A chilling video recorded from the heights 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 its Facebook account, convey the distress experienced by the workers at dozens of meters in height, as the structure sways and one of them tries to keep calm among his colleagues.
"Everyone stay still, everyone stay still, stay still, stay still, everyone. My God, Lord. My God. Beloved, my God, Holy Father," is heard from the worker, his voice trembling with fear.
With no way to leave the structure immediately while the movement continued, the man began to pray aloud.
"Eternal Father, Holy Father, lovely Little Father, help us, help us, my God," she implored.
The seconds pass as the workers remain attached to the structure, waiting for the shaking to subside.
When the movement finally began to subside, the worker asked his companions to descend calmly.
"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, but where the tremor was intense enough to cause evacuations and scenes of panic.
The earthquake was recorded at 7:34 a.m. local time, with its epicenter near San José del Palmar, in the Chocó department of northwestern Colombia.
The movement was felt intensely 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 increased 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 suffered damage.
El Chocó, where the epicenter was located and which lies in a region of high seismic activity due to the convergence of several tectonic plates, also reported casualties and severe damage.
Among the most affected areas 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) activated 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, a figure that may change as the extent of the damage becomes clearer.
The earthquake ranks among the strongest recorded in Colombia in recent decades and exceeded in magnitude the devastating quake of the Coffee Axis in 1999, which resulted in over 1,000 deaths and destroyed a large part of Armenia.
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