Rescuers desperately searching for survivors in the wreckage left by the strongest earthquake to hit Colombia in over a decade miraculously found a baby beneath the rubble and pulled the child to safety.
Dramatic footage shows several searchers encircling a recess underneath a collapsed building and carefully lifting up debris, revealing a dust-covered man cradling a baby in his arms.
The rescuers then gingerly took the tiny infant from the man and lifted him to safety.
Moments earlier, one of the men, Brian Osorio Zuluaga, had left his office in Cali and was trying to quickly make it home on his motorbike, but was forced to stop by the collapse of destroyed building, La Torres del Limonar, a five-story apartment complex.
As he approached the rubble, he told CNN he heard the faintest of sounds rising from within, and called out into the darkness.
“Yes, I’m here. I’m with a baby,” a man replied.
Zuluaga and the other men quickly worked to clear the debris blocking access to the man and child, but progress was halted when they encountered a large concrete slab that seemed too heavy to move.
“On the first attempt, we couldn’t lift it,” he told the outlet. But then, “we all lifted together — one, two, three, up.”
Several of the men propped up the slab while others focused on clearing a safe path to the baby, who appeared to be in rough shape.
“You can see the baby’s little head there, which, at the time, looked sort of purplish because he couldn’t breathe,” Osorio said.
“Once we started removing the rubble, the baby began to … breathe, and his color started to come back.”
Osario said he was handed the baby boy and passed him to a police officer, who took him away in an ambulance as the volunteers pressed on to rescue the trapped man.
He said moving the seemingly unmovable slab shows what is possible when people united for a shared purpose work together.
“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. “Every bit helps.”
The 7.4-magnitude quake struck western Colombia on Monday, leaving devastation in its wake as volunteers raced to rescue as many victims as possible.
At least 250 people are dead and more than 2,500 injured, with as many as 4,000 still missing.
With Post wires
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