More Than 50,000 Missing After Venezuela Earthquakes
La Guaira: More than 50,000 people are missing after a double earthquake struck Venezuela on Friday, the United Nations aid chief told AFP, as international rescue teams and search dogs arrived to join a desperate search for survivors.
Interim president Delcy Rodriguez said the death toll now stands at 589 and that figure is likely to “increase significantly,” according to U.N. aid chief Tom Fletcher.
“More than 50,000 people are missing, more than 500 people have died, so it’s a big job to remove the debris,” he told AFP.
Rescue teams used their bare hands as well as heavy machinery to save people trapped under rubble in the strongest earthquake zone north of the capital Caracas.
AFP saw workers in one of the flattened buildings using sledgehammers to break debris and calling for “absolute silence” to detect the screams of survivors.
Oil-rich Venezuela is facing its worst natural disaster in more than a century after more than a decade of economic collapse overwhelmed hospitals and public services and led millions to flee the country.
The country is still in a delicate transition six months after the United States ousted leader Nicolas Maduro.
Rescue efforts progressed slowly due to desperate calls for heavier machinery as families waited desperately to pull loved ones they could hear alive from under the rubble.
“There are so many rocks and it’s impossible to do it with bare hands,” said Amparo del Giudice, who struggled through the rubble to find her son.
Two earthquakes measuring 7.2 and 7.5 magnitude hit northern Venezuela in less than a minute on Wednesday night, causing hundreds of buildings to collapse.
Help has arrived
National Assembly Speaker Jorge Rodríguez confirmed on Thursday that more than 200 people were trapped alive.
UN humanitarian agency OCHA said search and rescue teams from at least 17 countries were mobilized to help find survivors.
Spanish, Salvadoran, Swiss, Colombian and Mexican rescue teams were already in the area.
A senior US military official has landed in Caracas to oversee Washington’s relief efforts.
The United States announced that it had deployed two warships, transport aircraft and helicopters and mobilized $150 million in aid. Washington also suspended economic sanctions against Venezuela that could have blocked rescue operations for four months.
“Even before the earthquakes, millions of people across Venezuela were facing food insecurity, collapsing health services, protection risks and limited access to basic services,” the UN and other aid agencies said in a statement on Friday. he said.
“The international community must not allow this emergency to turn into a greater human tragedy.”
Earthquakes of similar magnitude claimed the lives of more than 200,000 people in Haiti in January 2010 and more than 73,000 in Kashmir in October 2005.
‘Authorities are useless’
Among the dead were nine Portuguese nationals, four Spaniards, two Brazilians, two Chinese nationals and one Italian-Venezuelan national.
According to the respective governments, 56 Portuguese citizens and 120 Spaniards were missing or otherwise unnamed.
Satellite photos of La Guaira, the worst-hit area north of Caracas, showed one collapsed housing complex after another.
AFP reporters witnessed residents looting a local supermarket on Thursday.
Argenis Mendez, a local resident who complained about the lack of aid, said, “Now is not the time to loot, it is time to enforce the law.”
“The authorities are useless; they are useless because the army should be here with all the heavy machinery they have,” he added.
Venezuela’s northern coast lies at the boundary between the Caribbean and South American tectonic plates, but there has been no significant earthquake since 1997, when 73 people died. In another earthquake in 1967, 236 people died.
Wednesday’s 7.5-magnitude earthquake was the strongest since Oct. 29, 1900, when a 7.7-magnitude tremor struck offshore.
This week’s earthquake was also felt in neighboring Colombia, where Bogota residents evacuated buildings as a precaution.
Tremors were also reported in many cities in Brazil’s north, according to the country’s seismic monitoring network.
