On 10 August 2026 a magnitude 7.4 earthquake hit Colombia. It struck at 7.34 in the morning, deep under the Chocó department, about 20km from San José del Palmar. More than 300 people were killed and thousands were injured. In Valle del Cauca, roads went under landslides, buildings came down, and the phone networks went with them.
I flew out twelve days later to film what happened next.
It started with one phone call that could not be made
One of the companies I work with is World Mobile. They have a community around them, and one of the people in that community is a man called Camilo. His parents live in the affected region. After the earthquake he could not reach them. No signal, no line, nothing.
So he asked World Mobile if there was anything they could do.
The answer came back almost immediately. Yes. We will come out, and we will put networks in, so people can contact their families and get on with their lives.
That is the whole story in one sentence. The rest is logistics.
Getting there
I flew out on Saturday 22 August and met the team at Calima El Darién, about two hours' drive from Cali airport. It sits above a long reservoir in the hills of Valle del Cauca, and in normal times it is a holiday town. Green, warm, coffee growing on the slopes, a main street of painted shopfronts and parked motorbikes.
It was not a holiday town that week.
What the ground actually looked like
You brace for damage before you arrive, and then you get there and the thing that lands is how uneven it is. One building standing, the next one down. A shop open and trading with a wall missing next door. Rubble tipped into the street and swept into a pile, because the street still has to work.
On one street, a row of seven businesses had been reduced to its own shopfronts. The doors and shutters were still standing, painted turquoise, hazard tape across them, and behind the doors there was nothing left at all. The town church had lost its bell tower, cracked open from roofline to door. Past that, houses reduced to a heap of brick and roof tile, and scaffolding already going up on a facade, three weeks in, because people had started rebuilding before anyone told them to.
In one town the aid distribution was running out of the sports centre. Emergency shelters up, police and volunteers handing out water, boxes of supplies and donations.
Five AirNodes, five Starlink dishes
Over five days the team deployed five AirNodes, each with Starlink backhaul, in areas that had no internet at all.
The principle is simple. Satellite gets the connection into the valley. The AirNode turns it into a network people can actually use on the phones already in their pockets. You do not have to rebuild a tower, and you do not have to wait for a carrier to schedule the work. You have to get the kit to the right place, get it powered, get it pointed, and then get out of the way.
The siting is the hard part. It has to be somewhere that serves people, somewhere with power, and somewhere that will still be standing and looked after in six months. That is a conversation with the community, not a map exercise.
The people
I interviewed a lot of people who saw it happen.
One of them was a teacher. The school he taught in partially collapsed and four of the children in it were killed. He described it to me with his arm in a sling, broken in the same few seconds. I have filmed difficult interviews before. That one stays with me.
And then, over and over, the opposite. People who had lost most of what they owned insisting on feeding us. Farmers stopping on the road to explain what the mountain had done. A woman in a red shirt laughing at something off camera in the middle of a very bad month. Generosity that did not seem to depend on circumstances at all.
Working with an escort
When we went up into the mountains we had police protection, because of the existing political situation in that part of the country. Not a marked convoy. An undercover officer, riding with us. That is a normal condition of work there rather than a drama, and it shapes how you shoot. You go where you are taken, you keep the day tight, you do not wander off for the nice shot on the ridge, and you make the schedule fit the escort rather than the other way round.
It also means you shoot light. One person, one camera body, a small set of primes, and everything on your back.
Why we film this at all
It would be easy to make this kind of trip into a corporate good news story. That is not what it is.
What actually happened is that a company with the right hardware, and people willing to get on a plane, put five networks into a place that had none, so that families could tell each other they were alive. That is a small thing set against 300 deaths and 5,000 destroyed homes. It is not a small thing if you are the one making the call.
The job on the ground is to record it honestly. Show the damage without making a spectacle of it. Let the people who were there do the talking. Resist the urge to score the whole thing with strings.
We flew home on 29 August. A number of short films have already been cut from the footage, and a full length documentary will follow shortly.