Colombia’s earthquake tore apart this family with triplets. Only one survived

A Single Survivor from a Family of Seven: How Colombia’s Worst Earthquake in Decades Shattered One Household

Activelifezero.com – When the ground beneath Cali split open on August 10, sending a 7.4-magnitude tremor through western Colombia, the Saavedra Caycedo apartment was reduced to a pile of concrete and rebar. Hours later, rescue workers hauled out one woman — Ana María Saavedra Caycedo — clutching injuries to both arms and a fractured pelvis. She was the only member of her immediate family who walked away alive.

The quake, the most lethal to strike Colombia in decades, flattened neighborhoods across the country’s second-largest metro area. Satellite imagery captured the scale of destruction: more than 12,000 homes reduced to rubble, over 100 buildings completely leveled, and a death toll that has already climbed past 294 confirmed fatalities. Colombia’s National Unit for Disaster Risk Management reported roughly 320 people still missing and nearly 4,000 injured as of the latest official count. Rescue crews continue digging through debris while families flood social media with desperate pleas to locate vanished relatives.

The Hours After the Collapse

Search-and-rescue teams reached the Saavedra Caycedo building almost immediately and maintained a continuous operation for days. Neighbors, friends, and extended family members poured into the streets, offering hands, information, and whatever aid they could muster. Over the following hours and days, six more bodies were extracted from the wreckage.

The triplets — Ana Maria, Sofia, and Isabella Saavedra Caycedo — had all been inside the apartment when the structure gave way. Their father, Jair Saavedra, and their mother, Vicky Caycedo, were discovered still holding each other in their final moments. Uncle Diego Caycedo lay beside them. Sofia was confirmed dead at the scene. Isabella’s remains were the last to be recovered from the collapsed structure, according to the triplets’ cousin, Camila Martínez Sierra.

Ana María, pulled from beneath the debris after spending hours trapped in the dark, faced a reality no one could have prepared her for: she was alone. Every person she had called family that morning was gone.

A Fundraising Effort and a Long Road Ahead

A GoFundMe campaign organized by surviving relatives has already drawn thousands of small donations. The page describes Ana María as having undergone surgery and now confronting “a long recovery process.” The family’s stated goal is to give her a stable footing — physically and emotionally — so she can rebuild without the added burden of financing her own survival.

The triplets, the campaign notes, had recently completed their university degrees and were working together. Their family wrote on the fundraising page:

“They had dreams, plans, and a whole life ahead of them. We want Ana María to have a solid foundation to recover physically and emotionally and to restart her life, without also having to worry about how to pay for everything that is to come.”

Memories Frozen in Time

Camila Martínez Sierra has posted photographs and video clips to Instagram showing the family at large gatherings, beach outings, parties, and quiet evenings around a nighttime bonfire. One image captures the group in matching white outfits and black hats, seated poolside with broad smiles at what appears to be a reunion. Another frames them huddled together as flames flicked in the dark.

“I can only look at these videos and photos with a heart full of memories and a mix of love, nostalgia, and a pain I still don’t know how to explain,” Martínez Sierra wrote. “Here are our reunions, the laughter, the hugs, the family moments, my uncles, the triplets … moments we lived without imagining that one day we would look at these images in such a different way.”

On Friday she added a direct appeal to her followers:

“Our hearts are broken by the loss of my uncle Jairo and Vicky and my cousins Sofía and Isabella. Now is the time to stay united and be there for our cousin Ana. Every bit of help, prayer, donation, and sharing counts.”

The Broader Toll and What Comes Next

The Saavedra Caycedo losses are one thread in a vast tapestry of grief stretching across Cali and surrounding municipalities. The August 10 event was the deadliest seismic disaster Colombia has endured in several decades, compounding years of infrastructure strain in a city where aging buildings and dense informal settlements amplify shaking. Authorities have warned that aftershocks and secondary collapses could extend the rescue window for days, while hospitals remain overwhelmed with orthopedic and traumatic injuries.

For Ana María, the immediate crisis has shifted from survival to reconstruction — of her body, her household, and her sense of a future that, until August 10, included three sisters, two parents, and an uncle. The earthquake, as Martínez Sierra put it, compressed an entire lifetime of ordinary closeness into a single, irreversible rupture.

“One never thinks that a photo can become such a precious memory, nor that a hug that seemed so ordinary could become something we would keep forever in our hearts. This earthquake changed our lives in a matter of seconds. It reminded us, in the most painful way, that nothing is guaranteed and that many times we put off a hug, a phone call, an ‘I love you,’ a meeting, a visit.”

As rescue operations continue and the missing count slowly converts into confirmed deaths, the question facing Colombia’s communities is no longer whether the shaking will stop, but how a society rebuilds when entire family units vanish in a single afternoon. For now, in Cali and beyond, the answer is being written one donation, one prayer, and one stubborn act of solidarity at a time.