An earthquake of magnitude 7.4 struck western Colombia on Monday morning. The epicentre was near San Jose del Palmar, in the department of Choco. The count so far, announced by the Colombian president: at least 111 dead, 87 injured, 1,575 damaged houses and 37 completely destroyed.

Pereira was hit hardest, one of the central cities in the country's coffee region. At least 47 people died there alone. In Cali, the mayor said 26 buildings had collapsed and that rescue teams were still searching for people under the rubble. That is the key figure in any disaster of this kind - not how much has fallen, but how many people are still under it.

The building that vanished in a second

After the quake, footage appeared online from Pereira showing a building collapse to its foundations practically in an instant. It doesn't sway, it doesn't lean, it gives nobody time to run out. It simply goes down.

That is the image that separates a prepared state from an unprepared one. A magnitude 7.4 earthquake is strong, but it isn't a rare event - Colombia sits on the boundary of three tectonic plates and knows it sits there. The question that always follows footage like this isn't about the magnitude, but about the concrete: who approved that building, to what standards was it built, and did anyone check at all.

The region is known for coffee, not for seismic infrastructure. But when a country builds for decades on an active fault system, the excuse "nobody expected it" stops working.

Why this isn't distant news

The Balkans know this scene. Skopje 1963, Zagreb and Petrinja 2020, Durres 2019 - each of those dates left both rubble and a longer list of questions about what had been built and how. Every time after an earthquake comes the same sentence about revising building standards. Every time the interest lasts exactly as long as the attention does.

Here, the seismic review of public buildings has been a topic after every stronger tremor in the region. How many of those buildings were actually checked, and how many stayed on a list? That is the question worth asking before the next earthquake, not after it.

In Colombia what is happening now is what happens everywhere - rescue teams, numbers that change with every report, families waiting in the street. The list of the dead is not final yet. The list of those responsible, as a rule, will never even begin.