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National toll and infrastructure

National earthquake toll rises to 239 dead, 3,755 injured and 287 missing

Editorial illustration for “National earthquake toll rises to 239 dead, 3,755 injured and 287 missing”
Illustration éditoriale En Colombie

A new national assessment cut off at 7:30 a.m. Colombia time on August 12 records 239 people dead, 3,755 injured and 287 missing after the magnitude 7.4 earthquake. Caracol Radio published it at 11:02 a.m. and attributed it to an UNGRD consolidation confirmed by the Presidency; Cadena SER carried the same totals later in the day.

A preliminary toll across 14 departments

The consolidation covers Valle del Cauca, Risaralda, Chocó, Caldas, Antioquia, Bolívar, Putumayo, Cundinamarca, Norte de Santander, Sucre, Tolima, Huila, Quindío and Cauca. It records 24,324 families, or 49,214 affected people.

The figures are preliminary and may change as searches, victim identification and assessments of isolated areas continue.

Homes and buildings affected

The new tally counts 9,215 destroyed homes and 45,457 damaged homes. It also lists 140 collapsed buildings without establishing whether that category overlaps with housing.

These categories describe nationally recorded damage; they do not by themselves establish how many people were displaced or rehoused.

Schools and health facilities

The toll lists 1,667 schools and 530 health facilities as affected. “Affected” does not necessarily mean destroyed or closed.

Local assessments are still needed to distinguish minor damage, evacuation, closure and loss of service capacity.

A change that cannot be calculated mechanically

UNGRD Situation Report No. 014, cut off at 7:20 p.m. on August 11, counted 181 deaths, 2,774 injured people and 320 rescued people. It gave no new missing-person total. The earlier figure of 195 missing people came from a presidential briefing with a different scope.

Without a methodology note accompanying the new consolidation, differences between successive cutoffs do not show how many cases were added, reclassified or verified.

What remains to be clarified

A full breakdown by department and municipality has not yet been published with these totals. Authorities also need to clarify the definitions of affected families and people and the operational status of schools and health facilities.

The timeline places this development at 11:00 a.m., based on the first original publication found at 11:02:39 a.m. The 7:30 a.m. data cutoff remains visible without being presented as the publication time.

Sources and transparency