Under a tent that shades their hours of anguish, the relatives of five of the people who were in the tower of the Valle University Hospital, which collapsed due to the earthquake last Monday in Colombia, continue to await the definitive removal of the rubble. Parents, daughters, siblings, or uncles take turns so as not to leave the place until they recover their loved ones and verify that the work of specialized organizations resumes. In the first 48 hours of the search, a 24-year-old nursing assistant student and another woman with her two-month-old baby were rescued alive, as well as the body of an 80-year-old man who died.
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The uncertainty of the families takes place in a parking lot of a neighboring Legal Medicine site, on the other side of a chain-link gate that prevents them from approaching the exact site where the block collapsed. Giant concrete slabs, walls, and fallen glass, from the sixth to the third floor, remained supported on the second level on unstable ground. The HUV has operated for 70 years as the main high-complexity public hospital in Cali and the southwest of the country. On the day of the emergency, doctors and nurses had to evacuate patients to external areas to protect them from the risk of further structural damage.
Diego Fernando Jaramillo Restrepo is the brother of Héctor Asdrubal Jaramillo Restrepo, a 55-year-old patient who was recovering from a tracheostomy since late July on the fourth floor of the medical center. “The hospital lists my brother as deceased, but we have not had the body. Support groups of rescuers have come, but they come and go,” he says from the access gate, resigned to waiting and without visibility toward the collapse point.
Héctor Asdrubal’s daughters assure that their father showed signs of life after the earthquake. They keep screenshots of cell phones recording two answered calls from their father’s phone hours after the tremor: Monday at 4:36 pm lasting 7 seconds and another on Monday at 5:24 pm lasting 6 seconds. His father’s surgery prevented him from speaking. The last WhatsApp connection appears on Wednesday at 8:32 am.
“It has been total uncertainty. They say they will work day and night when that is not the case. Time passes and what they tell us is that they are evaluating the infrastructure, but we do not know an action plan,” says Daniela Jiménez, 27, one of the daughters. “There is frustration and fatigue,” she adds.
In a video released on the hospital’s social networks, director Irne Torres Castro explains the complexities. “In a situation of this magnitude, any rescuer is at risk. We understand and share the families’ pain, but it is the technicians who determine how to do the work,” he states. In the current search phase, led by the Specialized Urban Search and Rescue Group and Bogotá Firefighters, the Red Cross and specialized teams from the United States and Israel have participated and conducted inspections. In a video published on the hospital’s official Instagram account, the hospital has reported on the progress of the rescue efforts.
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Luz Stella Murillo, another relative, lost communication with her daughter, Yulieth Gutiérrez, who was accompanying her youngest son, 14 years old, a hospital patient, after the earthquake. The following Tuesday they told her that the grandson had died. “They took us to the scene. They explained that they were now using heavy machinery to rescue bodies. But on Thursday nothing moved, on Friday nothing moved. Cranes arrive and are sent back,” she emphasizes. Near her, the relatives of patient José Guillermo Roncancio, 65 years old, who was with his wife as a companion on the day of the tragedy, also await news.
On the night of last Friday, President Abelardo de la Espriella visited the medical center along with the governor of Valle, Dilian Francisca Toro. He announced funds of 4.386 billion pesos (1.5 million dollars) for the equipment of the oncological functional unit and resources for leasing infrastructure to facilitate service provision. However, he did not clarify the recovery efforts for the victims nor did he approach the relatives who were protesting on nearby roads.
Only the next day did the mayor of Cali, Alejandro Eder, go to the place where the families remain and committed to accompany them. “They are preparing the ground to enter with heavy cranes to be able to remove the rubble in an orderly manner that gives greater dignity to the victims and greater care to avoid causing more damage,” he specified on his social networks.
Behind the gate that separates the relatives from the site where until a few days ago they could visit the patients, a crane remains stopped. In a drone photograph taken by EL PAÍS on the afternoon of Saturday, August 15, two rescuers can be seen performing search work, suspended by ropes on the sides of the structure.
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“As you can see, the machine is just standing there,” says Murillo.
