{"id":368342,"date":"2026-08-11T12:40:08","date_gmt":"2026-08-11T12:40:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/368342\/"},"modified":"2026-08-11T12:40:08","modified_gmt":"2026-08-11T12:40:08","slug":"flights-from-colombia-land-at-mia-hours-after-earthquake-nbc-6-south-florida","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/368342\/","title":{"rendered":"Flights from Colombia land at MIA hours after earthquake \u2013 NBC 6 South Florida"},"content":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s a desperate search for survivors after a 7.4 magnitude earthquake shook Colombia<\/a> Monday morning. More than 100 people are confirmed dead.<\/p>\n

Keylah Villarroel said for minutes there was nothing but she or her mom could do but pray.<\/p>\n

\u201cMe and my mom grabbed each other’s hand and praying and hoping that everything was going to be OK,\u201d Villarroel said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Villarroel and her mother have spent the last couple of weeks in Bogot\u00e1, Colombia, visiting family. The Miami natives were in a taxi heading to the airport Monday morning when Villarroel said the car started rocking back and forth.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs well with the motorcycles, everything was really scary,\u201d Villarroel said. \u201cFirst time in an earthquake especially over a bridge, with a bunch of people around, everyone was pointing and scared, holding each other\u2019s hands because you didn’t really know what was going to happen.\u201d<\/p>\n

By Monday night, at least 132 people were confirmed dead. More than a thousand buildings are damaged.<\/p>\n

Villarroel says her family is safe, but some of her relatives who live on El Tolima have damage to their home.<\/p>\n

\u201cI’ve never been in an earthquake before so I didn’t know what to do, but I was just trying to keep calm, deep breaths, communicating with my family members,\u201d Villarroel said.<\/p>\n

NBC6 talked with Villarroel and others who landed in Miami Monday from Colombia.<\/p>\n

\u201cEverything was moving, the traffic lights, people coming out of the buildings, panic,\u201d Luis Garces said.<\/p>\n

The focus now is finding people and sending help. Miami-Dade County Chairman Anthony Rodriguez said the county is prepared to send a task force to the country. He also said they’ll look to send canned food, health care materials, medication and diapers to Colombia once they send their task force over.<\/p>\n

\u201cOf course the regular stuff we do is collect materials to send over but in addition to that we want to make sure we send support right away for search and rescue,\u201d Miami-Dade County Chairman Anthony Rodriguez said.<\/p>\n

Frantic rescue efforts are just getting started. Villarroel said she’s grateful.<\/p>\n

\u201cEven though it was very scary thank God everyone is OK, but it was a moment where we were terrified to see what was going to happen or who was going to get hurt,\u201d Villarroel said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There\u2019s a desperate search for survivors after a 7.4 magnitude earthquake shook Colombia Monday morning. More than 100…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":368343,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[35358,123,125,124],"class_list":["post-368342","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-miami","tag-earthquakes","tag-miami","tag-miami-headlines","tag-miami-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/368342","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=368342"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/368342\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/368343"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=368342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=368342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=368342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}