World news This article is more than 25 years old'Hell has come to Colombia'
This article is more than 25 years oldEarthquake disaster: More than 1,000 dead and toll expected to soarThe horrific extent of the destruction caused by the earthquake which shook western Colombia on Monday became clear yesterday as dawn rose over the devastated city of Armenia.
The quake measured six on the Richter scale, one of the most severe to hit the country this century. It flattened more than half the city of 250,000 people, reducing entire neighbourhoods to piles of twisted metal and shattered stone.
In Bogota, the Colombian capital 140 miles from the tremor's epicentre, buildings were swayed by aftershocks.
Civil defence officials last night put the preliminary casualty figures at 550 dead and 2,700 injured across five mountainous provinces in the country's coffee-growing belt. But more than three-quarters of the rubble is still to be moved, and fire brigades and Red Cross officials expect the toll to rise swiftly.
"There are more than 1,000 dead, perhaps more than 2,000 in Armenia alone," said Ciro Antonio Guiza, the city's deputy fire chief.
Most residents of Armenia - about 180,000 of whom lost their homes - spent Monday night huddled around bonfires in the streets as the cries and wails of buried victims filled the air. Fires still burned out of control in some suburbs yesterday morning, as the stunned population began the grisly task of digging out the dead and injured.
A despairing child with cuts, bruises and tattered clothes wandered the streets in search of a familiar face. "I don't know where my parents are," whispered seven-year-old Sandra Orbina from the nearby town of Calarca, her eyes glazed.
Residents said relief efforts had been slow to reach the city. Water and electricity supplies were cut and many bodies were left uncollected because hospitals were damaged.
Emergency services, whose headquarters were destroyed by the quake, were forced to treat many of the injured on the floors of commandeered buses. Schools and stadiums have been converted into makeshift shelters and morgues.
Some earth-moving equipment had been drafted into service but emergency crews did not want to use machines for fear of crushing victims trapped in air pockets under tons of rubble.
Injured residents were evacuated by air to Bogota, Medellin and Cali, and by road to nearby Manizales. Without refrigerated trucks to store the hundreds of corpses, it is feared epidemics could break out.
"Hell has come to Colombia," said Alfonso Ramirez, who was watching television when the quake hit. His house remained intact, but when he stepped outside everything around him had been reduced to rubble.
"From underneath the remains of my neighbour's house I could hear the cries of Celina and the screams of her children," he said, fighting back tears.
Digging for three hours with only a stick to lever away the stones, Mr Ramirez managed to rescue three children aged six, 12 and 14. But he could not save his neighbour and her youngest son, aged three.
Red Cross members worked through the night to rescue three men buried in a pawn shop where they had been drinking coffee. To applause from a crowd, the men, who had dived between a safe and the wall seconds before the four-storey building collapsed around them, were pulled free after 13 hours.
"Why has God done this to us?" wept Catalina Valencia, whose two children aged six and 15 were crushed to death in the doorway of their house.
"They were only two steps behind me as we ran out. They died in each other's arms and there was nothing I could do."
Gustavo Alvarez, the governor of neighbouring Valle del Cauca province, who overflew Armenia at dawn yesterday, said black squares marked the areas of total destruction.
"Armenia is like a chess board," he said. "The white squares are the areas where nothing happened, and the black where everything collapsed."
"Everything fell in like a house of cards," said Janeth Delgado, a resident who spent the night on the streets. "You didn't know whether to run or stand still, everything just came crashing down."
The city's fire service is crippled - nine officers were killed and its entire fleet of 14 vehicles was flattened when the three-storey fire station caved in - and the cash-strapped health service is faring little better. Even where wards are still standing the situation is dire.
"We don't have enough needles, antibiotics, basic medicines. We have no ventilators. People should bring anything they can, even toilet paper, with them," said a nurse, Gloria Cardenas. "If we don't receive immediate help, we simply won't be able to cope."
Ten-year-old Catalina Obilia was freed from the rubble, badly injured but alive, after six hours of digging by her father and rescue workers. But the lack of basic first aid supplies in her ambulance meant she was too weak to pull through by the time she arrived at hospital.
Armenia's mayor, Alvaro Patino, told local radio: "We need everything - food, medicines, blood...blankets, generators. There is no way to measure the scale of this disaster."
There was havoc in the city's jail, where one prisoner was killed and 15 injured. The majority of inmates escaped when the prison wall and police guard house collapsed.
Armenia and the province of Quindio took the brunt of the quake. The town of Calarca was also largely destroyed, with at least 100 people killed and 300 injured. In neighbouring Cajamarca, the quake upturned the town's graveyard, scattering scores of corpses around the ruins of the church.
As many as 20 other towns in Quindio suffered serious damage. In Pereira, the capital of Riseralda province, 100 people died as houses and businesses collapsed.
President Andres Pastrana, who cancelled a high-profile European tour that was to have included the World Bank's annual assembly in Munich and an audience with the Pope, toured the disaster zone, promising more aid.
In Bogota, hundreds of donors formed long lines outside bloodbanks.
Landslides - which had slowed the arrival of rescue equipment and supplies - were gradually being cleared, and convoys of government vehicles with cranes converged on the disaster zone.
Rescue specialists from the United States and Japan were due to join the search for survivors last night.
Among the casualties, it was feared, were five members of the professional soccer club Atletico Quindio.
Last night, less than 24 hours into the rescue effort, emergency services feared that the quake would prove to be one of the worst natural disasters in Colombian history.
The last major earthquake to hit the country was in 1994 when a tremor in the south killed 800 people and left 50,000 homeless.
Monday night's quake was the deadliest since 1875, when about 1,000 people died near Cucuta, a border city with Venezuela.
In 1985, a volcanic eruption in central Tolima state destroyed an entire town and killed 23,000 people.
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