At 7:34 a.m. on the morning of August 10, the strongest earthquake in decades struck western Colombia. The magnitude 7.4 tremor, centered in the Chocó region, shook the entire country. Cali, Colombia’s third-largest city, took one of the heaviest blows. Buildings collapsed. Dozens went missing. A city known for its salsa music and dance suddenly fell quiet under a cloud of dust.
Amidst the devastation, the catastrophe has also quickly turned into an early political test for newly elected president Abelardo De la Espriella, drawing sharp criticism over the government’s crisis response. Yet beyond the debates in the capital, the true weight of the tragedy rests on the streets of Cali, where rescuers, volunteers, grieving families, and community leaders have stepped into the void to recover and rebuild.
Supply Station
Next to the ruins in Barrio Capri, in southern Cali, the dust never quite settles. María José Murcillo Aguilar stirs a massive pot of sancocho—the thick, hearty Colombian soup that has become a kind of comfort food for the whole operation.
“It started with sandwiches,” she says, wiping sweat from her forehead. “I posted a video on social media asking for donations to make 100. We ended up making a lot more than that.”
After sandwiches, it was arepas—over 100, with lemonade. When she heard rescue workers and displaced families were surviving on nothing but “rice and eggs,” she decided to do more.
“What better than a sancocho?” she says, with a small smile.
She took to social media once more. Donations trickled in—a local restaurant chain sent extra poultry, a produce supplier sent bulk vegetables. Now she and her family—mostly students and a few older relatives—cook 200 to 300 meals a day.
But the food is never just food. At these makeshift kitchens, rescuers, volunteers, journalists, and residents who lost everything sit down together, eat, and talk. Sometimes they even laugh—a strange, welcome sound in the middle of grief.
“It’s not just about the food,” María José says. “It’s about reminding each other we’re not alone. When we sit and eat together, we become a family.”
She’s been cooking since the first days, up before dawn and asleep long after midnight. But when an exhausted rescuer walks up, she hands him a bowl of sancocho and watches his shoulders drop.
“That,” she says, “is why I’m here.”
A Family’s Mission
Miguel Uribe is 56, an industrial designer and a university professor. Originally from Santander, in northeastern Colombia, he has lived in Cali for 25 years. “I’m a Caleño by adoption,” he says.
On the morning of the earthquake, he was in his fourth-floor apartment in Barrio Capri—one of the hardest-hit blocks in the city. The shaking, he says, kept building. It didn’t feel like the small tremors Cali is used to. It felt like it wasn’t going to stop. By that afternoon, he was at the site of a collapsed building, Torre Limonar, just a few blocks from his home. What he found was chaos. “There was a lot of disorder, a lot of chaos,” he says. “None of us were prepared for this. You just did what you sensed you could do.”
He describes the first response less as a decision than a reflex. “It’s not thinking about what to do—it’s the reaction. You run toward it and try to do something, even if you don’t really know what that something is.” Within hours, Civil Defense and Cali’s firefighters arrived and began organizing the volunteers, who by then were so numerous, and so eager, that they were nearly pushing each other out of the way. “It’s harder to do nothing,” he says. “Staying home, staying calm, not getting in the way of people who know what they’re doing—that actually takes more thought than running in to help.”
Since then his job has mostly been physical: hauling rubble, filling buckets, helping pry loose concrete slabs so they can do their work safely. “We’re basically their laborers,” he says. “They’re the ones with the training to go in without making things worse. We do the small, simple stuff so they don’t have to.”
There’s a whole support system that most outsiders never see, he says. Volunteers keeping the diggers hydrated and fed. A tent that appeared almost overnight where physical therapists give massages and treat the muscle strains and minor injuries that come from work no one is built for. And something less tangible: a kind of instant trust among strangers. “We communicate incredibly easily out there, even in the middle of disagreements about what to do,” he says. “There’s not much conflict. People are careful with each other. Empathetic.”
What stays with him most is how the wreckage erased social categories.
What stays with him most is how the wreckage erased social categories. “You see someone who’s clearly a construction worker, giving everything he’s got. And then someone who fits every stereotype of the gym-toned Caleña in lycra—and she’s out there too, working just as hard, with the same will,” he says. “Whatever divisions we carry around—class, appearance, whatever—they fall apart out there.”
