BOGOTÁ — Rescue teams pulled a 32-year-old woman alive from the rubble of a collapsed apartment building in Pereira on Tuesday, 36 hours after Monday's magnitude 7.4 earthquake in western Colombia, as the official death toll rose to at least 188 and hundreds remained missing.
The rescue of Daniela Largo, freed after a 10-hour operation in which firefighters tunneled above and below four concrete slabs, buoyed a search effort that has stretched into a third day and is testing the four-day-old government of President Abelardo de la Espriella. Colombia's National Geological Service has called the quake the country's worst this century.
Under the slabs
Local residents heard Largo call out from beneath the debris, and rescuers reached her with a small camera before crews from Pereira, Bogotá and the national police disaster team dug their way in, the BBC reported. Oxygen was fed through an opening from above; a second tunnel, from below, brought her out. Largo's mother said "at home, her 12-year-old son is waiting for her."
De la Espriella called the rescue "news which fills us with hope" in a social-media post cited by the BBC. The president said 181 people had died and 2,595 had been injured, while civilian-run databases put the number of unaccounted for near 4,000, CBS News reported.
Cali still digging
The bulk of the search remained in Cali, Colombia's third-largest city, where Mayor Alejandro Éder said 95 people were confirmed dead and more than 200 remained trapped as of Tuesday afternoon. Éder declared an overnight curfew and put soldiers on patrol in the hardest-hit neighborhoods. "We need to ensure that the rescue work can be carried out safely," he said.
More than 50 buildings in Cali have collapsed, including the four-story Torres del Limonar in the Capri neighborhood, where about 25 people were believed trapped Monday night. Rescuer James Velasco told BBC Mundo, "What I can tell you is that right now there are at least two people detected alive. Tunnels are being made to get them out. One of them has to have his leg freed."
Video posted by Brian Osorio Zuluaga, cited by CBS News, showed volunteers pulling an infant alive from a separate collapsed building Monday night after a man buried underneath told them, "I'm with a baby." In Pereira, 79 people were confirmed dead and 92 buildings had collapsed, according to the Association of Colombian Capital Cities.
Aid flows in
Washington has pledged more than $15 million in aid, CBS News reported. Mexico's president said she was ready to send hundreds of search and health workers and supplies, and El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele said two planes carrying 100 tons of aid would leave in the coming days. "Our prayers are with the families of the victims, the wounded and all the Colombian people," Bukele wrote on X.
No opposition figure or critic of the new administration's handling of the disaster surfaced in Tuesday's dispatches, and Colombian political rivals had not commented publicly by press time.
The 7.4-magnitude quake struck at 7:34 a.m. local time Monday, with its epicenter near San José del Palmar in Chocó province. Rescuers said tunneling at Torres del Limonar and other sites in Cali and Pereira would continue into Wednesday.