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Thousands of volunteers are joined by overseas teams in the hope of finding more survivors in the rubble, reports Tom Phillips in Caraballeda.
When twin earthquakes tore through Venezuela’s northern coast last week, Israel Rivas was at home hundreds of miles away in the industrial city of San Félix. As the scale of the catastrophe became clear, the 24-year-old knew he had to react. A mechanic and budding photographer, Rivas gathered the money he had been saving to buy a new camera lens and jumped on a bus to make the 12-hour journey to La Guaira, the coastal state that has suffered the most damage.
“I couldn’t eat well. I couldn’t sleep well, knowing that my brothers and sisters from this country are dying, so I … came here and I’m doing the best I can,” he said on Wednesday, exactly a week after the disaster, as he stood outside Residencia La Gabarra, a 12-storey block of beachside apartments that had collapsed into a jumble of reinforced concrete and bricks with at least three children inside.
Roaming the devastated streets of Caraballeda, a resort town east of La Guaira’s capital, Rivas stumbled across a group of British search and rescue workers who had flown in from Merseyside, the West Midlands and Wales. “If you need me, I’m here,” he remembers telling them. They told him that they did.
Since then, Rivas, who is a fluent English speaker, has been working as the interpreter for the UK’s International Search and Rescue team (UK ISAR) as its members navigate a hellscape of broken properties to try to find life beneath the debris.
“It’s a hard job. It’s hard to see so many dead people around you. It’s hard to say we can’t recover the body because it is 10 floors down and we don’t have the equipment. It’s hard,” Rivas said as his British colleagues and searchers from Ecuador investigated possible signs of life detected under the wreckage of La Gabarra.
“But that’s one side of the coin, which is death. The other side of the coin is life. Coins are always flipping and we are always [hoping they land] on life.”
Rivas is one of thousands of Venezuelan volunteers who have mobilised in the aftermath of two giant earthquakes that – in the space of 39 seconds – brought death and destruction to La Guaira, created a major humanitarian crisis and made the country’s already uncertain political future even more unpredictable.
The official death toll so far is 2,595, but with 400 bodies reportedly being delivered to La Guaira’s morgue each day, that figure is certain to rise. At least 12,400 people have been injured while one estimate, based on satellite data, suggests more than 58,000 buildings have been damaged or destroyed.
“Along the coastline what we’re seeing is buildings of 20 storeys plus [that have] collapsed – pancake collapses, total collapses, where it’s floor upon floor upon floor. Buildings that are leaning over,” said Russ Gauden, UK ISAR’s national coordinator and team leader in Venezuela. “It’s [such] an apocalyptic scene that you’d think you’d seen … a disaster film.”
A few hundred metres along Los Corales beach in Caraballeda, one of Gauden’s teams has been deployed to use life-scenting dogs and a seismic and acoustic listening device to confirm whether someone was still alive under the wreckage.
Early on Wednesday, they gathered around the building’s rubble-filled swimming pool, seeking shade under dust-caked parasols from a ferocious Caribbean sun. “It’s pretty extreme. I can only describe it as a war zone in terms of collapse,” says Tristan Bowen, a firefighter from south Wales, as his crew plotted its next move.
Bowen said the 72-hour “golden window” for finding survivors had closed but believed it was still possible to find people alive. Hours later, a 43-year-old security guard is pulled from the collapsed basement of a nearby shopping centre after eight days under the rubble. “People have survived many days beyond that [golden] window, but … it depends entirely on where they are within that structure,” Bowen said.
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