Colombia Quake 2026

So this video is a little late in coming, you have to forgive me. I've had no electric, no gas, couldn't charge my phone. The electric's been going in and out, in and out. The computer's on a battery supply, but there's something wrong with it. So even when I got the electric back tonight around seven o'clock, two days later, the computer didn't want to fire up. I've been having a lot of problems with it. I think it fried the video card. I don't know, I've got more to look into. And so there's no real editing to this video because, I don't know, we'll see where we're going to go with this. So the video starts off with me telling what happened a few minutes after it happened. And I've got some videos that I took in the first hour or so. The building next door, which has a lot of damage, my building, which doesn't have much at all. Of note, I'll show you the swimming pool here. That video I took 20 minutes after the earthquake ended and the thing was still sloshing back and forth. I just thought that was kind of interesting. So all the video clips that I located are from Armenia till towards the end. I've got one of Salento, which I thought was interesting, and talk a little bit about the volcano. Today, the president came to Armenia, reassured everybody, talked about what they know so far. The number of houses in Kandiyo, I think it was 6,000 have been destroyed and a lot of people out on the street. And so they've got a fund and he promised that people are going to be lined up for the fund. He's going to help them out. Plus there's a food bank. I don't understand the details of it, but people can go to this food bank. So we'll see how it goes. I personally know somebody whose apartment was shredded and she's kind of out in the street. I think she went to stay with her mother, her and her kids with her mother. And last thing to update you on Sharique, apparently she's okay, but she wants to come to Armenia, ask if she could stay here for a few days with her mother. Aside from her job, she's been building her coffee business and expanded to coca, not coca, sorry, cocao. Bad joke. Chocolate. And they warehouse it here in Armenia. Well, apparently that warehouse collapsed and all their product, millions and millions of pesos of product are buried under rubble. So they're coming here, they got to try to dig it out. They don't know how much of it they'll be able to save. So they're majorly stressed out. Yeah, this is going to be a never-ending thing. I don't know if I can update you on videos. I can't do live anymore, as you know. But depending on what's going on with the computer, I might not be able to do much of anything. So I'm trying to piecemeal this and do it through my phone, which is, well, anyway, I'll talk to you later. Well, it's been quite a, quite the morning, around 7 30 this morning. We got a little earthquake, which is not unusual. Generally there, you notice some, you can feel it, you might see something sway, but it goes away. And they're not here in Armenia. They'll be, you know, 50, 100, 200 miles away. But this morning, one hit and I go, okay, well, here's another one. And it did the usual, it swayed back and forth at first, and then, and then it got violent and it shook up and down and sideways. And if you were to look at a box, the building on an axis, every axis up, down, sideways, left, right, it violently shook. And about probably 30 seconds, 45 seconds into it, I probably should have grabbed my phone and just started recording, but I figured it was just another earthquake. Things got crazy. Pictures on the wall started swinging. I took a picture showing the mark on the wall where the corner had left a scuff. And it's one hell of an arc. Things on top of the refrigerator fell off. Then the refrigerator fell over. That really surprised me. In my studio, everything that wasn't bolted down fell over, hit the floor. I had a whole bunch of coffee cups around in the studio. In the hallway next to my coffee machine, the stand the coffee machine was on tore away from the wall. And the coffee machine, which kind of heavy, it kind of bounced around sideways. So there was a ton of stuff going on. And it lasted, I would say at least a good two minutes. And I don't really exaggerate these things because I don't know, it's just part of life. I was in Ecuador when maybe 11 years ago when that big one hit. And as much damage as that one did, it wasn't near as violent as this one today. It just kept escalating, escalating and didn't seem to want to end. So it was surprising to me. So when it finally stopped, there's been no aftershocks. But when it finally stopped, I went out, looked out my balcony, and there were hundreds of people in the street going over to the median. So I decided to go down, see what was going on, kind of look around the building because it felt violent enough to where there's probably some damage here. So I go down and the people were, it was it was kind of bizarre to me. Look, having a little fear over it, I get that. But the