With the official death toll nearing 2,300 and huge numbers of people still missing, the rescue of security guard Hernan Gil after so long under the rubble was greeted as a miracle.
Gil was brought out on a stretcher after a painstaking operation to extract him from the collapsed seven-storey building where he worked in Catia La Mar, a coastal area almost entirely razed to the ground in the June 24 catastrophe.
“This is truly a miracle,” Gil’s wife Gusbimar Gonzalez said just before his rescue.
“I’m completely amazed because it’s the first time I’ve seen so many countries come together like this to save a single person,” she said.
Rescue teams from seven countries – Venezuela, Chile, the United States, Portugal, Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Mexico – worked around the clock over the past three days to reach him.
It was a complex operation in which teams had to avoid provoking the further collapse of already damaged, nearby structures.
Venezuela’s National Assembly President Jorge Rodriguez said on Wednesday that the number of deaths had risen to 2,295, and more than 11,000 people were injured.
He said almost 13,000 people had been left homeless and that tens of thousands of people remain unaccounted for.
Venezuela’s interim president Delcy Rodriguez on Wednesday declared seven days of mourning, saying the country’s “soul is torn apart by the human losses”.
The two powerful quakes, measuring 7.2 and 7.5, shattered entire neighbourhoods in oil-rich Venezuela, which has suffered decades of economic crisis that devastated infrastructure and health services.
The country is also in a fragile political transition six months after the United States ousted leader Nicolas Maduro. (AFP)
