Colombia digs through the rubble: a thousand deaths feared

In Colombia the digging continues. A little more than twenty-four hours after the tremor, almost 250 deaths have been confirmed and the number is rising by the hour. Around four thousand people are missing and several hundred are injured. The Pager system run by the US geological survey, which estimates an earthquake's impact on the population, indicates a toll close to a thousand deaths is possible.

Time is the variable that counts. Rescue teams are working within the window of the first seventy-two hours, the period in which the chances of finding people alive under the rubble remain significant. Alongside the rescuers, civilians are digging, often with bare hands, in neighbourhoods that heavy machinery cannot reach. In Cali a mother and her newborn were pulled from the ruins of a five-storey building.

The scale of the damage is broad. More than 1,500 buildings have been damaged and several hundred have collapsed. The worst-hit cities are Pereira, Cali and Manizales, in the heart of the coffee region. Provisional economic estimates range from 100 million to one billion dollars, a very wide bracket that mostly shows how little is known so far.

Communications are a problem

In the seven worst-affected departments, 46.1 per cent of the mobile network is out of service: 3,403 of 7,379 base stations are not working. It is a technical figure with immediate practical consequences. Without a network, families cannot look for each other, reports of trapped people do not reach coordination centres, and estimates of the missing remain approximate. Some of the four thousand names on the lists may belong to people who are safe and simply unreachable.

President Abelardo de la Espriella has travelled to the coffee region to follow the handling of the emergency at close quarters and coordinate operations. The government has said its commitment extends to every affected family.

International aid has begun to arrive. The United States announced an initial allocation of 15.5 million dollars. Condolences and offers of support have come from the Pope, Chinese President Xi Jinping and UN Secretary-General António Guterres. The Colombian singer Shakira also released a message recalling the country's capacity to pull together in difficult moments.

It remains to be seen how much of this support will translate into resources on the ground, and how quickly. In the first days after an earthquake the bottleneck is almost never the availability of aid, but the ability to get it where it is needed: severed roads, damaged airports and absent communications weigh more than the quantity of resources pledged.