La Guaira, Venezuela. More than 100 people stood silently on Tuesday near the former Los Cocos public housing complex as rescuers listened for signs of life after twin earthquakes destroyed six of its eight towers last week. Rescue teams continued searching for survivors and recovering bodies from the rubble.
Silent search at Los Cocos
For 10 minutes, the crowd remained quiet, interrupted only by occasional cellphone rings or shouts from rescuers, as people listened for any sound from those who might still be trapped beneath the debris of the Hugo Chavez complex, colloquially known as Los Cocos.
When a horn sounded, the search resumed, with pickaxes striking rubble and rescuers calling out as operations continued.
Recovery efforts in the rubble
At Los Cocos, rescuers said they hoped to find survivors on what had once been the ground floor, while also searching for the dead.
In one area, national police and a paramedic pulled the blackened body of a woman from the debris. Her legs were wedged in the rubble, and a family member stood nearby trying by phone to reach a relative to accompany the body to the morgue.
International teams join operation
At what had been Building 27, rescuers, including members of Mexico’s Topos team, tunneled through debris toward the bottom floor with support from cadets from Venezuela’s army.
At another nearby tunnel, a call for silence prompted rescuers to stop and raise their fists, signaling for quiet. After several minutes, a man standing atop a mound shouted that there were people.
Operations halted in Macuto
Rescue teams from Ecuador and the United States stopped operations in the early hours of Tuesday at a site in Macuto, a town in La Guaira, after they no longer received responses from a mother and her three children trapped under a nine-story building. The effort to reach them had lasted more than 40 hours.
“In the end, we believe the days have already passed and that what we will find now is death,” said Major Jorge Montanero, leader of the EQ11 team from Guayaquil on Ecuador’s Pacific coast.
