Venezuela rescue crews silence rubble to hear earthquake survivors

Rescue crews in La Guaira have been forcing silence over the rubble, shutting down machinery and cutting conversation so they can hear any trapped survivor who might still answer from beneath collapsed buildings. By June 28, that painstaking work had helped pull 33 people out alive over the weekend, including several children and a baby, even as authorities put the toll at at least 1,400 killed and about 3,360 injured.

Two powerful earthquakes struck northern Venezuela on June 24, one measured at magnitude 7.2 and a second, stronger quake at magnitude 7.5 that hit about 40 seconds later. The U.N. humanitarian office placed the epicenter off the coast near northern Venezuela, and more than 130 aftershocks followed quickly, later climbing past 430. The first provisional count on June 25 stood at 32 dead and more than 700 injured, then rose that same day to 211 dead and 1,261 injured.

La Guaira, the hardest-hit state, has become the center of a disaster response that is straining across neighborhoods, ports and roads that connect the Caribbean coast to Caracas. Families and neighbors have joined professional rescuers in Caraballeda, Montalbán, Carabobo and Yumare, digging through debris beside local and international teams. The U.N. humanitarian coordinator, Gianluca Rampolla, visited La Guaira with U.N. agencies to coordinate the response as rescue efforts shifted between searching for survivors and accounting for the missing, with tens of thousands still unaccounted for by June 28. The U.S. Geological Survey put the June 24 magnitude 7.5 earthquake among the strongest to hit Venezuela or its immediate coastal area in more than a century, and only seven magnitude 6 or larger quakes had struck within 250 kilometers of the epicenter in the past 100 years.