Venezuelans dig through rubble as quake toll rises, aid lags

Families in La Guaira were still clawing through broken concrete by hand as the death toll from Venezuela’s twin earthquakes climbed and official rescue resources lagged behind the scale of the disaster. By Friday, the government said 172 people remained trapped, 920 were dead and 3,360 injured, with more than 50,000 people reported missing.

The hardest scenes were in La Guaira state, where residents and volunteers kept searching through rubble with little heavy equipment and only a limited official presence. Foreign rescue crews and aid were only beginning to reach devastated areas nearly two days after the quakes, a delay that left neighbors to improvise in the window aid agencies consider most critical for survival.

Jennifer Palacios, whose 6-year-old son and five other relatives were buried in the eight-tower Hugo Chavez housing complex in La Guaira city, said the community was doing much of the work itself. “It’s the community that has managed to get people out alive,” she said, while urging cranes to move the collapsed slabs that had pinned her family inside.

The earthquake pair struck on Wednesday, June 24, 2026, and the second temblor was Venezuela’s most powerful in more than a century. A United Nations report estimated direct damage from the two quakes, which measured 7.2 and 7.5, at about $6.7 billion, underscoring the burden on a state system already struggling to keep pace with the rescue effort.

A weaker 4.9 aftershock shook Caracas and nearby Maracay on Friday afternoon, adding to the strain on crews and residents already working amid unstable debris. Officials later told people to stay away from La Guaira because clogged roads were slowing rescue operations, and they said roads would be closed from 8 p.m. except to official and registered response teams.

Aid agencies treat the first 48 to 72 hours after a disaster as the crucial period for finding trapped survivors alive, though that window can stretch when people have food and water. In Venezuela, that timetable collided with scarce machinery, difficult access and families forced to search for their own.