Early on a Monday morning, just five days after a pair of catastrophic back-to-back earthquakes devastated Venezuela’s northern coastal region, a fresh aftershock rattled the disaster-stricken area, sending panicked residents fleeing into streets already lined with collapsed infrastructure.
According to data from the United States Geological Survey, the tremor registered a magnitude of 4.6 on the Richter scale, hitting at 7:01 a.m. local time roughly 17 miles north of Caraballeda, along Venezuela’s Caribbean coastline. Colombia’s national geological agency recorded a slightly higher magnitude of 5.1, leaving minor discrepancies in official measurements of the seismic event.
The aftershock was felt as far inland as Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, where occupants of multi-story apartment buildings rushed to evacuate. Concepción Hernández, a 51-year-old resident of Caracas’ Chacao municipality, spoke to the lingering anxiety that has gripped communities across the region in the wake of the initial disasters. “Here we are again, back in the street. I don’t know when we’ll have a moment of true peace,” she said.
The tremor also shook the heavily impacted port city of La Guaira, the epicenter of much of the destruction from last week’s quakes. Local teams and international rescuers had already been working around the clock, racing against the clock to pull any remaining survivors from the rubble of fallen buildings when the aftershock hit.
As of Monday, the Venezuelan government has confirmed a death toll of 1,450 from the initial twin earthquakes, with thousands more people still unaccounted for. The national administration has faced mounting public criticism over its slow and insufficient response to the disaster, with grassroots civilian-led rescue efforts often outpacing official operations.
While the window for successful live rescues narrows significantly after the critical 72-hour period following a natural disaster — a threshold that passed over the weekend — rescue teams have not called off their searches. In a statement Sunday evening, Venezuelan Acting President Delcy Rodríguez confirmed that search operations would continue as long as there was any chance of finding survivors. To date, more than 2,600 rescue workers from dozens of countries across the globe have deployed to the affected region, bringing specialized search canines and heavy moving equipment to assist in the effort. Even as hope fades for most families of the missing, small, occasional successful rescues from the debris continue to offer a thin sliver of optimism to the crisis-stricken nation.