Search and rescue teams from France, the UK and Spain arrived in Venezuela on Tuesday to help locate and recover victims of the powerful twin earthquakes that struck the region on 24 June, killing more than 1,700.
Tens of thousands of people remain unaccounted for and time is running out to find survivors following the quakes of magnitude 7.2 and 7.5, the strongest to hit the South American nation in more than a century.
"So the objective of the mission, there are currently nine of us, is precisely to go and search for victims under the rubble. We have equipment that allows us to detect buried victims who are still, and I believe there are still many victims, alive beneath the debris," said Thierry Velu, the founder of the French disaster relief group GSCF.
Experts say the first 72 hours after natural disasters define the narrow window for rescuing the living. However that critical window closed at 6:04 pm on Saturday.
"We also have a geophone, which is a digital stethoscope, so to speak. And we’re going to listen for any impulse, any knock, any voice, from many meters away," said Mario Lopez who heads the Spanish rescue team.
