The death toll from the earthquakes in Venezuela has bototiously climbed to at least 1,500 people, the President of the country’s National Assembly, Jorge Rodríguez, said on Saturday.
ven as the first US relief flights touch down in Caracas, catastrophic shortages persist across the country, leaving millions more citizens stranded without access to sanitary facilities or basic necessities.
In an attempt to address intensifying public outrage over the local government’s paralysis, Delcy Rodriguez—the temporary, US-backed Venezuelan leader—assured the population that the nation “was not alone.”
The United States said one runway at Simon Bolivar International Airport was now functioning and that C-17 US military planes were landing there, while a naval ship had arrived off the coast.
The UN humanitarian organization OCHA confirmed that search and rescue teams from at least 17 nations are rapidly mobilizing to hunt for survivors. However, Venezuelans have become desperate in the hardest-hit areas, digging through rubble with their hands, while aid agencies warned that the critical 72-hour survival window was closing fast.
Newborn Baby Rescued From Rubble
Those local excavation efforts yielded a miracle when rescuers pulled a newborn baby alive from the crushed remains of a collapsed building. The stunning rescue occurred a grueling 32 hours after the twin earthquakes completely devastated the Venezuelan coastal city.
Clips shared on social media captured rescuers working under a floodlight atop collapsed masonry and bringing the infant out to applause late Friday in the hardest-hit city of La Guaira, north of the capital Caracas.
Social media user, Andreina Quintero, who shared the video noted, the baby was just 18 days old and was uninjured after being trapped for 32 hours.
Shortly after, about an hour later, rescuers found the baby’s mother.