Yet on a broader level, the spirit of solidarity hasn’t fully translated into a balanced recovery: while primary disaster sites in Cali drew immediate aid, whole communities in neighboring regions like Chocó remain in the dark, with residents questioning where the official relief actually went. But here on the ground in Barrio Capri, the immediate human impulse to help remains undeniable.
His wife, Yuli Ruiz, has been by his side since day one. She works more than 16 hours some days, hauling debris, handing out water, comforting people who’ve lost everything. She calls it simple: “It’s a human need,” she says. “We have to help each other. Colombia has already been through so much. If people are flying in from other countries to help us, how could we, who live five minutes away and felt this in our own bodies, just stay home?”
She was one of the first civilians on the scene at the Limonar building—the block in Barrio Capri that came down hardest. Within twenty minutes, she and a handful of neighbors, with no training and no equipment, had pulled a 40-year-old woman and her pet out of the rubble. “I think ordinary people got there before the firefighters, before Civil Defense, before anyone official,” she says. “We were amateurs. But being there in that first hour mattered.”
Her son, Jorge Andrés Hernandez, lives in Bogotá and flew in as soon as flights resumed. “I expected sadness, loss,” he says. “What I found was so much unity between Colombians, all of us trying to pull each other out of this. A lot of love.” The first thing he did after landing was put on boots and a helmet and go straight to the rescue site at Torre Limonar. “My mom and Miguel—they’re not young anymore, and they’re giving everything they have.
One moment from his first day there has stuck with him: a group of volunteers hauling a single rope to pull a beam weighing more than 100 kilograms out of the wreckage. “Everyone pulling for the same thing—that’s what I’ll remember.”
Across the region, over 31,540 homes were destroyed and more than 178,555 damaged. The damage is estimated at up to 9.5 billion USD. The physical rubble may be cleared long before the financial help arrives for small business owners who lost everything.
The Healers in the Dust
The dust hangs over everything in Barrio Capri—skin, clothes, the inside of your lungs. For Dr. Juan Fernando Vélez and Dr. Camila Gómez—both Cali-based physicians four years out of medical school—that dust has become a constant. For five days they’ve staffed medical points near the collapse sites, rotating to wherever personnel are needed most.
“In the first days, the priority was the people trapped inside,” Camila says. “Now that most sites have been cleared, our attention has shifted to the rescuers themselves.” Muscle injuries, skin lacerations from the debris, falls, dehydration—the toll of bodies working far past what they’re built for. “It’s been support in both directions,” she says.
What worries them more is what comes after. Respiratory illness from days of breathing dust and smoke. Older residents whose chronic conditions will worsen because they can’t obtain their usual medications. And it isn’t only the people who were trapped, or the ones who did the digging—it’s the neighbors, the bystanders, everyone who lived through it. “You look around and there are a lot of people nearby who are going to be affected by this too,” he says.
The damage runs deeper than homes: 348 health facilities were damaged. The health system meant to absorb this crisis is itself part of what has to be rebuilt in the weeks and months ahead.
The health system meant to absorb this crisis is itself part of what has to be rebuilt in the weeks and months ahead.
“Right now, thanks to the government and the solidarity of ordinary people, we haven’t felt the need as sharply as we might have,” Camila says, referring to Cali’s swift municipal aid. “But that could change. When the cameras leave, when the world’s attention moves to the next disaster—that’s when the real need is going to show up.” She adds a pointed reminder: Cali isn’t the only place affected. Other cities and rural regions were hit too, and for them, aid is often much harder to deliver.
Then there’s the part with no visible wound. “Everyone is shaken, no matter what work you’re doing,” Juan Fernando says. “We’re all carrying some trauma. People are afraid to sleep. A lot of people left their homes and don’t know what to do, because they can’t go back and sleep there..” Mental health, both doctors agree, is the crisis nobody’s tracking yet.
“Please don’t forget us,” Camila says simply, as another rescuer limps over holding his shoulder. She smiles at him, gentle and already back to work.
The Daughter’s Goodbye
Juliana Patiño kneels in the dust, sifting through what used to be her family’s home. She’s looking for anything that belonged to her father. she finds a small box of oil paints. She holds it out to a friend. “This is for you,” she says. “So you can make something beautiful with it.”
Her father, Darío Patiño, died when the Torres del Limonar building came down. He worked at a hospital, spent his life helping families, and was “both father and mother” to her. “We’ve been overwhelmed by all the messages people have sent us about him,” she says. “He was a good son, a good father, a good friend, a good brother, a good citizen. He fulfilled every mission God gave him. I know he’s with our Father now.”
