What happened
Acting Venezuelan President Delcy Rodríguez on Friday morning raised the official death toll from Wednesday’s powerful back-to-back earthquakes to 589, with at least 4,300 injured and hundreds more missing or trapped under collapsed buildings. With international aid beginning to arrive, “rescue crews and residents dug through rubble in an increasingly desperate search for survivors,” The New York Times said. The “first 48 to 72 hours after a quake are widely regarded as the ‘golden’ window to reach people buried alive,” CNN said.
Who said what
The magnitude 7.2 and 7.5 earthquakes “hit a country already weakened by years of economic turmoil” that “left much of its infrastructure fragile and complicated rescue efforts as aftershocks rattled the capital and surrounding coastal areas,” Reuters said. “Affected residents have nowhere to go,” CNN said, and many Venezuelans “are enduring a second night out on the streets” near damaged and collapsed apartment buildings. “They’ve pulled out a lot of dead people,” La Guaira resident Yorliana Colmenares told the Times. “Injured people, children, animals.”
What next?
The “number of dead and injured” is “virtually certain to rise,” the Times said. A website created to track the missing “listed more than 46,000 people as unaccounted for” on Thursday night, Reuters said.
Over 500 people have been confirmed dead