looks on people's faces and the things they were talking about, these people were in terror. And that really surprised me. So I walked around the building and there's cracks in the plaster, you know, the finishing plaster they put on the side of the building. I couldn't find anything structural. I couldn't find anything, any cracks that were deep beyond just the surface layer of the building next door. I think that might have some structural damage because there's some pretty serious cracks in the building next door. About 15-20 minutes after the earthquake, I was still downstairs trying to, well hopefully my electric comes back, my phone's almost dead. And I walked over to the swimming pool. It was still swaying back and forth, back and forth. That was surprising. So my first thought was it's picking up an aftershock and so I'll be feeling something, you know, any moment. Well that never came. So it was it was just leftover energy in that pool still rocking it back and forth. Because, I mean, obviously there's not normally waves in the swimming pool. It's usually dead still. So I got, excuse me, I got tired of sitting around. So I decided to go back upstairs. Now the lights in the building are on and I just decided I'm in the little recreation area. Okay, let's see if I can show it. Phone's complaining, doesn't want me to move. It's funny, it'll move on its own whenever it wants. All right, let's try this. So anyway, I'm down here in this area and I plugged my charger in, plugged it into the phone and lo and behold, it's taking a charge and I was down to like five percent. Now the internet, it's crazy. I mean, I've got all the bars and it says 4G and it should be good. I'm not getting anything. Like if I send a message on WhatsApp, it hangs up there for an hour. If I open Facebook and look through it, I can see see things. But if I try to add something, it just gets caught. I mean, I had some video clips I took this morning and we're what, four and a half hours later, five hours later and it's, they're still hung up in there. So if I, it did get a little bit better. I'll get a ding once in a while. You might have just heard one. Once in a while I get a ding and I'll get a message through. That didn't happen for the first three and a half hours or so. So I don't know, I don't know what's going on with the internet. It just seems throttled. So it's, it's kind of unusable. I did get a message from William if I was okay and I'm thinking, you know, maybe if I, if William wants to drive me around, we could take some, I have no idea what's going on out there because I can't, I can't get really any news articles. Somebody sent me a message that said Pareto was hit kind of hard. Well, I don't think it could have been any harder than what I felt this morning. So I'm thinking if Pareto was hit hard here in Armenia, it's got to be about equal. So I sent a message to William that, of course, got hung up saying, hey, if you want to drive me around, I can do videos and, you know, to let people know what's going on. Of course, maybe other people are doing that. It's not necessary. I just don't know. I don't know what's happening. It's quite a beautiful day. It's kind of hot as hell. If I go out walking, I won't be able to see that much because I'm detached from most of Armenia and I can't walk. I can walk now and I can go out now. I just can't go 10 miles or even five miles. I mean, I'll be lucky if I can go a mile. In that distance, there's not much here and most of what's here is relatively new builds. So I'd be surprised if there's any kind of real damage. The new building across the street that I filmed as they were building it, it's open now. I didn't see anything with that building. It looked fine and they're right next to it, which I've shown in Coffee Time before, right next to it there's a building in construction. It's probably three quarters of the way up. I didn't see anything. Of course, you saw the workers get the hell out of there quite a ways away standing around looking at that was this morning. Now everybody's found a place to go. Some people went back up to their apartments. I did. I went back up to my apartment and I swept up all the broken glass, picked up a whole bunch of things that were, you know, got knocked over. Again, I'm quite surprised at the extent of damage. In my apartment, a refrigerator falling off. This is not a small refrigerator. This is a full-size Samsung refrigerator. I have no idea how it decided. I saw it. It was walking away from the wall because it's got the stands but it's got wheels that are in there. Now it doesn't just, it's not always on wheels but the wheels are close by and if you go to move it you can kind of kick them down and then you move it on wheels. Well, the vibrations must have kicked it down because this thing first kind of moved it, kind of walked it around so it moved at about 90 degrees and then as it got more and more violent, it just fell over. It hit, there's a wall there for the laundry room and because it had walked around