She isn’t only mourning. She’s still out searching, for other relatives, other neighbors still under the concrete. Asked what she’d say to people watching from outside Colombia, she doesn’t hesitate. “Life is so fragile. Don’t fight over the small things. Love and humanity come before everything else. We have to stay united — family, friends, all of it. Together, we’re strong.”
The Rescuer’s Vow
Gissell Gálvez Vargas has spent 18 years as a rescuer with the Colombian Civil Defense and now volunteers with the Cali Fire Department. She’s spent more than a week on 24-hour rotations at the Capri site.
“All the outside teams that come in — from other parts of Colombia, from other countries — they all report to the command post,” she explains. Teams from Mexico, Costa Rica, and Brazil, among others, are assigned zones from there and organize their own crews— shoring up structures, breaking through concrete, clearing debris, until they reach a victim. This international mobilization underscores the immediate regional solidarity that followed the disaster, though experts note that coordinating foreign specialized teams under local command remains a key logistical challenge in the critical early hours. On the ground, one local volunteer pointed out that distant teams like Israel’s arrived too late for that initial golden window, illustrating the timing gaps inherent in long-distance deployment.
“If it’s someone who didn’t make it, we move them somewhere more private for Forensic Medicine — these are sensitive situations, and we’re always careful about that,” she says. “If it’s a survivor the full trauma protocol kicks in immediately.”
“Adults trapped somewhere can scream, bang on something, signal that they’re there,” she says. “Babies and small children can’t. They just go quiet. If they cry, it’s not a call for help — they don’t know how to ask for that.” She remembers the children’s bedrooms in the wreckage, the toys, and the infant — just a few months old — who was the first survivor pulled from the ruins.
What has carried Gissell through, she says, is the city around her. “Cali is an incredibly supportive community. We’re very united. Whenever we tell people, ‘We need help breaking up this slab,’ they come and they do the heavy work with us, they clear debris with us.” She says she’s deeply grateful — 18 years into this work — to be part of the response in her own city. For her and her team, the vow was simple: leave no one behind under the rubble, no matter how long it takes.
The Road Ahead
Miguel is already thinking about what comes next. “They’re saying recovery is going to take two or three years,” he says. “Right now the instinct to help is strong. But people have obligations—we’re going to have to go back to some kind of normal life, and that urgency can start to fade.”
He points to the hundreds of small business owners—hotel operators, shopkeepers, families renting out a few rooms—who lost everything and will need a different kind of help long after the debris is gone, at a moment when the country’s economy, he notes, is already strained. “The physical work is now. But later, the help that matters most is going to be donations, materials, whatever it takes for people to rebuild their lives.”
As the emergency phase gives way to long-term reconstruction, the earthquake lays bare Colombia’s deep-seated structural challenges. While Cali’s municipal capacity offers a path toward recovery, peripheral and historically neglected regions like Chocó and Buenaventura face far steeper hurdles—where state presence is thin, and relief risks stalling as international headlines fade.
As the emergency phase gives way to long-term reconstruction, the earthquake lays bare Colombia’s deep-seated structural challenges.
Local solidarity and community kitchens can sustain a population through the initial trauma, but they cannot repair regional economic divides, rebuild critical infrastructure, or institutionalize long-term disaster management. The coming years will test whether national policy can bridge these geographic gaps before the next disaster hits.
“Cali will be Cali again,” Gissell says. “This disaster has marked us deeply,” she says. “But it has also taught us something. We can overcome this. Together, we will rebuild.”
Miguel agrees. “The joy of Caleños didn’t fall,” he says. “It’s still there, even in the middle of this.”
María will keep cooking. Gissell will keep searching. Yuli and her family will keep showing up, day after day, until the last body is recovered and the first new building rises from the dust.
And somewhere in the city, salsa music will play again. As the famous salsa song’s lyrics say: “Que Cali es Cali, señoras, señores, lo demás es loma.” Cali is Cali — and everything else is just a hill.
All interviews were conducted between August 14 and 17, 2026, in the first week following the earthquake.
Tony Zhou (Kirby) is an independent investigative journalist and photographer based in Colombia. He has previously reported from Ukraine, the Middle East, and Africa, focusing on geopolitics, refugees, and environmental issues.