Catia La Mar (Venezuela) (AFP) – Morela Luna anxiously awaits the arrival of a team of experts to inspect her partially collapsed home, where her neighbors had to rescue her after Venezuela's double earthquake on June 24 that has claimed more than 3,600 lives.
Luna lived with her husband and four-year-old son on the second floor of their house in the La Lucha neighborhood of Catia la Mar, in La Guaira state, the hardest hit by the quaktes. Her father lived on the first floor."I still think this is a nightmare. I wish I could rebuild my house. I grew up here and I don't want to lose it," says the 23-year-old geography student, who sleeps at her partner's grandmother's house at night.Two weeks after the quakes, engineers and architects are evaluating the homes in this low-income neighborhood, built by its residents.They will determine which ones are safe to live in -- marked with a green sticker -- those that need repairs, marked yellow, and those that are dangerous and must be evacuated -- red.Luna's house is one of the collapsed homes they won't even enter.Nearby, 65-year-old Juana Alfonzo still moves around her home, even though the floor is sunken and cracked, and the columns show visible damage.She and five of her relatives are sleeping in tents in the yard, out of fear of more collapses. But she's confident her house can be salvaged."Some people are crying a lot because, of course, it's a total loss. So many years building these houses, only for them to be gone in 39 seconds" with the powerful, consecutive earthquakes of magnitude 7.2 and 7.5, Alfonzo says about her neighbors.She doesn't yet know that the inspection determined several columns in her house are compromised and it shouldn't be inhabited because they could give way.Alfonzo won't receive this news from the engineering brigade. Instead, a government team will come later to tell her and place a red warning sticker on her building’s facade.The small open spaces of the La Lucha neighborhood are filled with tents belonging to residents anxiously awaiting government repairs to their homes. In some areas, workers are clearing debris, but so far, nothing more.Many remember the 1999 mudslide that left thousands dead in this same area, as well as tens of thousands more left homeless in that disaster, some of whom spent years in shelters.
