LA GUAIRA, Venezuela (Reuters) – Rescue teams in Venezuela were losing hope on Tuesday of finding more survivors of twin earthquakes that struck the country last week, following hours of grueling work searching for victims beneath the rubble of collapsed buildings.
Rescue teams from Ecuador and the U.S. halted operations early on Tuesday in Macuto, a town in La Guaira state — the area hardest hit by the June 24 earthquakes — after more than 40 hours of work, when they stopped receiving responses from a mother and her three children trapped beneath a nine-story building.
“In the end, we believe the days have already passed and that what we will find now is death,” said Major Jorge Montanero, leader of the EQ11 team from Guayaquil, located on Ecuador’s Pacific coast.
“Unfortunately, things haven’t developed favorably,” he said as he stood amid rubble after cutting through four concrete slabs of the building in an effort to locate the four trapped victims.
At a makeshift morgue in La Guaira, set up at what is usually the state’s major port, Andrea Montilla sat in a plastic chair under an increasingly stifling marquee, awaiting family members who had entered the port to formally identify the remains of her cousin and his grandmother.
The 14-year-old was found in the rubble of an apartment building overnight and the family brought the remains directly to the port, Montilla said.
“It’s been so painful, a very long wait,” she said, adding her cousin’s mother is still missing.
At the morgue, staff lead families through an in-person identification process, an official at the site, who was not authorized to speak to the press, told Reuters. Families can then get death certificates and cremation permissions, the official added.
The official, who said they are from La Guaira and had lost multiple family members in the quakes, had no figure on the numbers of bodies already handed over to families or the number still awaiting identification.
Some 59,000 buildings were damaged or destroyed by the twin earthquakes — which hit just seconds apart with magnitudes of 7.2 and 7.5 on June 24 — according to NASA estimates. The widespread devastation can be seen from space.
Not all collapsed buildings have had professional rescue teams on site, with relatives and neighbors working to remove debris to pull out survivors or bodies, according to survivors and residents from various areas.
“There is no doubt we are facing a figure higher than what has already been reported. I can offer an estimate: we are procuring — and this has been agreed with local authorities — 10,000 body bags,” Gianluca Rampolla, the United Nations’ resident coordinator in Venezuela, said on Monday from his office in Venezuela’s capital, Caracas.
