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AMERICANALMANAC (Jack Newsome) - Colombia earthquake survivors brace for years of recovery as experts warn the hardest part lies ahead Fri Aug 14 16:25:03 2026

A 7.4 magnitude earthquake killed at least 281 people in western Colombia this week, and disaster veterans who lived through the region's last catastrophic quake in 1999 say the country faces not months but years of rebuilding. The quake struck Monday morning, collapsing buildings across several states and trapping hundreds under debris. In Pereira, a […] The post Colombia earthquake survivors brace for years of recovery as experts warn the hardest part lies ahead appeared first on American Almanac .

A 7.4 magnitude earthquake killed at least 281 people in western Colombia this week, and disaster veterans who lived through the region's last catastrophic quake in 1999 say the country faces not months but years of rebuilding. The quake struck Monday morning, collapsing buildings across several states and trapping hundreds under debris. In Pereira, a city in Colombia's coffee-growing region, glass shattered, walls cracked, and water poured through fractured concrete. Residents who survived the shaking emerged to find apartment buildings toppled onto neighboring structures. Within hours, displaced families began gathering in public parks, cooking meals on the side of the road and watching their ruined homes from the sidewalk. For Jahir Rodríguez, a 68-year-old retired urban planner who has lived in Pereira for decades, the scene carried a grim familiarity. He responded to the 1999 earthquake in Armenia, a city roughly 30 miles away, that killed approximately 1,200 people. He later assisted after the 2010 earthquake in Chile. Now he finds himself doing the same work in his own neighborhood, visiting collapsed buildings and displaced residents in the immediate aftermath. Rodríguez visited a friend's collapsed building and found people refusing to leave The day after the earthquake, Rodríguez went to see a friend's apartment building. The structure, home to a fellow urban planner, had toppled onto surrounding buildings. His friend refused to leave the site, afraid vandals would pick through the wreckage. Rodríguez told CBS News that the emotional toll hits survivors before the logistical crisis does. "You feel a sense of powerlessness." He described people standing on sidewalks, staring at what used to be their homes. His own sister, 65-year-old Liliana Rodríguez, lost her apartment in the quake. As the death toll climbed past 224 and continued rising, the scale of displacement grew clearer by the day. Colombia's new government, which took power just days before the earthquake, began helping set up encampments in parks for displaced residents. But Rodríguez warned that approach may prove shortsighted. He laid out the three phases he has seen in prior disasters: count the survivors, organize where they will be housed, then begin reconstruction. Each phase, he said, takes far longer than officials or the public expects. Rodríguez recalled a lesson he learned after the 1999 Armenia quake from a delegation of Japanese earthquake responders who had faced a deadly quake in Osaka in 1995. Their message stuck with him for more than two decades. "It is a mistake to think that you will be here for days or months. You will be here for years." That warning proved accurate in Armenia. And Rodríguez believes it applies now. He described the grinding reality of long-term displacement in blunt terms. "Days and days and days, nights and nights and nights, months and months and months in a shelter waiting to be helped." Three days after the quake, Rodríguez said survivors remained focused on the immediate crisis. "They are just recovering from the earthquake," he said. "They have not yet thought about tomorrow's story." The full weight of what they lost, and how long it will take to rebuild, had not yet registered. Early rescue efforts focused on the narrow survival window that follows any major quake. As the 72-hour survival window closed , operations shifted from rescue to recovery, and the question changed from who could be saved to how many had been lost. Murillo built Colombia's post-1999 recovery blueprint and sees the same failures forming Everardo Murillo knows what comes next. After the 1999 Armenia earthquake, then-President Andrés Pastrana tasked Murillo with creating a fund and organization to allocate money for people who lost homes and businesses. That effort became a blueprint Murillo has since carried to disaster zones around the world, consulting for governments at the behest of organizations including the World Bank. He assisted after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. More recently, he visited Venezuela after back-to-back earthquakes devastated parts of that country, traveling to La Guaira, the hardest-hit city, to meet with the governor, local leaders, businesspeople, and community members. Venezuela's disaster exposed how poorly built socialist housing programs contributed to mass casualties , a failure of government planning that compounded the natural disaster. Murillo compared the scale of damage: dozens of fallen buildings in Colombia's quake versus hundreds that toppled in Venezuela. But he cautioned against treating a smaller number as a smaller problem. The human cost per building is enormous, and the social destruction extends far beyond the physical wreckage. He described the crisis facing individual families in terms that no policy document captures. "People lose the route of their life. It's the hardest thing for a human being. How do I help that family who lost everything, whose home collapsed, who lost children, and also lost their belongings inside and is now on the street?" Murillo said his methodology for disaster recovery starts not with spreadsheets or government directives but with showing up. He stressed that the social problems created by a disaster only become visible on the ground. "There are a number of problems in the social realms that one only discovers by going there and seeing for oneself." One pattern he has observed across multiple disasters: formal leadership often fails to meet the moment, but ordinary people fill the gap. "The first thing that emerges from within a disaster victim when something like that happens is a new kind of leadership," Murillo said. "Natural leaders emerge, people who step up." A new government faces a test it did not choose Colombia's new government inherited this crisis almost immediately after taking office. The timing raises practical questions the source material does not answer: What is the government's full disaster response plan? Which agencies beyond the central government are coordinating relief? How will reconstruction be funded, and on what timeline? The 1999 Armenia earthquake offers a partial roadmap. Pastrana's decision to task Murillo with building a dedicated recovery fund gave that effort structure and accountability. Whether the current government will follow a similar model, or improvise, remains unclear. Rodríguez's concern is that the encampment approach already underway treats displacement as a short-term problem when history shows it is anything but. People who lost homes in the 1999 quake waited months in shelters. Some of the emotional and financial damage from that disaster lingered for years. Pereira sits just 30 miles from Armenia, and many residents lived through that earlier catastrophe. They know what "years" means. In the first days after the earthquake, dramatic rescues offered moments of hope, including an infant pulled alive from rubble in the early hours of the disaster. But as the rescue phase ends and the recovery phase begins, the harder, quieter work starts: counting losses, finding housing, and confronting the reality that rebuilding a city takes longer than surviving a quake. Murillo and Rodríguez both pointed to the same truth, drawn from decades of firsthand experience: governments promise fast recovery, communities expect fast recovery, and the timeline is never fast. The Japanese responders who visited Colombia after 1999 said it plainly, years, not months. Twenty-six years later, a new generation of Colombians is about to learn the same lesson. Natural disasters do not wait for governments to get settled, and they do not care about political timelines. What matters now is whether the people in charge have the honesty to tell survivors the truth about how long the road ahead really is, and the discipline to stay on it. The post Colombia earthquake survivors brace for years of recovery as experts warn the hardest part lies ahead appeared first on American Almanac .