Volunteers step up in the aftermath

When twin earthquakes hit Venezuela’s northern coast last week, Israel Rivas was in the industrial city of San Félix, hundreds of miles away. As the scale of the disaster became clear, the 24-year-old mechanic and budding photographer gathered the money he had been saving to buy a new camera lens and took a 12-hour bus ride to La Guaira, the coastal state that has suffered the most damage.

“I couldn’t eat well. I couldn’t sleep well, knowing that my brothers and sisters from this country are dying,” Rivas said on Wednesday, exactly a week after the disaster. He has since been working as the interpreter for the UK’s International Search and Rescue team (UK ISAR) as they search for life in the wreckage.

International aid and local efforts

Roaming the devastated streets of Caraballeda, a resort town east of La Guaira’s capital, Rivas encountered a group of British search and rescue workers who had flown in from Merseyside, the West Midlands, and Wales. “If you need me, I’m here,” he told them. They did.

Since then, Rivas, who is fluent in English, has been working alongside the UK ISAR team as they deal with a hellscape of broken properties to try to find life beneath the debris. He has also worked with searchers from Ecuador to investigate possible signs of life detected under the wreckage of Residencia La Gabarra, a 12-storey block of beachside apartments that collapsed into a jumble of reinforced concrete and bricks with at least three children inside.

Challenges and hope

“It’s a hard job. It’s hard to see so many dead people around you. It’s hard to say we can’t recover the body because it is 10 floors down and we don’t have the equipment,” Rivas said. “That’s one side of the coin, which is death. But that’s not the only side.”

Rivas’s British colleagues and searchers from Ecuador continue to work in the wreckage of La Gabarra, hoping to find signs of life. The effort is a reminder of the resilience and determination of both local and international volunteers in the face of disaster.

While the scale of the destruction is overwhelming, the efforts of volunteers like Rivas and international search teams highlight the ongoing commitment to saving lives in the aftermath of the earthquakes.