The ground lurched at 3:15 pm local time. For Maria Gonzalez, a 42-year-old mother of three in Caracas, the world turned to splinters. Her apartment block, a concrete tower in the working-class district of Petare, swayed like a reed. ‘The building nearly fell on me,’ she told me, her voice still shaking on a crackling phone line. ‘I grabbed my youngest and ran. We could hear the walls crying.’
Maria’s story is one of thousands emerging from Venezuela after a 6.8 magnitude earthquake struck the country’s northern coast yesterday. The epicentre was 20 miles off the coast of La Guaira, sending tremors as far as Bogotá. Official figures remain unclear, but local NGOs report at least 14 dead and more than 200 injured. The true cost, in lives and livelihoods, will take days to tally.
As the dust settles, a small but vital British presence is mobilising. A team of 12 search and rescue specialists from the UK’s International Search and Rescue (UKISAR) landed in Caracas this morning, accompanied by two sniffer dogs and six tonnes of equipment. They are not heroes in flashy uniforms: they are firefighters, paramedics and structural engineers drawn from brigades across the UK. Their job is to find the living amid the wreckage, before the concrete turns cold.
‘We’re here to support local teams who have been working without rest,’ said team leader James O’Hare, a veteran of the 2011 Christchurch earthquake. ‘The biggest challenge is the instability of buildings already weakened by poor construction. Many are still standing, but they could fall at any moment.’
That poor construction is a legacy of Venezuela’s long economic crisis. Cheap, unregulated building materials have left swathes of housing stock dangerously fragile. Petare, a vast hillside barrio where Maria lives, is a patchwork of cinderblock homes clinging to steep slopes. ‘They were already unstable,’ she said. ‘The earthquake just reminded us that we live on borrowed time.’
For the wider UK, this deployment raises familiar questions of resources. The British government has committed £500,000 in emergency aid, but critics point to deeper cuts to the Foreign Office budget. An aide to the charity ShelterBox, which is coordinating relief, told me: ‘We are grateful for the support, but it must be sustained. Earthquakes do not respect budgets.’
Yet the rescue teams themselves are clear-eyed about the limits of their mission. They will work for 14 days, then hand over to local crews. They will find some survivors and many bodies. They will leave behind equipment, training and a faint hope that next time, the building will hold.
Maria Gonzalez, for now, is living in a neighbour’s ground-floor flat. She has no idea when she can go home. ‘The building is still there,’ she said. ‘But I don’t trust it. Every time I hear a lorry, I think the ground is moving again.’
