Venezuela quake death toll nears 1,500 as rescue work goes on

Rescue teams raced on Sunday to find more survivors of the two powerful earthquakes that struck Venezuela this week, with signs of life bringing occasional relief to a grim quest to whittle down a list of tens of thousands missing.

The death toll from Wednesday’s twin earthquakes neared 1,500 people as foreign rescue teams poured into La Guaira, the hardest-hit state of a country long mired in a deep political and economic crisis.

Dozens of buildings collapsed into piles of sand and rubble in the coastal state, about 40 km (25 miles) north of Caracas.

“Rescue and recovery efforts are ongoing. Today (Sunday), we have recovered people alive and, therefore, operations are not being suspended. We always maintain hope,” said interim President Delcy Rodriguez, after announcing a presidential commission that would determine the habitability of buildings.

Flanked by several of her ministers, Rodriguez said school classes would be suspended for one more week, and the electricity supply in La Guaira had been restored to 75%.

The government — headed by Rodriguez since her predecessor was ousted by the US in a January raid — had thanked civilian volunteers ferrying aid to La Guaira, but then tightened access to the road, saying traffic was preventing efficient movement of emergency vehicles.

Earlier, Jorge Rodriguez, the acting president’s brother and president of the National Assembly, said the death toll rose by 20 people on Sunday to reach 1,450. He added that 3,150 people remained injured, 12,721 had been displaced, and 774 buildings had collapsed.

“We are in critical hours, in crucial hours to continue rescuing lives and to build camps where those people who have lost their homes, or who cannot return, for whatever reason, to their residences can stay,” he said.

Families and volunteers spent days pulling survivors and bodies from the rubble before the arrival of the more than 2,600 foreign rescue workers, often complaining of scant heavy equipment and a limited official presence, as hundreds of aftershocks deepened damage and kept residents on edge.

So far this weekend, the government said at least 33 people had been rescued by Saturday evening, including several children, while tens of thousands remained unaccounted for.

A father and his son were pulled out alive from the rubble of a collapsed building on Sunday as rescue workers raced against the clock to find more survivors.

Although the government has given a figure of hundreds missing or trapped, just under 50,000 people were listed as unaccounted for on a website promoted by the country’s political opposition on Sunday, a slight decline from 55,000 people a day earlier. 

Limited time for finding survivors
The US Geological Survey estimated more than 10,000 deaths were possible from the magnitude 7.2 and 7.5 quakes, which would place them among Latin America’s deadliest of the last century.

“There exists a window of roughly three days, 72 hours, where the probability afterwards decreases that you can save people alive,” said Sebastian Eugster, the leader of the Swiss rescue team.

The 80-strong team had found multiple people alive in the rubble thanks to alerts from their eight search dogs, but had not been able to pull them out in time to save them, he added. Saturday evening marked 72 hours since the quakes.

Rescued children
The US State Department hailed the rescue of an infant by US rescue crews on Saturday, posting a video on X showing helmet-clad rescuers removing the blanket-wrapped and wailing child from the rubble.

A Colombian rescue team also saved an 11-year-old boy, Moises, who had been trapped some 3 meters (10 feet) deep in rubble, after identifying his location with a scanner, Reuters TV reported.

He was removed on a stretcher with a broken arm, his eyes covered by cloth to protect them from the shock of daylight. His mother and sister were killed.

Mexican rescuers working at a collapsed building in the town of Caraballeda rescued another 11-year-old boy, Rodriguez posted on X late on Saturday, showing crews carrying a small figure on a stretcher out of the rubble.

Pope Leo on Sunday told worshippers gathered for the Angelus prayer in Rome that he wanted “to express my closeness to the Venezuelan sisters and brothers affected by the recent earthquakes” and expressed gratitude to rescue workers.

A senior US official said on Saturday that a funding package worth hundreds of millions of dollars is expected to be announced within the next day or so, in addition to the $150 million the Trump administration had already committed.

Opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Corina Machado told media outlets on Sunday she planned to return to the country, where she had been living in hiding since a 2024 presidential election that international observers say the opposition won, until she left in December to receive her prize.

A White House official told Reuters on Saturday that her push to return home is frustrating senior officials in Washington, who said it was too soon after the disaster.

Venezuela’s largest refinery, the 645,000-barrel-per-day Amuay, shut down operations on Sunday following a large power outage in western Falcon state, workers from that facility said.