Fabiana Blanco rescued after 30 hours in Venezuela quake rubble

Fabiana Blanco was pulled alive from the rubble of her family’s apartment in Caraballeda after spending about 30 to 32 hours trapped beneath a 10-storey residential building that collapsed in Venezuela’s June 24 earthquakes. The 12-year-old had been in her mother’s bedroom on the first floor when the ground shook less than a minute apart in back-to-back quakes measured at magnitudes 7.2 and 7.5.

Her rescue became one of the clearest survival stories to emerge from La Guaira state, where buildings crumpled across the northern coast and rescue crews worked through unstable debris. One local report said Fabiana remained in a hole for seven hours while in visual and verbal contact with rescuers before they pulled her free, a detail that underscored how close the search came to ending differently. In the same quake zone, rescuers also saved a mother and her 18-day-old baby after about 32 hours under rubble.

The earthquakes struck about 160 kilometers west of Caracas and left a trail of collapse that immediately overwhelmed the scale of the emergency. The first official counts put the dead at at least 32 and the injured at about 700, but the toll climbed sharply as recovery teams kept digging. A later official tally placed the death toll at 1,943, with 10,571 injured and 6,461 people rescued from debris.

The damage extended far beyond the sites where survivors were found. A NASA satellite assessment suggested almost 60,000 buildings may have been damaged or destroyed, signaling a disaster that reached deep into the Venezuela capital region and surrounding states. The breadth of the destruction raised hard questions about building safety, inspection standards and whether vulnerable residential blocks had been prepared for a major seismic event.

Rescue teams from multiple countries joined the search, a sign that local capacity was stretched by the scale of the collapse. As survivors like Fabiana Blanco and the infant in La Guaira were pulled out alive, the operation also exposed how much depended on the speed of emergency response, the stability of old structures and the ability of authorities to reach trapped residents before the debris shifted again.