A baby was pulled alive from the rubble of a collapsed apartment building in Cali, Colombia after the 7.4-magnitude earthquake struck western Colombia on Monday.
When the deadly 7.4 magnitude earthquake struck Colombia on Monday, Brian Osorio Zuluaga ran out of his office in Cali and rushed home on his motorbike, but the sight of a collapsed five-story residential building forced him to stop.
The complex, which covered an entire block, was La Torres del Limonar.
He approached the rubble and began shouting into the wreckage for survivors, despite warnings about a possible gas leak.
He suddenly asked those around him for silence, and a faint sound rose out of the debris — barely a whisper.
“Yes, I’m here. I’m with a baby,” a man’s voice replied.
Osorio and several others began moving debris with their hands to reach the pair, clearing rubble as quickly as they could.
But when they encountered a large concrete slab, progress halted. “On the first attempt, we couldn’t lift it,” he said. Then, “we all lifted together — one, two, three, up.”
Some volunteers held the slab aloft as others cleared a path to the baby.
The infant’s little head appeared, which, at the time, looked sort of purplish because he couldn’t breathe.
Once they started removing the rubble, the baby began to breathe, and his color started to come back.
Osorio was handed the baby, a boy, and gave him to a police officer, who took him to an ambulance.
Osorio and six others pulled the baby out before emergency responders arrived and continued the rescue efforts for the trapped man.
On Facebook, Osorio posted video of the multi-stage rescue and shared his reflections on what the ordeal meant.
“Today I understood, more than ever, that no one is really prepared to live through a situation like the one we are experiencing today,” he wrote on the post accompanying the videos.
“A helping hand can make the difference between life and death,” Osorio wrote. “In moments like this, differences don’t matter, what matters is helping.”
In the rubble, Osorio said he saw clothes, shoes, and a stuffed animal covered in dust. He thought about the people who might still be trapped. “All those thoughts go through your mind,” he said.
“Unity is strength, because no one person alone could have lifted that piece of rubble; it was so large and so heavy,” he said.
“It’s better to act than to stand still,” Osorio added.
Search and rescue operations entered their third day early on Wednesday, as emergency responders raced to find more survivors after the powerful quake struck western Colombia.
In the viral moment that unfolded Monday morning in Cali,
the 7.4-magnitude earthquake struck the western Colombia.
The quake was the strongest to hit Colombia in more than a decade and sent residents and neighbors of the building, La Torres del Limonar, fleeing into the street, “some in sleepwear or pajamas; some crying, others in shock,” Osorio said.
Osorio told CNN that he heard the building collapse during Monday’s earthquake, and initially thought a construction site had collapsed, but then a man came up to him and told him a residential building had collapsed.
Osorio said, “I started to think about everything that could wrong, but then I made a decision. I took a step forward and told myself I’ll leave it up to God. I then began to call out for survivors.”
The earthquake claimed at least 250 lives, according to authorities, with rescue teams racing to find survivors in Colombia after Monday’s deadly earthquake.
Colombia’s President Abelardo de la Espriella, who had only been in power for days when the disaster struck, said at least 181 people had died and 2,595 were injured, with civilian-run databases estimating nearly 4,000 people still unaccounted for.