Rescuers, civilians search for Venezuela earthquake survivors amid a sharply rising death toll

Josué Ramírez, a Venezuelan man currently living in Calgary, says his family back home have lost their homes due to the devastating earthquakes.

LA GUAIRA, Venezuela -- Tensions flared Saturday as desperation grew among anguished residents of the Venezuelan state of La Guaira, where rescuers and civilians searched for earthquake survivors amid a sharply rising death toll.

Venezuela’s government said the number of people killed rose to 1,430 Saturday morning and families reported at least 68,900 people missing, three days after the one-two punch of 7.2 and 7.5 magnitude earthquakes that devastated the South American nation.

Venezuelans looking for loved ones and neighbors used shovels, heavy equipment, ropes and bare hands atop mounds of toppled concrete throughout La Guaira, one of the country’s hardest-hit states.

Most of those digging were civilians who took search efforts into their own hands, and tensions peaked over inadequate response from the Venezuelan government, whose soldiers, firefighters, police and military cadets were evidently underprepared to respond to the tragedy.

Frustration was only amplified by state efforts to project the image of a robust state response.

“There’s a pile of bodies over there from last night. Newborn babies. Look what time it is, and they still haven’t come to recover them. At 8 p.m. there were people alive down there, and they haven’t bothered to rescue them. We’ve located several bodies, and they haven’t helped us recover them either,” said Mileidy Romero, who was among those searching the rubble in the seaside town of Caraballeada. “What are they waiting for?”

Aid agencies consider the first 48 to 72 hours as crucial for retrieving people alive, though that can be extended if they have access to food and water.

However, a growing number of international rescue teams were joining the effort to save lives nearly 72 hours after the quake.

Acting president Delcy Rodriguez said on state television Saturday that more than 14,000 members of the military and police are patrolling the area, where access is now blocked and special permits are required to enter. More rescue teams sent by governments across the world arrived in Venezuela on Saturday.

Simon Bolivar International Airport, which serves Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, was badly damaged in the quake. One runway was operational on Saturday as U.S. teams worked to repair the crucial throughway, said Jeremy Lewin, a senior State Department official in charge of foreign assistance told reporters.

Anxious families wait to see if relatives survived

In the state of La Guaira, just north of the capital, Caracas, Nazareth Jiménez sobbed into a loved one’s shoulder as she watched neighbours use hammers and power tools to try to cut through slabs of concrete in a building reduced to a mountain of debris. She was wracked with anxiety as she waited to see if her siblings, nephews, nieces and friends would emerge alive.

“My God, how are we going to get them out of there?” Jiménez murmured.

“We’re making a call for help to the government and countries across the world,” she said, pleading for machinery capable of moving collapsed structures. “There are still people alive in there.”

Government forces distributed food and water to survivors in La Guaira, and Rodríguez said her government was mounting a full response during these “critical hours for rescuing people alive.”

The disaster poses a huge challenge for Rodríguez, the former vice president who took office in January after the capture and removal of then-president Nicolás Maduro by the United States. Venezuela has been facing economic disarray for more than a decade, and many people reject the legitimacy of the political movement Rodríguez represents.

The number of dead was expected to climb, and people reported tens of thousands of missing on independent digital databases. Those figures likely included people who have been incommunicado due to the lack of cellphone signals, and some reports may be duplicates.

The number of injured was more than 3,300 as of midday Friday, and authorities said they rescued 243.

Search teams and foreign aid from Mexico, the U.S., Brazil, El Salvador, France, El Salvador and more continued to arrive to Venezuela Saturday morning to bolster recovery efforts.

Lewin, the State Department official, said the U.S. military would help coordinate flights to bring in search and rescue workers, mobile hospitals and supplies. He said two 80-person search teams were at work and a U.S. Navy transport ship was docked off the coast of Venezuela ready to receive airlifted survivors in need of medical attention. Lewin said it is a “race against the clock” to find people injured in the quakes.

“People are trapped under rubble, and the priority is to get the search and rescue teams and the medical professionals and others to them as quickly as possible to save lives,” he said.

Millions of people reeling

The International Organization for Migration said up to 6.76 million people could be affected, some 2 million of them in Caracas alone. The destruction was amplified by the quick succession of shallow quakes, experts said.

Loyce Pace, the International Red Cross’ regional director for the Americas, said “people are still terrified to reenter what were their homes.”

Indeed, many continued to sleep on the street.

Omar Reyes said around 20 family members died.

“I’ve been left alone in this life,” Reyes said, walking through the rubble where two of his children were buried.

In the city of Maiquetia, people lined up outside stores and pharmacies that served them one by one behind closed doors. At one point a woman in a crowd threw herself to the ground to protect a package of diapers with her body, desperate to keep it.

Traffic and throngs of motorcyclists at times disrupted search efforts. Mexican soldiers and volunteers repeatedly asked for silence to try to hear signs of life under the rubble, but bikers — civilian and uniformed — continued to honk horns and rev engines to the first responders’ frustration.

Some people began to carry off basic goods such as toilet paper and food from stores in Catia La Mar, adjacent to the country’s main airport. Others swarmed a civilian pickup truck that was giving out bread and water, until a soldier intervened. The parking lot of a pharmacy turned into a makeshift shelter with tarps, hammocks and tents.

A few kilometres away, Yuleidy Cadenas, 28, stood across the street from a collapsed public housing building, hoping her son, mother and brother would be pulled out alive.

She fled barefoot from another building as it collapsed Wednesday and found her mother’s 12-floor apartment tower had pancaked.

“I got on top of the rubble and told them to yell back, and nobody did, not my brother, nor my son or my mother,” Cadenas said.

Regina Garcia Cano, Juan Pablo Arraez And Megan Janetsky, The Associated Press

Janetsky reported from Mexico City. Associated Press journalists Clara Preve in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Dánica Coto in San Juan, Puerto Rico, contributed.