Venezuelan man saved from collapsed mall eight days after earthquakes | Venezuela

A 43-year-old security guard, who managed to survive the devastating earthquakes that occurred in Venezuela last week thanks to the air gap in his workstation cabinet, was rescued from the collapsed basement of a shopping mall amid intense applause from international rescue teams.

Hernán Alberto Gil Flores had been trapped under the rubble of Galerías Playa Grande in the coastal port city of La Guaira for eight days since back-to-back earthquakes.

The 7.2 and 7.5 magnitude earthquakes killed approximately 2,200 people, injured more than 11,000, and left tens of thousands of people missing.

Gil Flores, who works the night shift as a security guard at the mall, was in the small security booth when the first violent shaking occurred. As the concrete structure surrounding him collapsed, his cabin protected him from debris and created a vital air gap.

An expert team from the Costa Rican Red Cross (CRRC) first detected signs of life and contacted him on Sunday.

“When we found him, he asked us not to tell his wife he was alive if he wasn’t going to make it,” Minyar Collado, a member of the CRRC team, told The Associated Press.

But four days later on Thursday, flag-waving teams from around the world cheered as rescuers carried Gil Flores on an orange tarpaulin-covered stretcher through crowds of people to a Red Cross ambulance. A group of men in red CRRC uniforms hugged and laughed with relief.

Gil Flores’ wife, Gusbimar González, said that her despair gave way to hope when she heard that he was still alive. “I saw a ray of light in the darkness,” González said.

The operation was coordinated by an urban search and rescue team of Chilean firefighters working around the clock with expert teams from the United States, Portugal and Mexico, among others.

Rescuers had to navigate extremely unstable structural conditions, torrential rain and persistent aftershocks to tunnel toward Gil Flores. They used a telescopic camera to maintain constant contact with him and kept him hydrated by passing water and liquid nutrients through a narrow shaft for the last three days of extraction.

María Paz Campos, an experienced firefighter from Chile, talked with the security guard throughout the entire operation and kept him calm in the final hours of the rescue Thursday.

A video released by Chilean firefighters a few hours before the rescue showed Gil Flores drawing, apparently to pass the time. Campos then gently told him to look at the camera and wear protective glasses.

“I need you to wear your glasses to prevent small falling particles from getting into your eyes,” he said.

While there have been several surprising rescues, including Gil Flores and a three-year-old child pulled from the rubble on Tuesday, hopes of finding more survivors are quickly diminishing.

However, the families of those trapped in collapsed buildings have hope that their loved ones can be found. Dora Bello said that her nephew, 42-year-old Eduardo José Rosal Bello, was inside the Residencia Costa Brava skyscraper in La Guaira, which was reduced to rubble due to the double earthquake.

“We need to take action. We need them to come and do something because there’s life inside. There’s life inside that building,” said Bello, 49, standing next to the building’s debris and a pile of personal belongings and clothing belonging to its missing residents.

Russ Gauden, Venezuela national coordinator and team leader of the UK International Search and Rescue team, said that despite the terrible devastation on Venezuela’s north coast, it was still possible to find more survivors.

“The population in this part of the world is very, very strong: humble, proud people. They are survivors. And that’s [where] we see the difference. All the books that have been written about windows of vulnerability over the years seem to be changing in this part of the world,” said Gauden, whose group of firefighters, paramedics and engineers spent their final days trawling through ruined buildings to find survivors.

“[The survival window is] normally here it is 96 hours, 126, 130 hours. “This is a very clear possibility,” he said.

The focus now shifts to survival for the earthquake survivors. Many are homeless and food and water are becoming scarce.

The World Food Program on Tuesday appealed for $50 million (£37.4 million) in aid, saying nearly 500,000 people in Venezuela need to be fed for three months.

Preliminary analysis of satellite data shows more than 58,000 buildings were damaged or destroyed in the two earthquakes; This dwarfs official estimates.

Associated Press and France-Presse Agency contributed reporting