Management raised the death toll from the 10 August earthquake to 331 on Tuesday, two weeks after a magnitude 7.4 shock tore through the country’s coffee belt and Pacific west.

The UNGRD said 240 people remain missing, 4,449 were injured and 364 have been pulled out alive. It registered 406,273 people from 188,034 families as affected across 494 municipalities in 16 of Colombia’s 32 departments. The agency counted 33,275 homes destroyed and 185,889 damaged. Health centres hit number 376. Schools and other education sites number 3,819. Community buildings number 4,337.

The quake struck at 7:34 a.m. local time on 10 August near San José del Palmar in Chocó. Colombia’s Geological Service and the U.S. Geological Survey put the depth near 107 to 110 kilometres. Depth usually softens shaking. This one still flattened apartment blocks in Pereira and Cali, cracked hospitals and dropped a tower from Manizales Cathedral. It is the strongest earthquake recorded in Colombia this century.

Early city tallies told the same story in two urban centres. Pereira, in the coffee axis, and Cali, the country’s third-largest city, accounted for most of the first 250 deaths. Rescue crews spent the first nights shouting for silence so they could hear people under concrete. A boy trapped under a bakery in Pereira was one of the cases local television followed in real time.

President Abelardo de la Espriella declared an economic, social and ecological emergency to speed spending. On 18 August he put first-pass damage at $9.5 billion and announced a reconstruction vehicle he called the Miracle Fund. The International Organization for Migration has said more than 282,000 people needed shelter, water or other help. United Nations teams remain in the affected departments.

Tuesday’s two-death increase looks small next to the first week. It is the kind of revision that follows when hospitals record late fatalities and families stop hoping for the missing. Two hundred and forty names are still on that list. In a quake this deep and this wide, some of those people will not be found intact. The housing numbers are the longer shock. Thirty-three thousand destroyed homes and nearly 186,000 damaged ones mean a reconstruction job that will outlast the emergency decrees.

Western Colombia sits where the Nazca plate dives under South America. People there already know how the ground moves. What they did not have, on the morning of 10 August, was enough steel and inspection in the buildings that came down in Pereira and Cali. The UNGRD list of wrecked clinics and schools is the part of the tally that will shape the next rainy season, when temporary classrooms and field hospitals become the default.

Health and school damage will set the pace of recovery more than the headline death toll. Three hundred and seventy-six clinics and hospitals cannot be replaced with tents once rainy-season infections start. Nearly 3,800 education sites mean students in double shifts or in rooms that still have cracked beams. Earlier UNGRD lists also counted five airports, 118 aqueducts and dozens of road and foot bridges. Those figures explain why inland towns that did not lose a skyline still cannot move food or patients.

Cali and Pereira will dominate the political argument because that is where cameras found the collapsed apartment blocks. Chocó, where the epicentre sat, is poorer and less visible. San José del Palmar is a small municipality on a steep Pacific slope. Damage there is harder to count and slower to repair. The emergency decree helps the state write cheques. It does not decide which department gets steel first.

The government has not published a department-by-department rebuild timetable tied to the $9.5 billion figure. Until it does, the 331 dead, the 240 missing and the 406,000 registered as affected are the only numbers that have official weight. They will move again. In events of this size they always do.