Search and rescue teams from France, the UK and Spain arrived in Venezuela on Tuesday to help locate and recover victims of the powerful twin earthquakes that struck the region on 24 June, killing more than 1,700.
Tens of thousands of people remain unaccounted for and time is running out to find survivors following the quakes of magnitude 7.2 and 7.5, the strongest to hit the South American nation in more than a century.
“So the objective of the mission, there are currently nine of us, is precisely to go and search for victims under the rubble. We have equipment that allows us to detect buried victims who are still, and I believe there are still many victims, alive beneath the debris,” said Thierry Velu, the founder of the French disaster relief group GSCF.
Experts say the first 72 hours after natural disasters define the narrow window for rescuing the living. However that critical window closed at 6:04 pm on Saturday.
“We also have a geophone, which is a digital stethoscope, so to speak. And we’re going to listen for any impulse, any knock, any voice, from many meters away,” said Mario Lopez who heads the Spanish rescue team.
Meanwhile, the United States military repaired and reopened a key seaport in the hardest hit area of Venezuela on Monday, as the country began burying more than 1,700 victims of the twin quakes.
Five days after powerful back-to-back quakes flattened entire neighbourhoods, the task of recovering the dead loomed large and hopes of finding survivors faded.
By the latest official count, some 1,700 are dead and 5,000 are injured, with no governmental word on the number missing. Other estimates place these in the tens of thousands.
The Port of La Guaira re-opened, where an AFP correspondent observed a warehouse storing hundreds of unidentified bodies encased in white and black body bags as well as a few coffins. The USS Fort Lauderdale was docked and delivering aid.
Dozens of relatives from this devastated region waited outside the makeshift morgue for news of their families as forensic personnel in blue uniforms examined the corpses.
Nearby, buildings turned into mountains of rubble are being dug at by rescuers and volunteers in the hope of finding life. It is a remote possibility five days after the quakes.
American airmen were also helping restore traffic at Simon Bolivar International Airport near Caracas, which was also heavily damaged.
On Monday, a new 4.6 magnitude tremor rekindled fear among the population.
Satellite images
The powerful twin earthquakes that struck Venezuela last week damaged or destroyed more than 58,000 buildings, according to a preliminary assessment of satellite data published by US space agency NASA.
“Approximately 58,870 buildings were likely damaged or destroyed across the affected region” based on satellite radar data gathered on June 25, the day after the earthquakes, according to researchers Corey Scher and Jamon Van Den Hoek of Oregon State University.
The duo were citing data from the European Space Agency’s high-resolution radar imagery satellite Sentinel-1.
“This is a preliminary, rapid assessment. It reflects abrupt surface change consistent with damage,” the researchers wrote, adding that the figure should only be read as an indicator and was not verified on the ground.
National Assembly President Jorge Rodriguez reported on Monday that 855 buildings have been damaged, including 189 “total collapses.”
NASA said that its satellites were “providing critical support, capturing imagery and data to help teams on the ground assess impacts and guide response efforts.”
Additional sources • AFP