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AMERICANALMANAC (Charles McAdams) - Colombia earthquake death toll passes 224 as rescuers race to find survivors Wed Aug 12 17:49:52 2026

A 7.4-magnitude earthquake has killed more than 224 people in western Colombia, and rescue crews are still pulling survivors from collapsed buildings as the death toll climbs. The quake struck Tuesday, August 11, with an epicenter roughly three miles east of the small town of San José del Palmar, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. […] The post Colombia earthquake death toll passes 224 as rescuers race to find survivors appeared first on American Almanac .

A 7.4-magnitude earthquake has killed more than 224 people in western Colombia, and rescue crews are still pulling survivors from collapsed buildings as the death toll climbs. The quake struck Tuesday, August 11, with an epicenter roughly three miles east of the small town of San José del Palmar, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Colombian authorities in Bogota reported the overall death toll by Wednesday morning. The Colombian Geological Survey called it the strongest earthquake recorded in the country in a decade, powerful enough to be felt across neighboring Venezuela, Ecuador, and Panama. Cali, a city of more than 2.2 million in the Valle del Cauca region, bore the worst of it. Mayor Alejandro Eder reported on social media Tuesday that at least 95 people had been killed in Cali alone, nearly half the national toll at the time. The Pereira area was also among the hardest-hit zones. Power, cell phone, and internet outages compounded the chaos across affected regions, cutting off communication for residents and complicating coordination for emergency teams. President Abelardo de la Espriella declared a national emergency and his government issued an appeal for humanitarian aid. What form that aid might take, and which nations or organizations have responded, remains unclear. Hundreds dig through rubble near Cali health center By Tuesday afternoon, hundreds of rescue workers and volunteers were digging through the wreckage of a collapsed department building in a residential area south of Cali, near the Clinica Colombia health center. People were feared buried inside. The Colombian army's Third Brigade posted on X that it had deployed "a canine team, a thermal-capable drone and specialized equipment" to the Cali area to assist the search. The scale of the disaster recalls earlier reports from the same earthquake , when the confirmed death toll stood above 110 and the full picture of destruction was only beginning to emerge. That number has now more than doubled. Colombia's National Unit for Disaster Risk Management released video of ongoing operations in the Choco region and posted a message to X describing the urgency of the effort. The agency told the public : "In a race against the clock, supported by canines, physical and technological search, these men and women are searching for people alive." Rescue operations continued through Wednesday morning. The Torres de Limonar building in Cali was one of the sites where search-and-rescue teams concentrated their work. How many structures collapsed across the affected regions, and how many people remain unaccounted for, has not been disclosed. Four pulled alive as Cali's mayor pleads for time Amid the grim toll, there were moments of hope. Mayor Eder posted again Tuesday night, reporting that four people had been rescued alive in Cali that day. Eder wrote: "Every minute counts in this race to save lives. Today we rescued four people alive and continue working with all our capabilities to find more citizens." Four survivors out of at least 95 dead in a single city. The math is brutal, and the window for finding more people alive narrows with every passing hour. When initial reports of the quake surfaced , the death count stood in the dozens. The trajectory since then, from dozens to more than a hundred to now past 224, suggests the final number could climb further, particularly if the collapsed structures in Cali yield more victims. President de la Espriella also posted to X on Tuesday, marking the rescue of a woman who had been trapped under rubble. Her condition was not disclosed. De la Espriella wrote: "We trust in God and in the tireless work of our rescue teams so that more Colombians may be found alive and can return to the arms of their families." Open questions outnumber answers For all the official statements, basic questions remain unanswered. No total injury count has been released. The extent and duration of the power and communications outages have not been specified. Whether any international governments have responded to Colombia's humanitarian aid appeal is unknown from available official statements. The Colombian Geological Survey's description of this quake as the worst in a decade puts it in stark context, though the agency did not identify which prior earthquake it was measuring against. Earthquakes of this magnitude in densely populated areas of Latin America have repeatedly exposed the consequences of aging infrastructure and insufficient building codes, a pattern visible in recent earthquake casualties in Venezuela , where government-built housing crumbled under similar forces. Cali's size, more than 2.2 million residents, means even a localized collapse in a residential district can bury dozens. The department building near Clinica Colombia appears to be one such site, with an unknown number of people still feared trapped inside as of Wednesday morning. Major earthquakes across the region have shown a consistent pattern: initial death tolls reported in the first hours represent only a fraction of the final count. Venezuela's recent earthquake disaster followed exactly that trajectory, with casualties multiplying as rescuers reached more remote areas and cleared more debris. Colombia's rescue teams, soldiers, civilian volunteers, canine units, drone operators, are working against that clock now. The equipment is deployed. The appeals have been made. What remains is whether the effort can outrun the math that every earthquake imposes: the longer the rubble sits, the fewer survivors emerge. Natural disasters do not care about politics. But the response to them reveals whether a government can deliver when its people need it most, and right now, Colombia's people need it desperately. The post Colombia earthquake death toll passes 224 as rescuers race to find survivors appeared first on American Almanac .