Three days after the magnitude 7.4 earthquake in western Colombia, rescue teams are still pulling people alive from the rubble — and the official picture of how many died, and how many are still missing, remains unsettled.

President Abelardo de la Espriella said on Tuesday that at least 181 people had been killed and 2,595 injured. A CNN tally put the dead at 224 the same day. By Wednesday, other outlets were reporting the toll had passed 250.

The gap in the missing

The most striking discrepancy is not in the dead but in the missing. The president put the figure at around 195. Civilian-run databases, according to NPR’s reporting from Pereira, put it closer to 4,000.

A gap that large is not a matter of one side being dishonest. Official registers generally count people formally reported missing to the authorities, with details verified. Civilian databases collect what families submit, which means they capture people the official system has not yet processed — and also double-count, and include people who have since been found and not removed from the list.

The true figure is almost certainly between the two. It will take weeks to establish, and the final number will be lower than 4,000 and higher than 195.

Rescues past the threshold

Survivors are still being found. A woman was pulled from a collapsed building in Cali almost 30 hours after the quake. Video from the same city showed a baby recovered from the rubble of an apartment block. In Pereira, teams and volunteers were still searching what had been an apartment building.

Rescue specialists work to a rough guide that survival chances fall sharply after the first 72 hours, though people have been recovered alive well beyond it. That threshold passed on Thursday morning, and it is the point at which operations typically shift from rescue to recovery — a decision that is agonising for families and is usually taken by engineers assessing what is survivable rather than by officials.

The secondary disasters

An earthquake does not only collapse buildings. The quake caused a fire at a jail in Buenaventura, near Cali, which killed at least four people and sent two to hospital, according to the governor of Valle del Cauca.

Detention facilities are a recurring problem in earthquakes. People inside cannot evacuate themselves, staff must choose between securing a facility and emptying it, and fire in a locked building is close to the worst case.

In Cali, a clinic was evacuated because of structural damage and patients were moved to beds set up in a school gymnasium. That is what a damaged hospital looks like in practice: care continues, in a worse place, with less equipment.

Assessing what is left standing

In Manizales, where the mayor reported five deaths, the city has received thousands of requests to inspect damaged homes. He estimated the assessments will take at least a month.

This is the phase that receives almost no coverage and determines how many people are eventually displaced. Every damaged building has to be examined by someone qualified to judge whether it is safe to re-enter. Until that happens, families either sleep outside or return to buildings nobody has certified.

In La Italia, a district near the epicentre, a community leader reported structural damage and no water or electricity a day after the quake.

A crisis on top of a crisis

Aid organisations have pointed out that the affected region was not starting from a stable position. “This earthquake compounds an already severe humanitarian situation, and there is a need for increased support for the humanitarian response,” said Giovanni Rizzo, Colombia director for the Norwegian Refugee Council.

Parts of western Colombia have experienced decades of armed conflict and displacement. Communities already living precariously have less capacity to absorb a shock, and the organisations working there were already stretched.

President de la Espriella, who took office only recently, has announced economic relief measures while touring the coffee region. The World Central Kitchen has said it is working through local restaurants to provide meals — an approach that feeds people and keeps money in businesses that would otherwise fail.

What to expect next

The death toll will keep rising as the epicentre area is reached and as the missing are resolved. Aftershocks — more than 70 recorded by Tuesday — will continue for weeks.

We will update as figures are confirmed. Where our numbers differ from those elsewhere, it is because different bodies compiled them at different hours.

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Sources: NPR; CNN; Democracy Now!; statements from the Government of Colombia and the Governor of Valle del Cauca, 11–12 August 2026.