A chilling video recorded from the top of a construction site in Bogotá captured the moment when several workers had to cling to the beams as the structure violently swayed during the 7.4 magnitude earthquake that shook Colombia on Monday morning.
The images, shared by the newspaper El Colombiano on their X account, convey the distress experienced by the workers dozens of meters above the ground, as the structure sways and one of them tries to keep calm among his colleagues.
"Everyone stay still, everyone stay still, still, still, everyone. My God, Lord. My God. Beloved, my God, Holy Father," the worker can be heard saying, his voice trembling with fear.
With no possibility of leaving the structure immediately while continuing the movement, the man began to pray aloud.
"Eternal Father, Holy Father, dear little Father, help us, help us, my God," she pleaded.
The seconds pass as the workers remain anchored to the structure, waiting for the shaking to stop.
When the movement finally began to subside, the worker asked his colleagues to descend without rushing.
“Let’s go down, but calmly, let’s go down now, calmly, calmly,” he indicated.
The video became one of the most striking testimonies of how the earthquake was experienced in Bogotá, a city located hundreds of kilometers from the epicenter, yet where the tremor was intense enough to cause evacuations and scenes of panic.
The earthquake was registered at 7:34 a.m. local time and had its epicenter near San José del Palmar, in the Chocó department of northwestern Colombia.
The movement was felt strongly in Bogotá, Medellín, Cali, Manizales, Pereira, and Barranquilla, as well as in areas of Ecuador and Panama.
In the Colombian capital, authorities initiated preventive evacuations in numerous buildings while emergency teams began assessing potential damage.
The situation was much more serious in other regions of the country.
According to preliminary figures that raised the number of fatalities to over a hundred, at least 111 people died and 87 were injured, while more than 60 buildings collapsed and 1,575 homes were damaged.
Chocó, where the epicenter was located and which is in an area of high seismic activity due to the convergence of several tectonic plates, also recorded casualties and severe damage.
Among the areas most affected by structural damage are cities in the Coffee Axis, particularly Pereira and Manizales, as well as Cali and Buenaventura.
While rescue teams continued to search for survivors among the rubble, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) issued an orange alert, indicating a scenario with the potential for significant human and economic losses.
The U.S. agency initially estimated the probable range of fatalities to be between 100 and 1,000, an estimate that may be adjusted as the extent of the damages becomes clearer.
The earthquake ranks among the strongest recorded in Colombia in recent decades and surpassed in magnitude the devastating quake of the Coffee Triangle in 1999, which left more than 1,000 dead and destroyed a significant part of Armenia.
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