Venezuela quake survivors search rubble as death toll climbs

In Caraballeda, neighbors kept clawing through broken concrete with crowbars, mallets and pickaxes as Venezuela’s twin earthquakes drove the death toll to at least 920, with more than 3,300 injured. Families were still searching for relatives in the rubble even as rescue crews struggled to reach one of the hardest-hit coastal communities and the critical 72-hour window for finding survivors slipped away.

Caraballeda, a city of about 53,000 people on Venezuela’s Caribbean coast in La Guaira state, sat just east of La Guaira and roughly 40 km northeast of Caracas. Entire neighbourhoods there were reduced to rubble, turning the shoreline community into one of the main centers of the search as local residents, firefighters, volunteers and local and international rescue teams worked side by side through collapsed buildings.

The scale of the disaster kept worsening as the days passed. By June 26, officials had confirmed at least 920 dead, and later counts put the toll at about 1,430 to 1,450, with thousands still missing. The rising number of absent people underscored the same painful divide visible on the ground: survivors and neighbors were still doing much of the searching themselves, while official relief efforts fought unstable wreckage, blocked access and the clock.

An early-Monday aftershock jolted nerves again, sending a fresh wave of fear through people who had already spent days waiting beside the ruins. In Caraballeda, a backhoe loader joined hand tools in the rubble-clearing effort, a sign of how improvised the response remained in places where destruction was too deep and widespread for quick recovery.

The disaster also reopened old wounds in La Guaira, where residents still remember the deadly 1999 mudslides that ravaged the same coastal state. Some survivors now say they never want to return after living through both catastrophes, a stark measure of how repeatedly this part of Venezuela has been exposed to sudden, overwhelming loss. Officials have described the earthquakes as the country’s most brutal natural catastrophe, but on the ground in Caraballeda the more immediate reality was simpler: families were still looking for their own.