Rescue teams erupted in cheer as they freed a 32-year-old woman from piles of rubble caused by a massive earthquake in Colombia, after she had been trapped there for 36 hours.
Footage released by Bogota firefighters shows the moment Daniela Largos Sanchez was pulled from a collapsed building after a powerful 7.4-magnitude quake.
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Colombian rescue teams are in a race against time to locate survivors still trapped beneath collapsed buildings with at least 265 people killed and 500 unaccounted for.
“We are in a race against time to save lives,” Cali Mayor Alejandro Eder told reporters on Wednesday, warning there was now less than a day left of a critical 72-hour window during which there are far greater chances of finding quake survivors.
“We will keep working after this window, but it is important to rescue the most people we can in this day we have left,” Eder said, adding that rescue workers needed silence and order to detect survivors under the mountains of rubble.
In Cali, Colombia’s third-largest city, more than 56 buildings collapsed, killing at least 95 people and injuring close to 1000 others, according to data from Asocapitales, the country’s capital cities association.
Pereira, deep in the coffee-growing region and some 55km from the quake’s epicentre, counted at least 79 dead, according to Asocapitales. The mayor’s office said 300 people were still missing.
