The United Nations (UN) announced this Thursday an investigation that estimates around 1.2 million people need humanitarian assistance following the earthquake that struck western Colombia.
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According to a review conducted through the Humanitarian Response Plan of its Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the UN and its partners need US$135 million to respond to the emergency in the Latin American country.
This is because assistance is needed for about 671,000 people in the most affected areas, mainly in Risaralda, Valle del Cauca, Chocó, and Caldas, with food, shelter, healthcare, water and sanitation, education, cash assistance, and protection services.
The agency also noted that humanitarian teams are already deployed in several areas, but access remains uneven. More than 400 roads were damaged by the earthquake and, in rural and more remote areas, these damages add to logistical difficulties that already existed before the earthquake, according to the UN.
The humanitarian response and recovery specialist from the International Organization for Migration (IOM), Jean-Philippe Antolin, stated from the Colombian city of Quibdó that “practically everything remains urgent” and that the full extent of the emergency is still unclear.
This is because ten days after the earthquake there are still communities where assistance has not been able to arrive regularly. “There are communities that have still not been accessed, or have only been reached once”, Antolin explained online to journalists at the UN headquarters in New York.
According to the agency, the latest official figures on victims after the earthquake indicate that more than 300 people have died, 426 remain missing, and more than 4,500 were injured in 472 municipalities across 15 departments of Colombia.
Additionally, more than 134,000 homes are damaged and nearly 30,000 were destroyed. For many families, even the homes that remain standing cannot yet be considered safe.
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“From the outside, some may not seem affected. But if you go inside, you see cracks everywhere,” Antolin explained, adding that “people are sleeping outside for fear that the roof will collapse on them”.
For those families, one of the most urgent needs is to know if their home is safe. Structural assessments continue while thousands of people look for places to stay.
The IOM has identified at least 71 temporary collective shelters, where about 4,700 people live, equivalent to nearly 1,400 households, in Valle del Cauca, Risaralda, Chocó, and Caldas.
Many others have settled with relatives, rented a home temporarily, or remain in improvised spaces. This makes it difficult to locate them and determine what assistance they need.
“We do not want shelters to become magnets (for aid), as if they were the only places where people can access assistance,” Antolin warned in this regard.
A situation worsened by the heavy rains recorded in places like Quibdó, Buenaventura, and Pereira, which are further complicating the lives of those sleeping in shelters, schools, churches, public buildings, or open spaces.
“The rain is also facilitating the spread of vector-borne diseases, such as dengue”, warned the IOM specialist.
