‘I can only describe it as a war zone’: the rescuers navigating Venezuela’s post-quake hellscape

When twin earthquakes tore through Venezuela’s northern coast last week, Israel Rivas was at home hundreds of miles away in the industrial city of San Félix. As the scale of the catastrophe became clear, the 24-year-old knew he had to react. A mechanic and budding photographer, Rivas gathered the money he had been saving to buy a new camera lens and jumped on a bus to make the 12-hour journey to La Guaira, the coastal state that has suffered the most damage.

“I couldn’t eat well. I couldn’t sleep well, knowing that my brothers and sisters from this country are dying, so I … came here and I’m doing the best I can,” he said on Wednesday, exactly a week after the disaster, as he stood outside Residencia La Gabarra, a 12-storey block of beachside apartments that had collapsed into a jumble of reinforced concrete and bricks with at least three children inside.

Roaming the devastated streets of Caraballeda, a resort town east of La Guaira’s capital, Rivas stumbled across a group of British search and rescue workers who had flown in from Merseyside, the West Midlands and Wales. “If you need me, I’m here,” he remembers telling them. They told him that they did.

Since then, Rivas, who is a fluent English speaker, has been working as the interpreter for the UK’s International Search and Rescue team (UK ISAR) as its members navigate a hellscape of broken properties to try to find life beneath the debris.

“It’s a hard job. It’s hard to see so many dead people around you. It’s hard to say we can’t recover the body because it is 10 floors down and we don’t have the equipment. It’s hard,” Rivas said as his British colleagues and searchers from Ecuador investigated possible signs of life detected under the wreckage of La Gabarra.

“But that’s one side of the coin, which is death The other side of the coin is life. Coins are always flipping and we are always [hoping they land] on life.”

Rivas is one of thousands of Venezuelan volunteers who have mobilised in the aftermath of two giant earthquakes that – in the space of 39 seconds – brought death and destruction to La Guaira, created a major humanitarian crisis and made the country’s already uncertain political future even more unpredictable.

The official death toll so far is 2,595, but with 400 bodies reportedly being delivered to La Guaira’s morgue each day, that figure is certain to rise. At least 12,400 people have been injured while one estimate, based on satellite data, suggests more than 58,000 buildings have been damaged or destroyed.

“Along the coastline what we’re seeing is multiple-storey buildings of 20 storeys plus [that have] collapsed – pancake collapses, total collapses, where it’s floor upon floor upon floor. Buildings that are leaning over,” said Russ Gauden, UK ISAR’s national coordinator and team leader in Venezuela. “It’s [such] an apocalyptic scene that you’d think you’d seen … a disaster film.”

A few hundred metres along Los Corales beach in Caraballeda, one of Gauden’s teams has been deployed to use life-scenting dogs and a seismic and acoustic listening device to confirm whether someone was still alive under the wreckage.

Early on Wednesday, they gathered around the building’s rubble-filled swimming pool, seeking shade under dust-caked parasols from a ferocious Caribbean sun. “It’s pretty extreme. I can only describe it as a war zone in terms of collapse,” says Tristan Bowen, a firefighter from south Wales, as his crew plotted its next move.

Bowen said the 72-hour “golden window” for finding survivors had closed but believed it was still possible to find survivors. Hours later, a 43-year-old security guard is pulled from the collapsed basement of a nearby shopping centre after eight days under the rubble. “People have survived many days beyond that [golden] window, but … it depends entirely on where they are within that structure,” Bowen said.

Rivas was also optimistic. “It doesn’t smell bad which means there are no dead bodies in there, [which means there is] a higher chance for them to be alive,” he said, as British and Ecuadorian searchers crawled into cramped tunnels they had dug into the ruins and used a loudhailer to communicate with anyone who might be caught below.

A hundred metres away, in the remains of a neighbouring high-rise, the distraught relatives of one of those thought to be trapped inside wait for news of eight-year-old Ronald. The boy’s name is a double tribute to the Portuguese footballer Cristiano Ronaldo and the Venezuelan baseball star Ronald Acuña.

“Ronald is such an intelligent, calm, respectful boy,” said his 50-year-old grandmother, Olivia Sandoval, breaking down as she described her vigil outside what is left of La Gabarra. Her grandson had been playing with his two cousins, 10-year-old Victoria and eight-year-old Leonardo, when the earth shook and the building came crashing down.

