By Luis Jaime Acosta, Julia Symmes Cobb and Nelson Bocanegra
BOGOTA, Aug 10 (Reuters) - At least 111 people were killed after a powerful earthquake struck western Colombia on Monday, toppling buildings across several cities, damaging hospitals and infrastructure and trapping people beneath the rubble in what authorities called the country's strongest earthquake of the century.
The quake struck just days after Abelardo De La Espriella was sworn in as president, thrusting the new administration into
its first major crisis, with memories still fresh of devastating twin earthquakes in neighboring Venezuela in June.
"The national government has all of its capabilities deployed to protect lives, assist affected communities and deliver aid wherever it is needed," he said in a national address around 1 p.m. local time, upon declaring a national state of emergency.
"The first priority is rescuing the people trapped under the rubble."
De La Espriella said preliminary reports indicated 111 dead and 87 injured, along with dozens of collapsed buildings and damaged homes.
The U.S. Geological Survey said the 7.4 magnitude quake struck at a depth of 107 km (66 miles). Colombia's geological service said it was the strongest earthquake recorded in the country in the 21st century.
Reports from Choco, near the epicenter, were slowed by communications outages, with some areas still lacking cellphone service hours after the earthquake. Governor Nubia Carolina Cordoba said 12 people had been killed and 84 injured in the largely rural area.
The heaviest casualties appeared concentrated in Risaralda, part of Colombia's coffee-growing region. Pereira, the department's capital, suffered extensive damage, with rescue workers continuing to search collapsed buildings for survivors.
BUILDINGS CRUMBLE, AIRPORTS FORCED TO CLOSE
A four-story building crumbled in Pereira during the quake, according to Reuters-verified video, while footage from Manizales showed one of the side towers of the city's landmark neo-Gothic cathedral collapsing and scattering debris onto nearby streets.
Reuters footage showed rescue workers, police and volunteers shoveling debris by hand and loading rubble into trucks as they searched for survivors trapped beneath collapsed buildings. Other footage showed damage to residential towers and emergency-service facilities, with debris crashing onto ambulances parked below.
Mauricio Andrade, a firefighter in Cali, said his team had rescued two adult women and two children from a collapsed building. As he spoke to Reuters, his team was preparing to rescue more people from the rubble.
"They are alive," he said. "We are making space so we can free them and get them out."
Juan Carlos Osorio told Caracol Television that the collapse of one building "sounded like a bomb," as he helped remove debris from a collapsed structure in Cali.
"All of us neighbors are working together, forming human chains. We need heavy equipment. There are many people trapped."
Colombia's civil aviation authority suspended operations at several airports in the country's west, including Pereira, Manizales, Quibdo, Armenia, Cartago and Buenaventura, while engineers carried out structural inspections.
RING OF FIRE
Colombia sits along the seismically active Pacific Ring of Fire and records thousands of mostly minor earthquakes each month.
Northwestern University seismologist Suzan van der Lee said the quake's powerful magnitude, inland location and strike-slip motion may have amplified damage in populated valleys despite its considerable depth.
"This one was far below the crust, and in theory it shouldn't cause as much shaking. At this magnitude, it did actually cause a lot of shaking," she said.
The Colombian Geological Service said 21 aftershocks had been recorded by late Monday and warned that additional tremors were likely.
Colombia's coffee region was devastated by a magnitude 6.2 earthquake in 1999 that killed more than 1,000 people, particularly around Armenia and Pereira.
(Reporting by Nelson Bocanegra, Luis Jaime Acosta, Julia Symmes Cobb and Fabiola Aramburo; Additional reporting by Marco Trujillo in Cali and Sarah Morland in Mexico City, Writing by Kylie Madry and Daina Beth Solomon; Editing by Daniel Wallis, Paul Simao and Matthew Lewis)
