20 bodies recovered, 100 missing after Colombian landslide

Tuesday 07th December, 04:34 AM JST

BELLO, Colombia —

Rescue workers recovered 20 bodies but said more than 100 people remained missing and feared dead Monday following a landslide that buried a poor Medellin suburb in tons of sodden soil.

Sunday’s landslide was triggered by Colombia’s worst rains in at least 40 years, which also have driven thousands from their homes and damaged coffee and flower crops.

Claudia Patricia Molina, 37, lost her home. She was about four blocks away, visiting friends, when she heard “what sounded as if someone had placed a bomb, and smoke rose.”

“It shook powerfully and when we looked over we saw rocks falling,” she added. A couple who lived next to Molina were buried alive with their 2-year-old daughter, she said.

Thirty brick homes were buried by at least 1.7 million cubic feet (50,000 cubic meters) of earth, said John Rendon, disaster coordinator for Antioquia state, where the suburb of Bello is located.

“The weather was good yesterday, and also today, but the soil is saturated and it gave,” he told The Associated Press.

Interior Minister German Vargas told reporters that 20 bodies had been recovered and that more than 100 people remained missing Monday.

That brought the death toll from floods and mudslides triggered by this year’s rainfall to 196, said the director of Colombia’s national disaster management office, Luz Amanda Pulido.

Last year, 110 people died in rainfall-related calamities, while 48 were killed in 2008, Colombian Red Cross director of national relief operations Carlos Ivan Marquez told the AP recently.

This year’s rains—exacerbated by the La Nina weather phenomenon—are the heaviest in the 42 years since the country’s weather service was created and started keeping records, agency director Ricardo Lozano said.

The national government says 1.6 million people have either lost their homes or had homes suffer partial damage. About 70% to 80% live in inundated flood plains and have not abandoned them “because they don’t want to leave their homes and belongings for fear of losing everything,” Pulido said.

In Antioquia, nearly five out of six municipalities have declared emergencies due to the rains.

Colombia’s agriculture minister, Juan Camilo Restrepo, said in a radio interview Monday that while 5% of the country’s croplands have been flooded this year, there is no shortage of food. The coffee and flower industries reported serious crop damage that they said would hurt exports, however.

Colombia has two rainy seasons. The first extends from March through June. The second begins in September and normally ends in mid-December.