By Efrain Otero
LA GUAIRA, Venezuela, June 28 (Reuters) – A father and his son were pulled out alive from the rubble of a collapsed building on Sunday, four days after the devastating earthquakes that struck Venezuela.
It was a scene that gave hope to the French and U.S. rescue workers active in the area as they race against the clock to find more survivors.
Rescue workers carried the pair, visibly weakened and both wearing masks, on improvised fabric stretchers through debris-strewn streets to a waiting ambulance, as a crowd gathered around the emergency vehicles in La Guaira.
The coastal state was hardest hit by the earthquakes on Wednesday that left at least 1,450 dead and thousands missing.
Their rescue came after 12 hours of painstaking efforts by teams that combed through the ruins using specialized search cameras, carefully working through unstable rubble to reach the trapped victims.
“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,” said a member of the French Civil Security.
The rescue team in that area includes members of the French Civil Security and American responders from the Fairfax County Urban Search and Rescue Team in Virginia, who the previous day rescued a mother and her 9-month-old baby.
Before extracting the family members, rescuers prepared intravenous drips and cleared debris. Others remained beside the rubble searching for signs of life and communicating with their colleagues among the remains.
At least 33 people were rescued over the weekend, though tens of thousands remain missing, heightening fears that time is running out to find survivors.
According to specialists, after 72 hours following an earthquake, the odds of finding victims alive beneath the rubble drop dramatically.
(Reporting by Efrain Otero en La Guaira, Venezuela, and Diego Ore in Mexico City; Editing by Christian Plumb and Chris Reese)
