Rescuers race to free trapped Venezuelan guard after 100 hours
Rescuers were within a metre of Hernán Gil after 100 hours underground, as seven-country teams fed him water and an IV in a collapsed La Guaira car park.
Rescuers were down to about one metre from Hernán Gil after more than 100 hours trying to pull the 43-year-old security guard from the rubble in Catia La Mar, La Guaira state. Teams from Venezuela, Chile, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Mexico, Portugal and the United States were still cutting through the wreckage of the collapsed seven-story structure where Gil had been working when the twin earthquakes hit on June 24.
Gil was found on Saturday beneath the ruins of the multi-storey car park. They made visual contact only in the last hours of the operation. A small camera pushed into the debris showed him in good spirits. He was wearing a face mask passed through a hole to help shield him from dust, and one of his eyes was bloodshot. Rescuers had given him water and attached him to an intravenous drip, and Ricardo Arias of the Costa Rican Red Cross said Gil was in stable condition.
Gil’s wife, Gusbimar Gonzalez, called his survival “a miracle,” while Marco Antonio Franco of the Mexican Red Cross said Gil remained cheerful and even asked for specific hydration-drink flavors as he kept urging the rescuers to continue.
The structure was so unstable that access ducts repeatedly collapsed, forcing crews to work under constant risk of further cave-ins. Venezuela said 1,600 foreign rescuers had arrived by June 27, and the government deployed 14,000 military and police personnel in La Guaira as 17 flights carrying rescue workers landed. Delcy Rodriguez declared seven days of mourning as the search stretched well beyond the 72-hour survival window that experts often treat as critical.
A three-year-old boy was also alive six days after the quakes.
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