Woman rescued alive 36 hours after Colombia's deadly 7.4 quake

Daniela Largo heard the rescuers calling her name from somewhere above the darkness. She had been trapped beneath four massive concrete slabs for a day and a half, ever since the ground beneath western Colombia convulsed at 7:34 on Monday morning. A neighbor had heard her cries for help filtering up through the rubble of her collapsed building in Pereira, and that small mercy—someone listening, someone calling for aid—had set in motion a 10-hour operation that would pull her alive into daylight.

The earthquake that buried her measured 7.4 in magnitude. Its epicenter lay near San José del Palmar in Chocó province, but the shaking radiated outward across a vast swath of the country, lasting between 90 seconds and two minutes where the seismometers were closest. In the hours and days that followed, more than 100 aftershocks rippled through the region, each one a reminder that the earth was still unsettled.

When the firefighters arrived at the site where Largo lay trapped, they faced a puzzle of weight and geometry. A small camera helped them locate her position beneath the rubble, but the four concrete slabs blocking access were immovable from above. So they dug. Firefighters from Pereira worked alongside colleagues brought in from Bogotá and members of the national police disaster response team. They excavated two separate tunnels—one from above to deliver oxygen, another from below to finally reach her and pull her free. After 36 hours in the dark, Largo emerged alive.

Her rescue was a rare bright moment in a catastrophe still unfolding. President Abelardo de la Espriella announced the death toll at 265, with 496 others unaccounted for. Pereira, a city in Colombia's coffee-growing region, had lost 79 people. Cali, the country's third most populous city, had suffered worse: 95 dead, with more than 200 still trapped beneath collapsed structures as of Tuesday afternoon. In Pereira alone, at least 92 buildings had come down. Fifteen people were known to be trapped there, and another 37 had vanished into the rubble.

Largo's mother told news agencies that her daughter's 12-year-old son was waiting at home. The boy had no way of knowing, in those 36 hours, whether his mother would return. When she did, the president took to social media to mark the moment, calling her rescue "news which fills us with hope"—a small defiance against the scale of loss surrounding it.

In Cali, the mayor imposed a nighttime curfew and deployed soldiers to patrol the hardest-hit neighborhoods. "We need to ensure that the rescue work can be carried out safely," he said, acknowledging both the urgency of the work ahead and the chaos that can accompany disaster. Eighty-seven people had been pulled from the rubble there, but the work was far from finished. Rescue teams were still digging, still calling out names, still hoping to find others alive in the spaces between concrete and stone. The aftershocks continued. The missing remained missing. But Daniela Largo had come home.