It’s been six days since two devastating earthquakes leveled entire residential neighborhoods in Venezuela, and dozens of new bodies continue to be pulled from the rubble.
On Monday, rescuers stacked coffins inside a makeshift morgue in the sun-beaten port of the city of La Guaira, one of the hardest-hit areas. Small trucks arrived with more bodies, which were left lined up along a concrete pier.
“Every day, the number of victims continues to rise,” said Jennifer Moreno Canizales, spokeswoman for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Caracas. “And we hope it continues to increase.”
The official death toll from Venezuela’s earthquakes rose on Monday to 1,719, an increase of almost 300 from Sunday. The total is based on the number of bodies recovered during search operations, Moreno Canizales said.
But, as serious as it is, this number may be substantially underestimated. Many Venezuelans remain missing, and the chances of finding them alive are decreasing every day.
The uncertainty about this total is not just a matter of the journalistic or historical record. For many Venezuelans, it represents the harrowing limbo of searching for friends with bloody hands, caught between uncertainty and a desperate refusal to accept the worst.
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There is no official or reliable count of the missing. And with so much debris from high-rise residential buildings jammed together, plus a lack of heavy machinery to remove the rubble, estimates of how many people may still be trapped under the debris vary widely.
Two coroners at the main morgue in the capital, Caracas, estimated a total of around 4,000 dead, based on the number of bodies arriving daily at the La Guaira morgue.
Anticipating an increase in the number of victims, the UN is providing 10,000 body bags in coordination with the Venezuelan government, said Gianluca Rampolla del Tindaro, the organization’s resident coordinator in the country. “That’s the working premise; it’s very sad,” he said.
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According to an unofficial website where Venezuelans can register missing persons, more than 46,000 people had not yet been located. The New York Times was unable to independently verify that number, which may include people separated from family members.
For veteran rescue workers, the high number of reported missing could be a grim sign.
“Contact is difficult, but not so difficult that you can’t talk to someone,” said Linda Hornisberger, president of REDOG, a Swiss search and rescue nonprofit that has sent eight dogs and 88 emergency responders to Venezuela since Friday. “We have to assume most are dead.”
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Hornisberger said that despite working eight- to 12-hour shifts for several days, “we were unable to rescue anyone.”
Disaster response experts say it often takes several weeks to get a complete picture after tragedies of this magnitude.
The earthquake area
The day the earthquake struck was a holiday in Venezuela, when families were more likely to be at home or had traveled to the coastal region of La Guaira. Many buildings there were built during the economic boom of the 1970s and 1980s, when developers built tall towers, many 10 stories or more. A mountain range limited the space available for construction, which led developers to opt for vertical buildings, said Josué Araque, a Venezuelan geographer.
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Now, many of these buildings have become a dense tangle of rubble.
“These are mountains of debris from buildings with many, many floors, made of concrete, which basically turns them into tombs,” Araque said. According to him, it is difficult to search the lower floors of the buildings “because there are 10 floors that fell on top of them”.
Araque said he believes there are probably many more people missing who “probably won’t be able to be recovered.”
There are 1.2 million tons of debris in the hardest-hit areas of La Guaira, the United Nations Development Program said on Monday.
Moreno Canizales of the UN said 700 buildings collapsed. Despite the best efforts of rescue teams, he said, “it is difficult to reach everyone in time” to save those who may still be alive under the rubble.
Del Tindaro, the UN humanitarian coordinator in Venezuela, also said in an interview that the high number of collapsed buildings indicates that the official total is an underestimate.
Ilan Kelman, professor of disasters and health at University College London, said the exact total death toll may never be known. But a preliminary projection that the final total could exceed 10,000 — shared by the U.S. Geological Survey based on factors such as quake magnitude, population density and local infrastructure — remains sadly plausible, he said.
A difficult search
The work of recovering bodies is extremely slow and is not a priority for most response teams, who are trying to save those who may still be alive. On Sunday, 49 UN-coordinated rescue teams rescued seven survivors, Moreno Canizales said. Sometimes, he added, crews respond to reports from families saying they hear a relative crying under the rubble.
When the disaster response changes phases, more bodies will likely be found, experts say.
“The focus of search and rescue teams is to look for people who may be alive” based on reports of sounds and movement, said Phil Gelman, Latin America coordinator for GOAL, an international humanitarian response agency. “When the search and rescue phase ends and heavy machinery moves in to remove the rubble, the number of victims will rise.”
Even in well-organized response operations, many survivors end up being rescued by untrained friends, family and neighbors, said Emily So, a professor of architectural engineering at the University of Cambridge.
Witnesses and aid workers described a shortage of heavy machinery as one of the biggest obstacles to rescue efforts, saying volunteers often lacked the equipment needed to remove concrete slabs and reach survivors trapped beneath collapsed buildings.
“Tragically, until they recover the bodies from beneath the rubble,” So said, “the count will remain low.”
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