“We had to climb up. The janitor with the baby and all the neighbors coming down,” said María Fernanda in the midst of the confusion and disaster in the heart of the Venezuelan capital, in Caracas. From her home she saw how he caused a block next to hers to collapse. “But from that building, I only saw that one family managed to get out,” he adds, evidencing that the Venezuelan people are experiencing critical hours in which the death toll has already jumped from 32 to 164 dead, and from 700 to more than a thousand injured.
The estimates from the US Geological Survey are also not encouraging. The USGS estimates a range of potential victims of . Figures that remind us of other natural disasters and that also lasted in the collective memory of the Venezuelan people. And even on an individual level, with stories like that of María Romero, who at 80 years old and after being helped by the police to leave her home, can assure that “this earthquake was horrible, even worse than the one in 1967.” [de magnitud 6,3]”. But it is believed that the one in 1812 claimed the lives of 30,000 people in Caracas.
“This earthquake was horrible, even worse than the one in 1967”
María Romero, 80 years old
For others, like Coro Martínez, 56, it was the first time facing a situation of this caliber. “There was a very loud bang. Things fell in the house, jars inside the refrigerator. I had never experienced something like this,” this resident of eastern Caracas told Reuters. But almost everyone agrees in the description of the moments before the earth shook. “As soon as it started, we started hearing screams,” recalls Astrid Ramírez, a 41-year-old publicist who was caught by the tremors west of Caracas. “Everyone was running down the stairs,” he adds.
After receiving the mobile alert: “In less than two seconds, everything started to move”
In this reconstruction of how the moments before the double Venezuelan earthquake were experienced, there is also a case like that of a 41-year-old office worker who claims that the moment was incredible. He had just received an alert message on his mobile phone, but he had practically no time to react. “When I caught it [el móvil] and I started listening to what he was saying, first I felt a slight tremor,” he remembers. “Then, in less than two seconds, everything started moving,” he explains.
Social networks and communication through them—no longer having to use a VPN mask—have become key this fateful morning. “Everyone, the situation we are experiencing here is serious. A large earthquake. Look how it all ended,” Wilmer Azuaje, a former Venezuelan deputy, recounted in a video recorded by himself from the Maiquetía airport, where the cloud of dust and a shower of debris could be seen.