to that 90 degrees from where it had been, when it fell over it hit that wall so it was probably on an angle like this. So it's not like it fell over and hit the floor. It would have if the wall wasn't there. I got a TV mounted on the wall but I splurged and got one of those mounts that you can pull out and angle and it's a really heavy duty mount and no problem. Didn't tear anything away from the wall but it did flop the TV out which kind of also surprised me because there's a lot of pressure on that if you try to do it by hand. So anyway, that was my morning and now I'm sitting here charging up my phone and if I can get 50-60 percent of a charge, which it says about an hour, what I'll do is I'll start walking around this neighborhood and see what I see. I mean the building next door is kind of a mess so it may be superficial. It just it looks like because of the extent of these cracks, how wide they range and some look pretty deep, there may be some structural issues with it. But what I will say in Armenia because they had an earthquake in 99 and no tall building fell over but they upped the standards. So everything built after that, which out here in Oro Negro, the barrio I live in, they were all built after that. So they're built to earthquake standards that are as good or better. They had sent it to San Francisco earthquake standards and then two years, I believe it was two years later, they actually created new standards that exceeded the ones that are currently in San Francisco. So that's pretty good earthquake building and this building, as far as I'm concerned, this building proved it out because as violent as that shaking was, I expected that there'd be some damage here and all it was the the wall stucco, this stuff that's for appearance. Some of that cracked and little pieces flaked off but nothing that I could see of any consequence. And while I live on the 13th floor, which is technically the top floor, there's four levels of parking garage beneath. So it's actually 17 floor building, which is pretty good here in Armenia. It's pretty tall. So I guess that's it for now. I'll let you know if anything changes. Ciao. Laura, come over here. Laura, my God. Oh my God. Oh my God, my God. Oh my God. There just happened to be an eruption. There just happened to be an eruption. Emission of gas from the puracell. There just happened to be an eruption of gas and ash from the puracell. This morning, the desperate search for survivors across Colombia after a massive 7.4 earthquake rocked the country Monday. The deadly earthquake, the most powerful to hit the country in more than a decade, leaving a trail of destruction in multiple cities. The quake's epicenter coming close to heavily populated areas. Cities like Pereira and Cali hit particularly hard. Entire apartment buildings seen splitting apart, leaving clouds of dust and rubble. At least 61 buildings collapsed and over 1600 homes damaged or destroyed. Residents seen fleeing as structures around them crumbled. In Cali, at least 20 buildings collapsed, falling to the ground. Rescuers using their bare hands and buckets to scoop debris as they search for any signs of life. Amid the devastation, a remarkable rescue. The six-month-old baby, covered in dust, pulled alive from the rubble. And a woman is seen being pulled through this hole in a hospital that had partially collapsed. She was tied to a rescuer who then rappelled them both down the wall to safety. Travelers at the airport taking cover under a counter, desperately waiting for the shaking to stop. Parts of the ceiling falling just feet away. Elsewhere, cars seen shaking violently on the street. In Manizales, video capturing parts of this historic cathedral collapsing. One of the spires falling sideways. Nearby, people stranded in a cable car in the air, wires shaking. 7.4 the mountain answer. In the dark, the dust rose up. But hands reach down through the rubble. Voices calling through the night. Strangers becoming family in the moment. When we fought. 27 years of memory. The city knew this dance before. 1999, they stood there. Now they're standing at the door. This isn't speculation. This is real. This is the weight. This is coffee farmers' daughters. This is the A government moving. A flying in. But the grief doesn't care. Every rubble stone is someone's address. Someone's prayer. Aftershocks keep coming. The earth's not done yet. But watch what a broken place does. Watch them forget that they're broken and stand up. Watch them rebuild. Watch the coffee triangle rise. Watch hands that are filled with nothing but dirt and determination. That's the story. That's the moment. That's where we find glory. The mountain will settle. The dust will come down. And the city that suffered will hold its own ground. There's work in the rubble and work in the night. There's strength in the struggle. There's dawn after night. Armenia has seen this. Armenia knows how to bend without breaking. To stand and stand now. The earth shook. The people held. That's the story. That's all to tell.