Ever since the earthquakes, Sandoval has knelt down by the pool or in the rubble to beg for divine help. “I just can’t get my head around how such a monstrous thing could happen to these children,” she said as the search continued.

Sandoval – and many other Venezuelans – are struggling to comprehend something else: how in the hours and days after the earthquakes, Venezuela’s government failed to come to their aid.

Sandoval has seen rescue teams from Brazil, Chile, El Salvador and Peru on the frontline of the emergency response – not to mention scores of Venezuelan volunteers such as Rivas who have poured into La Guaira carrying shovels and axes and water and food. But the government has been largely missing in action. “That’s the saddest thing,” Sandoval said as the minutes ticked by without any news of her grandchild.

Outside the wreckage of Residencia Costa Brava, a neighbouring tower which buckled into a chaos of masonry, mattresses and piping, there was fury at the official reaction. Government critics and experts blame the sluggish response on years of corruption, economic mismanagement and investment in political repression and domestic security rather than emergency services and healthcare. Crippling US sanctions have further enfeebled the Venezuelan state.

Adolfo Guedes’ hands shake uncontrollably with rage as he thinks about what he would tell acting president Delcy Rodríguez if she visited the shack he now occupies beside the property in La Guaira where his 23-year-old daughter, Alexandra, remains buried.

“What would I say? That I curse the day this wretched revolution entered Venezuela. This is what ruined us,” the 56-year-old says of Rodríguez’s Chavista movement which has ruled since Hugo Chávez took power in 1999. Under his heir Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela fell into economic catastrophe and dictatorship. Maduro was abducted on Donald Trump’s orders in January, with Rodríguez, his former vice-president, filling his shoes with the US president’s support.

“Look at how we are sleeping! Look at how we are living! Look at the state we are in!” sobbed Guedes, sitting on a donated mattress, propped up by cinder blocks scavenged from his daughter’s pulverized home. On the bed next to him, his wife, Yaritza, grips a pillow and weeps.

Outside a third mangled building where Mexican and British rescue workers are hunting for a survivor entombed in a stairwell, Jesus David de Oliveira laments the lack of government action.

Oliveira, a 27-year-old civil engineer, complains that in the days after the quakes, Venezuelan soldiers hit the streets with machine guns when they should have been carrying spades. “As you can see, the international help is really all the help that we have,” he added as members of the Miami-Dade fire and rescue department arrived on the scene. “We are alone.”

At a press conference, Rodríguez bristled at claims her administration had reacted slowly, dismissing them as tendentious and offensive “generalisations”. She has vowed to work “tirelessly, morning, noon, night for Venezuela” and defended the armed forces, noting that one army commander was working at a camp for displaced people despite losing his entire family.

“We did everything in our power and we will continue to do everything in our power,” Rodríguez told reporters, showing off WhatsApp messages on her phone she claimed demonstrated a swift response. “They are carrying spades. They are pushing wheelbarrows,” she said of her troops.

Back at La Gabarra, as night falls, the British rescue team has been substituted with a group of Brazilian firefighters who have sent a border collie called Megan into a crevice they have carved out of the building’s facade with heavy-duty tools. Ecuadorian searchers are sure their listening devices indicate a survivor is trapped inside.

“They have detected movement. They have detected the sound of breathing – it might be a child or a younger person, or someone who is completely sheltered. This is enough to give us hope,” said Capt Diego Assunção, a firefighter from São Paulo.

Nearby, Olivia Sandoval sits alone in the shadows, keeping faith that her grandson and his two cousins will soon be found after seven agonising days. “It’s the kids! It’s the kids!” she said excitedly after a burst of activity around the pool misleadingly raised her hopes.

But another hour passes, then another, and still there is no sign of a breakthrough as rescuers struggle to cut through the steel rods that once held the building together.

By daybreak there is still no good news but the rescue teams and Venezuelan volunteers work on across this ruined stretch of coast.

On the collapsed side wall of Residencia Don Peppino, to La Gabarra’s left, someone has scribbled a message for the authorities who largely failed to show up. “Where the government is absent, the people abound,” it proclaimed.

The rubble below the graffiti was littered with residents’ possessions, hurled out into the street by the force of the quakes. A blue toy car. A pink cot and baby photo album. A children’s purse emblazoned with the faces of Elsa, Anna and Olaf from the Disney film Frozen. And a family card game called Fibber which the building’s former inhabitants once played.

Additional reporting by Clavel Rangel