Emergency teams are racing to find the mother of a baby who was rescued from the rubble of a collapsed building following the deadly 7.4 magnitude earthquake that struck Colombia on Monday.
Three-month-old Salomón was pulled alive from the five-story residential building in Cali after a bystander heard his father’s faint voice rising from the debris: “I’m here. I’m with a baby.”
Video of the remarkable rescue shows the infant in a dust-covered bodysuit being carefully pulled out of the wreckage. His father, Juan David Gómez, can be seen lying awkwardly on his side with his arm bloodied, still half-trapped beneath a concrete plank.
Now, as Salomón and his father recover in hospital, a desperate search is on for the baby’s mother, Valentina Vanegas Galiano, a 29-year-old architect, who remains trapped under the rubble of the same building, the Torres del Limonar, alongside her younger brother.
Valentina’s friends and colleagues — including architects, engineers and construction workers — have joined emergency crews and firefighters in the search.
