Colombian quake kills over 1000

ARMENIA (Colombia), Jan 26: The death toll surpassed 1,000 today from a powerful earthquake that destroyed nearly two-thirds of all the buildings in a western Colombian city, reports AP.

Stunned residents in Colombia's coffee belt chose to wait out the night around bonfires rather than venture back into their crumpled homes following the magnitude 6 quake, which injured hundreds.

The earthquake flattened cities and towns across western Colombia on Monday afternoon, rattling buildings as far away as the capital, Bogota, 225 kilometers from the epicenter.

Hundreds of the dead lived in Armenia, a city of 220,000 residents where entire neighborhoods were reduced to rubble and left without water or electricity, and where residents say relief has been slow to arrive.

Capt Ciro Antonio Guiza, the city's deputy fire chief, said rescue workers were so strapped that many bodies remained on the streets uncollected.

"There are more than 1,000 dead, perhaps more than 2,000 in Armenia alone," he said.

Hundreds of bodies were trapped in 25 buildings that collapsed, he said. In one 10-story apartment building alone, an estimated 60 people were crushed to death, Guiza said.

Some 700 buildings were destroyed and 180,000 people left homeless in Armenia alone, Colombian Red Cross official Carlos Gilberto Giraldo told The Associated Press.

The injured were being evacuated by air to Bogota, Medellin and Cali, and by road to nearby Manizales, he said. Without refrigerator trucks to store the hundreds of rotting corpses, epidemics could break out, worried Giraldo.

Guiza said 60 per cent of the city was destroyed. Worst hit were the poor southern districts. Some 340 bodies were collected at a makeshift morgue but it would be hours before hundreds more could be recovered, he said.

"There's no way to measure this crisis," said Alvaro Patino, Armenia's mayor.

As Colombians reeled from the worst temblor to hit the country since a 1994 earthquake killed 800 people, relief efforts continued through the night.

Landslides - which had slowed the arrival of rescue equipment and supplies - were cleared, and convoys of government vehicles with cranes and other heavy equipment converged on the disaster zone.

An air force plane shuttled rescue equipment, medical supplies, food and blankets to the region late Monday.

Schools and stadiums were converted to makeshift shelters and morgues.

More than 350 people were treated at the Southern Hospital in Armenia, where blood smeared the floors and walls and patients spent the night huddled on rusted gurneys. Doctors said at least 40 people had been pronounced dead at the facility.

Armenia's three-story fire station tumbled in pieces onto its 14 vehicles. At least nine people were killed when the building's concrete floors and pillars came crashing down. Officers were also feared killed in the collapse of a police barracks.

Five members of the Colombian professional soccer club Atletico Quindio - three Argentines and two Brazilians - were also feared dead in the ruins of a hotel in downtown Armenia.

"There isn't a point in the city's geography which was not affected by this horrific tragedy," Patino told RCN radio. "We need everything... medicine, clothes... electric generators," he said, urging Colombians in the United States to send aid.

Monday's quake was the deadliest since 1975, when about 1,000 people died in a tremor near Cucuta, a border city with Venezuela.

Colombia's worst disaster was a 1985 volcanic eruption in central Tolima state that destroyed an entire town and killed 23,000 people.