A death toll that keeps moving
A magnitude 7.4 earthquake struck western Colombia at 7:34 a.m. local time on Monday, centered near San José del Palmar, a Chocó department town of roughly 4,800 people, according to USGS's event page and Colombia's own geological service. The confirmed and official death toll has climbed unevenly through the day but now sits at 111, a total announced by Colombia's president Abelardo de la Espriella who was citing Colombia's Association of Capital Cities.
Pereira and Risaralda absorb the deepest losses
Pereira's own toll stood at 18, according to Mayor Mauricio Salazar, but that figure covers the city alone. Risaralda department — the broader coffee-region jurisdiction that includes Pereira — reported a separate, larger total of 40 dead, according to Governor Juan Diego Patiño. In Valle del Cauca, Governor Dilian Francisca Toro reported 27 deaths across the department, including three children, and said Cali's University Hospital of the Valley suffered structural collapses of its own. One of the towers in the city of Manziales', the city's neo-Gothic cathedral collapsed onto the nave, and more than a dozen buildings and twenty homes were partially or fully destroyed, Rojas said. In Buenaventura, Colombia's main Pacific port, one person died when a building collapsed on people sheltering inside, Mayor Ligia del Carmen Cordoba confirmed.
Cali's mayor gave shifting numbers of his own
Cali Mayor Alejandro Eder described the damage in terms that moved almost as much as the official death count — at various points citing 19 buildings with people trapped inside, 20 collapsed structures, and, in a call with Blu Radio, "at least 12 critical points and 25 collapsed structures". Two people, an elderly woman and a young girl, were pulled out alive early in the search, Eder said, with more still trapped. The city, home to roughly two million people, asked Bogotá and Medellín to send additional disaster teams.
Chocó's capital, Quibdó, sustained the most serious structural damage confirmed so far in the department, though it sits roughly 70 kilometers (43 miles) from the epicenter rather than directly on top of it, ColombiaOne's on-the-ground reporting shows. Governor Nubia Carolina Córdoba-Curi reported at least four deaths and 69 injuries in the department as of mid-morning, warning residents to stay alert for aftershocks. Near the epicenter itself, in the sparsely populated mountain communities surrounding San José del Palmar, authorities said road access remained a barrier to a full damage assessment.
Flights grounded, a terminal roof gives way
Colombia's civil aviation authority halted flights at six airports — Pereira, Manizales, Quibdó, Armenia, Cartago and Buenaventura — pending inspections for structural damage, according to Reuters. At Pereira's Matecaña International Airport, footage showed ceiling panels crashing down as travelers dove for cover, Techtimes reported. Bogotá, roughly 250 miles east of the epicenter, escaped serious harm: "no reports of injuries or structural damage, only some cracks in buildings," Mayor Carlos Fernando Galán wrote on X. The capital sent 100 rescuers to a military transport hub to be deployed wherever the national government prioritized them most.
A president three days into the job
Abelardo de la Espriella took office Friday, Aug. 7, sworn in not in Bogotá but in Cali — the first Colombian inauguration held outside the capital in roughly two centuries. Three days later, he ordered a Unified Command Post in Chocó and directed the national disaster agency, UNGRD, to compile a damage assessment before formally declaring a national disaster and announcing plans to travel to Pereira. "You are not alone. The state is present and taking action," he said. The Colombian Army deployed five platoons of rescue troops to affected regions.
Shaking that reached three neighboring countries
Tremors were felt in Ecuador, Panama and parts of western Venezuela, with officials in all three reporting no deaths or major structural damage, NBC News noted. USGS's event page states that roughly 10.5 million people across the region experienced strong-to-very-strong shaking; a narrower figure cited elsewhere — just over 2 million people who felt the most intense "very strong" category alone — describes a smaller subset of that same total, per USGS's own executive summary. The agency's statistical model gives roughly one-in-three odds the eventual death toll could exceed 1,000, a projection officials caution is preliminary.
World leaders offer help
The presidents of El Salvador, Ecuador and Chile — all politically aligned with de la Espriella — publicly offered assistance Monday. Ecuador's Daniel Noboa specifically offered a 47-member urban search-and-rescue team equipped to operate independently for a week. Mexico's president and the U.S. State Department also signaled support, though no foreign teams had been confirmed on the ground as of this writing.
Monday's quake was the strongest to hit Colombia in a decade, per Colombia's Geological Service, cited by OPB, and lands less than two months after twin earthquakes killed more than 6,000 people in neighboring Venezuela — a toll that only recently crossed that threshold, after climbing steadily through July.
