Caraballeda (Venezuela) (AFP) – The international rescue teams are packing up and heavy excavators are clearing rubble left by Venezuela's earthquakes.
But for Raul Alvarado the search goes on.Watching volunteers pick through the crushed remains of his 12-storey apartment building, Alvarado knows his mother, father and older brother are inside.Their third-floor apartment now sits at eye level, crushed under piles of concertinaed concrete slabs from the OPP 26 building in coastal Caraballeda, one of the districts hardest hit by the quakes.Deaths from the June 24 disaster have crept past 3,500, but for families like Alvarado's there is still the race to find the tens of thousands reported missing.Twelve days after the quakes hit, time is running short. Diggers are already clearing parts of the OPP complex, shaking the ruins even as volunteers and families continue to burrow for the bodies of loved ones."They were together the three of them, hugging," said Alvarado of the last moment he saw his family. He managed to pull himself out of the rubble because he was in a different room. "This building was full. My neighbor had five grandchildren, all them are trapped in there."Stuck in the layers of floors, a microwave, mattresses and crates of beer are the only signs of the building's previous life.Nearby a large excavator slams its shovel into another building's remains.The UN has estimated that as many as 50,000 people could be missing in one of Latin America's worst earthquake disasters. The government has yet to give any estimate.But the OPP complex is only one among the nearly 200 buildings that were destroyed or collapsed when the 7.2 and 7.5 magnitude quakes struck. Most of those are in the epicentre, the coastal La Guaira area.
