Local people searched the debris with bare hands before rescuers arrived Dozens of people are feared to have been buried by a landslide in the Colombian city of Medellin.
Rescue workers with sniffer dogs are at the scene and said they had managed to rescue seven people so far.
One body has been recovered from beneath the tonnes of rubble, said disaster management officials.
Landslides are common in the Colombian Andes region – the latest was triggered by the heaviest rains in the country in four decades.
The Red Cross says 176 people have been killed by the rains this year and thousands have had to leave their homes.
Sunday’s landslide hit the La Gabriela district of Bello, north of Medellin, at 1900 GMT.
The BBC’s Jeremy McDermott in Medellin said local people were initially digging for survivors with their bare hands, after a large section of hillside fell onto a poor area of the city, in Antioquia province.
Emergency teams then arrived with specialist equipment and lighting.
One Red Cross worker said up to 200 people could be missing.
“We are focused on moving rubble to see if we find survivors,” Cesar Uruena told the AFP news agency.
“The landslide buried 10 houses, each of then with three stories. Because on Sundays people usually have their family over for lunch, we think that on average there were between 15 and 20 people in each house,” Uruena explained.
Most major rivers in Colombia have burst their banks as a result of the heavy rain, and tens of thousands of people have been left homeless.
Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos has said he is considering calling a national state of emergency if the rains continue.
But our correspondent says the country’s emergency services are already struggling to cope with the scale of the disaster.
Neighbouring Venezuela is also experiencing heavy flooding.
Some 70,000 people have been driven from their homes there.
President Hugo Chavez has said his government plans to seize private land to house some of those forced to abandon their homes.
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