‘Concrete breaking off walls’: Survivors describe Venezuela’s earthquakes
The Venezuelan government has loosened restrictions on social media as residents search for missing loved ones. On Thursday morning, Billy Ebrin set out to search
The Venezuelan government has loosened restrictions on social media as residents search for missing loved ones. On Thursday morning, Billy Ebrin set out to search for bodies. He’d spent a short, anxious sleep in his silver Aveo car, too afraid to go back to his seventh-floor apartment in Caracas, Venezuela. Just hours earlier, he had been startled by the piercing alarm on his mobile phone. There was an uncomfortable pause. Then, the building began to violently shake. His three dogs darted beneath the beds, terrified and trembling, while Ebrin took shelter beneath a doorframe and began to pray. “I thought I was going to die. You could hear pieces of concrete breaking off the walls,” he said. Two back-to-back earthquakes struck Venezuela with little warning shortly after 6pm local time (22:00 GMT) on Wednesday, triggering panic as people scrambled for safety. The first was a 7.2-magnitude quake, followed by another that reached 7.5 on the nine-point Richter scale, both considered major seismic disasters. When the shaking stopped, Ebrin rushed to the ground floor along with hundreds of others fleeing their buildings. “People were bumping into each other in the confusion: elderly people, people carrying their pets, even squirrels and parrots. There were people in their underwear,” he told Al Jazeera. “It was all terrifying.” Near Ebrin’s home, many residents slept in the streets or in their cars after being warned not to enter buildings. They woke, if they slept at all, to find apartment blocks crumpled into heaps of concrete and twisted metal, with rescue workers searching for signs of life beneath the debris. One of the worst-affected areas is the state of La Guaira, just north of Caracas, where lines of buildings have collapsed. Venezuela’s Assembly has confirmed that at least 188 people have died in the country. But the United States Geological Survey predicts the death toll could run into the thousands.
Acting President Delcy Rodriguez called on the international community and Venezuela’s private sector to assist in the rescue operation. A number of countries have said they will send assistance, including Ecuador, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, the US, Qatar and Argentina. “We have one central and essential objective: to save lives. United as a nation, we will overcome this tragedy,” Rodriguez wrote on the social media platform X. But many know it is a race against time to find those not accounted for, while voices are still heard beneath the rubble. Phone lines and electricity were down for many people, although some services have resumed in certain areas, driving a push from families to find out about their loved ones. Across WhatsApp, Facebook, X and other platforms, images of missing relatives spread rapidly: elderly parents, young children, cousins, friends and neighbours whose phones had gone silent after the earthquakes. The social media platform X has been partially unblocked by some internet providers following the earthquakes, amid the clamour for information. Andres Azpurua, the director of digital rights organisation Ve sin Filtro, explained that the website, along with dozens of others, was blocked in 2024 in the aftermath of that year’s presidential election, which former President Nicolas Maduro is widely believed to have lost. At the time, Maduro had sought to limit the spread of information that contradicted his claims to a third term. But earlier this year, on January 3, the US launched a military operation to abduct and imprison Maduro. Public pressure, meanwhile, has built on the Rodriguez government to loosen the restrictions in the wake of Tuesday’s disaster. “The government saw a lot of pressure on social media for unblocking of X and other platforms specifically because of the urgency to get information,” Azpurua said. He added that some residents sought to leverage the US’s continued influence in Venezuela, after Maduro’s removal.
The BriefWire