Foreign rescuers race debris and time after deadly Venezuela quakes

Collapsed apartment blocks in La Guaira kept foreign rescuers busy on Friday as permit controls, a shortage of heavy equipment and a shrinking 48-72 hour survival window complicated the search after twin earthquakes killed 920 people and injured 3,360 in Venezuela. A missing-person website listed more than 50,000 names by Friday afternoon.

La Guaira, the coastal state north of Caracas, was the worst affected area, with at least 100 buildings, including high-rise apartments, brought down. Authorities tightened access to the area by requiring permits to enter, even as local residents kept digging through debris because they saw too few government rescuers on site. Cranes were needed to shift the slabs that were pinning people beneath the wreckage, and the pace of the search was slowing as the debris field grew more difficult to clear.

Foreign rescue teams and aid began arriving nearly two days after the quakes. By June 27, 1,600 foreign rescuers had arrived in Venezuela. The U.S. State Department deployed a Disaster Assistance Response Team of more than 250 people, including Urban Search-and-Rescue teams from Fairfax County, Los Angeles County and Miami-Dade County, along with more than 200,000 pounds of specialized equipment and canines trained for structural-collapse rescue.

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies launched a 50 million Swiss franc emergency appeal on June 26 to help 300,000 people and sent its first 17 tonnes of humanitarian cargo from Panama, including kitchen sets, hygiene kits and mosquito nets. The Venezuelan Red Cross headquarters had been critically damaged, and some volunteers had lost their homes, even as its teams kept working around the clock on search and rescue, psychological first aid, restoring family links and damage assessments.

Venezuela’s acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, shifted rescue teams from other parts of the country to La Guaira, appealed to the private sector for heavy construction equipment, declared a state of emergency and a $200 million reconstruction fund was to be created for hospitals and homes. The earthquakes were among the strongest to strike Venezuela in more than a century, and the U.S. Geological Survey warned that they could cause more than 10,000 deaths.