Strangers Lift Slab by Hand to Save Baby Trapped in Colombia Quake
According to CNN, when a 7.4 magnitude earthquake tore through Colombia on Monday, Brian Osorio Zuluaga rushed home on his motorbike, only to be stopped by the sight of a collapsed five-story building in Cali. He began shouting into the wreckage, ignoring warnings of a possible gas leak. Then he asked everyone around him to go silent.
A faint voice answered from beneath the rubble: “Yes, I’m here. I’m with a baby.”
Osorio and others dug through the debris by hand until a concrete slab blocked their path. It took the group working together to lift it. “On the first attempt, we couldn’t lift it,” he told CNN. “Then we all lifted together, one, two, three, up.”
Underneath, a baby boy lay trapped, his skin turning purple from lack of oxygen. As rescuers cleared the rubble around him, color slowly returned to his face.
The baby was handed to a police officer and rushed to an ambulance. The man who had been shielding him, still trapped under a concrete plank, was freed soon after.
According to CNN’s reporting, search and rescue efforts across Colombia entered their third day Wednesday, with the death toll surpassing 200. In Cali, a woman was pulled alive from the rubble Tuesday to cheers from the crowd. In Pereira, a CNN team on the ground saw rescuers and volunteers form human chains to clear debris from a collapsed apartment building.