Colombia Declares Emergency; Quake Toll May Be 1,000

President Cesar Gaviria declared a state of emergency Thursday in the remote mountain valley devastated by an earthquake and avalanche after government officials said the tragedy had claimed up to 1,000 lives.

Government officials appealed for donations of clothes, blankets and kitchen utensils to help thousands of refugees who lost their homes and farms in Monday’s disaster in the poor and mainly Indian Paez River valley, about 180 miles southwest of Bogota.

The catastrophe was Colombia’s worst natural disaster since the 1985 eruption of the Nevado del Ruiz volcano, which buried the town of Armero, killing 23,000.

The official death toll from the 6.4-magnitude quake stood at 253, but Omar Dario Cardona, director of the National Disaster Prevention Office, said at his emergency operations center in the southern city of Neiva that the full number of dead may never be known because “a lot of survivors have buried their family members on the spot.”

His assistant, Juan Manuel Uribe, said in Bogota that “from what we are seeing and given the difficulty of finding a lot of people, we can’t rule out the possibility that the number of victims is higher than 1,000.”