Father, son rescued after four days buried under rubble
Efrain Otero |
A father and his son have been pulled alive from the rubble of a collapsed building, four days after the devastating earthquakes that struck Venezuela.
It was a scene that gave hope to the French and US rescue workers active in the area on Sunday as they race against the clock to find more survivors.
Rescue workers carried the pair, visibly weakened and both wearing masks, on improvised fabric stretchers through debris-strewn streets to a waiting ambulance, as a crowd gathered around the emergency vehicles in La Guaira.
The death toll from Wednesday’s twin earthquakes neared 1500 people as foreign rescue teams poured into La Guaira, the hardest-hit state of a country long mired in a deep political and economic crisis.
The rescue of the man and his son came after 12 hours of painstaking efforts by teams that combed through the ruins using specialised search cameras, carefully working through unstable rubble to reach the trapped victims.
“They are extremely weak, as any patient trapped under rubble for four days would be, so we are doing everything possible to rehydrate them and administer various medications during the extraction process, which is moving very slowly,” said a member of the French Civil Security.
Their rescue comes a day after a mother and her nine -month-old baby were pulled out alive.
Before extracting the family members, rescuers prepared intravenous drips and cleared debris.
Others remained beside the rubble searching for signs of life and communicating with their colleagues among the remains.
At least 33 people were rescued over the weekend, though tens of thousands remain missing, heightening fears that time is running out to find survivors.
According to specialists, after 72 hours following an earthquake, the odds of finding victims alive beneath the rubble drop dramatically.
But small moments of optimism, solidarity and humanity like this have cut through almost overwhelming grief.
Dozens of buildings collapsed into piles of sand and rubble in the coastal state, about 40km north of Caracas.
“Rescue and recovery efforts are ongoing. Today (Sunday) we have recovered people alive and, therefore, operations are not being suspended. We always maintain hope,” said interim President Delcy Rodriguez, after announcing a presidential commission that would determine the habitability of buildings.
Flanked by several of her ministers, Rodriguez said school classes would be suspended for one more week and the electricity supply in La Guaira had been restored to 75 per cent.
Earlier, Jorge Rodriguez, the acting president’s brother and president of the National Assembly, said the death toll rose by 20 people on Sunday to reach 1450. He added that 3150 people remained injured, 12,721 had been displaced, and 774 buildings had collapsed.
“We are in critical hours, in crucial hours to continue rescuing lives and to build camps where those people who have lost their homes, or who cannot return, for whatever reason, to their residences can stay,” he said.
Families and volunteers spent days pulling survivors and bodies from the rubble before the arrival of the more than 2600 foreign rescue workers, often complaining of scant heavy equipment and a limited official presence, as hundreds of aftershocks deepened damage and kept residents on edge.
So far this weekend, the government said at least 33 people had been rescued by Saturday evening, including several children.
Although the government has given a figure of hundreds missing or trapped, just under 50,000 people were listed as unaccounted for on a website promoted by the country’s political opposition on Sunday.
The US Geological Survey estimated more than 10,000 deaths were possible from the magnitude 7.2 and 7.5 quakes, which would place them among Latin America’s deadliest of the last century.
Pope Leo told worshippers gathered for the Angelus prayer in Rome on Sunday he wanted “to express my closeness to the Venezuelan sisters and brothers affected by the recent earthquakes” and expressed gratitude to rescue workers.
A senior US official said a funding package worth hundreds of millions of dollars is expected to be announced within the next day or so, in addition to the $US150 million ($A218 million) the Trump administration had already committed.
Opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Corina Machado told media outlets on Sunday she planned to return to the country, where she had been living in hiding since a 2024 presidential election that international observers say the opposition won, until she left in December to receive her prize.
Venezuela’s largest refinery, the 645,000-barrel-per-day Amuay, shut down operations on Sunday following a large power outage in western Falcon state, workers from that facility said.
with AP
Reuters