Cali hospital partially collapses after powerful Colombia earthquake
A powerful magnitude 7.4 earthquake struck southwestern Colombia on Monday, causing the partial collapse of a major hospital in the city of Cali and forcing patients and medical staff to evacuate into surrounding streets, according to Africanews.
The tremor brought down sections of the Hospital Universitario del Valle, one of the largest public hospitals in Cali and a key referral facility for the Valle del Cauca department. Footage circulated by Africanews showed dust rising from the structure as floors buckled and walls gave way, with panicked patients being wheeled or helped outside on hospital beds and in wheelchairs.
Rescue operation
Rescue teams were dispatched to search for hundreds of people feared trapped in the wreckage, as Africanews reported. The surrounding streets were cordoned off while emergency services worked through the debris, and patients with less serious injuries were moved to open spaces outside the building. Those requiring critical care were transferred to other facilities across the city, putting immediate pressure on the regional healthcare network.
Cali, Colombia’s third-largest city, sits in a region long known for seismic activity. The city lies in the Cauca Valley, flanked by the Western and Central Andes mountain ranges, which channel geological stress along a string of fault lines running beneath the valley floor.
A seismic country
Colombia lies along the Pacific Ring of Fire, where the Nazca, South American and Caribbean tectonic plates converge, making it one of the most earthquake-prone countries in South America. The nation has experienced several devastating tremors in living memory. The 1983 Popayán earthquake destroyed much of the colonial-era capital of Cauca department and killed hundreds of people, while the January 1999 Armenia earthquake in the coffee belt region left more than 1,000 dead, injured thousands and left tens of thousands homeless. More recently, smaller tremors have repeatedly reminded Colombians of the risks posed by the country’s geology.
The Hospital Universitario del Valle, founded in the mid-twentieth century, is a university teaching hospital affiliated with the Universidad del Valle and serves as a critical referral centre for southwestern Colombia. Its partial collapse raised immediate concerns about the resilience of public health infrastructure in seismically active zones, an issue that has periodically drawn scrutiny in a country where building standards vary considerably between major urban centres and rural municipalities.
By Monday evening, search operations were continuing and authorities were assessing structural damage across Cali and other affected municipalities. The full scale of casualties, injuries and displacement had not yet been confirmed in the reporting cited by Africanews.
Sources
This report was written from coverage published by the following news organisations. Follow the links for the original reporting.
