The remarkable stories of quake survivors in Venezuela

Amid the death and despair in Venezuela are a handful of miraculous tales of rescue that have emerged from the earthquake’s rubble.

On June 24, a pair of quakes less than a minute apart struck 160 km from Caracas, levelling buildings across northwestern and central Venezuela. The death toll has surpassed 2,000 while some 50,000 people are still missing, officials have said.

More than 20 countries are aiding search efforts, and thousands have been rescued so far. A lucky few continue to be rescued even days after the critical window for survival has passed.

Here are the remarkable stories of some of the survivors who defied the odds.

Security guard Gil Flores was working the night shift at a shopping mall in La Guaira when the earthquake buried him underneath 29 feet of rubble.

He was at the basement level of the seven-storey building, inside a small security cabin that protected him from falling debris and created an air pocket for him to breathe. Rescuers worked day and night since Monday — more than 100 hours — to free the father of two.

Gil was brought out through a tunnel about three metres long. In the final phase of the operation, about 30 people worked in the building’s parking lot removing debris, while two rescuers dug the tunnel.

Their efforts were rewarded when Gil emerged after eight days, as rescuers cheered, hugged and crowded around the man they worked so hard to save.

Patiño and her newborn, Juan David, were inside their eighth-floor apartment in La Guaira when the twin earthquakes caused her home to collapse. At the time, she was changing her son’s diaper and managed to keep the infant on her chest while the building fell, she told ABC.

Patiño was pinned under debris and her knee was broken, but Juan David survived without injury, a miracle she credits to the Bible she happened to fall on top of.

Juan David’s father, Gerson Trujillo, who was not home at the time, said he rallied neighbours to help dig.

“The one who gave me the strength not to fall into despair was my son,” Patiño told ABC News. “I kept saying, ‘As long as he was alive, I was going to be alive.'”

Rescuers were able to get her and her baby water through a straw, Patiño said. A widely viewed video of the rescue shows Trujillo tearing up as he embraces his son after fearing the worst.

A father and his teenage son in La Guaira were found alive after four days in the ruins of a collapsed building. The coastal state is the hardest hit area, where hundreds of buildings have been destroyed.

Rescue teams from France and the U.S. used specialized search cameras and worked carefully to remove precarious rubble to find the trapped survivors.

“They are extremely weak, as any patient trapped under rubble for four days would be, so we are doing everything possible to rehydrate them and administer various medications during the extraction process, which ‌is ⁠moving very slowly,” a member of the French Civil Security told Reuters.

The previous day, the rescue team had also found a mother and a nine-month-old baby.

Jordanian rescuers pulled Kleiber out of the dust and debris in La Guaira on the sixth day. The toddler was the only reported survivor that day, according to Reuters .

Klieberwas taken to Caracas for care, where he reunited with his aunt. When a friend called to tell 23-year-old Andreína Sarmiento her nephew was still alive, she screamed and fell to the floor weeping.

Sarmiento told BBC she would “take care of Kleiber with a mother’s warmth until my sister appears, which is what we long for.”

“I’m praying a lot to God to give me strength because he is only two years old and I am not a mother,” she said from the hospital.

“It hurts me a lot because my sister always used to tell me that he is my son, and now it’s like she’s handing him over to me and saying ‘this is your son, he is your responsibility,'” she said.

National Post, with additional reporting by Agence France-Presse

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