Talk:Cali explosion

Numbers

The article on spanish wp gives 4000 deaths,12000 injured, giving a removed youtube video as a source. Of the other sources only seems to support these numbers. I guess this boiles down to a difference between early accounts and later estimates or something similar. The number of habitants is also remarcably different. It would be great if someone more fluent in spanish could takes a closer look. Personuser (talk) 18:36, 28 February 2021 (UTC)

The numbers on the Spanish Wikipedia are almost certainly closer to reality, given that 3,725 different persons were buried. And the city's population was probably around 400,000 at the time. The difficulty is that as there was no census at the time it's very hard to say how many people were living in the city at the time and therefore exactly how many died, given that many of them would have been vaporised in the explosion and no trace of them would have existed. Richard3120 (talk) 19:09, 28 February 2021 (UTC)

Numbers should now be credible and relatively well sourced. I found two additional probably useful sources, but I'm not sure how/where to fit them, so I'll dop the links here:,.Personuser (talk) 20:34, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

I know they should be, but if no reliable numbers existed at the time, it's difficult to source them. Richard3120 (talk) 20:38, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

Using the numbers in the refs it's the best we can do. If you think some rephrasing would be needed to put them in the right perspective, go for it, additional references are naturally always welcomed. "(more than) 1000/1300" deaths is often used, probably because it was the "official" estime at that time. I couldn't find any source for "just 120000 inhabitants", but adding a "probably" or something to 400000 wouldn't hurt. Personuser (talk) 21:28, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

I will, I was just waiting for you to finish so we didn't have any kind of editing conflict. I don't know if I will be able to find any other sources for now, but you've done a good job of adding some... this is definitely a major event in Colombia's history during the last century and it deserves a better article. Richard3120 (talk) 21:31, 1 March 2021 (UTC)