Four days after the magnitude 7.4 earthquake that struck western Colombia on 10 August, the confirmed death toll has reached 281, with 3,971 people injured and 379 still missing, according to President Abelardo de la Espriella.

The figures rose steadily through the week — 132 on the first evening, 265 by Wednesday — as rescuers reached collapsed buildings and remote municipalities. The 72-hour window in which survivors are most often pulled from rubble closed on Thursday, and operations have shifted from rescue towards recovery and shelter.

The scale of the damage

David Santiago Tamayo, director-general of Colombia’s Disaster Risk Management Unit, said more than 12,000 homes were destroyed and more than 74,000 damaged. More than 170 buildings collapsed outright.

The infrastructure toll is what will shape the coming months: 20 road bridges affected and a pedestrian bridge down, more than 200 roads damaged, five airports and 44 aqueducts hit. Damaged aqueducts mean interrupted water supply for communities that still have standing houses, and damaged roads mean aid moves slowly to exactly the places that need it most.

The epicentre was near San José del Palmar in Chocó, a community of about 4,800 people some 400km west of Bogotá. Much of Chocó is reachable only by boat or plane, which has slowed any full assessment of the toll there. The heaviest confirmed casualties have been in the cities of Pereira and Cali.

The missing-persons gap

One number deserves care. The government has put the missing at around 379 to 500. Civilian-run databases, where families register relatives they cannot contact, have listed figures above 4,100.

Both can be honest. Crowd-sourced lists capture people who are simply unreachable — displaced, without phone signal, staying with relatives — and they double-count. Official lists require verification and lag behind. The gap between them is normal after a disaster of this size and usually narrows over weeks. It is not, on its own, evidence that the death toll is ten times what has been reported, and it should not be read that way.

A first test for a new government

This is the strongest earthquake to hit Colombia this century, and it has landed on an administration that took office recently. De la Espriella said the government had mobilised the entire military and police apparatus, and described the impact as enormous, requiring determination and political will. Aid from regional partners began arriving on Wednesday, and Mexican rescue teams have worked alongside Colombian crews in Cali.

On the question everyone in the region asks after a quake this size, Rodrigo León Loya, a seismologist at the University of the Andes, said the probability of another of similar magnitude in the same area is low, but that he would not rule out further seismic activity — noting that Colombia is full of active fault lines.

With 12,000 homes gone and the rainy season ahead, the phase now beginning — temporary shelter, water restoration, road repair — is the one that determines how many more people are harmed by this earthquake after the shaking stopped.

Sources

Statements by President Abelardo de la Espriella and Colombia’s Disaster Risk Management Unit, reported by ABC News, France 24, NPR, CNN and Al Jazeera.