(Las Tejerías) Some 3,000 rescuers were hard at work in Venezuela on Wednesday to try to find the bodies of 56 people who disappeared in the landslide that occurred on Saturday in Las Tejerias (center-north), where the hope of finding survivors is almost nil.
Posted yesterday at 3:49 p.m.
Forty-three bodies were found and “there is still a significant number of missing persons: 56 missing persons. We are reaching almost a hundred victims who have died in this tragedy, this natural disaster,” Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro told state television VTV on Tuesday evening.
The Venezuelan army tweeted images of food drops, indicating that “people are receiving food and water in the most remote places through helicopter drops”.
The authorities have started to clean the streets and partially restore electricity and water services, but the task is still important.
The floods of mud swept away everything in their path: trees, rocks, cars, streetlights, telephone towers and whole sections of houses, many of which were built in risk areas. The city of 50,000 inhabitants spills over the sides of the mountains.
Maria Romero waits in an elementary school that serves as a shelter. She has lost everything and is waiting to be rehoused. “It’s no longer Tejerias, it’s a disaster,” sums up this 60-year-old housewife who took refuge here with her family – seven people in total.
This is a first step before their transfer to other reception centers in neighboring towns. “We were quiet at home […] and when we went to see, it was too late, the water was there,” she told AFP on Wednesday.
The family got out of the house as best they could. The current was so strong that they clung to a tree trunk wedged between two walls of a nearby hardware store. Her husband began to bring up the three children, one by one, then the adults. Maria remembers being paralyzed with panic and unable to get up.
“My granddaughter was screaming, my granddaughter was saying ‘Save us neighbours’, but how could the neighbors have saved us? They were worse off than us,” she continued. “I had never seen such a big river, only in movies”.
The smell and the flies
At school there is water, food, clothes and toys. Children are running everywhere.
Eighteen families have arrived in this shelter since Saturday, but most have already left for La Victoria, about twenty kilometers away.
The school also serves as a census center and survivors can request an inspection of their home to determine if it is habitable.
“I don’t want to leave Las Tejerias because I’m used to living here, but if I have to leave, I’ll leave,” says Deyanira Blanco, 37, resigned, after arriving at the shelter to request an inspection of her accommodation. In the meantime, she lives with a friend.
Not far away, neighbors joined in the search efforts, digging up the mass of mud, branches and stones. The smell and the presence of flies serve as guides. Some people point to where they think they last saw a missing relative, hoping to find them.
Gabriel Castillo, 32, runs in tears through the village. He has no news of his mother, his partner and a cousin who lived with him in a house built on the banks of one of the five streams that came out of their beds.
He went to a nearby hospital to check the list of survivors, but they weren’t there.
“When I came to present my case, they offered me food, but I don’t want food, what I want is for my family to come back,” he says.
This landslide is Venezuela’s worst natural disaster since the turn of the century.
In 1999, a major landslide in Vargas state, in the north of the country, killed some 10,000 people.
President Nicolas Maduro has promised to rebuild homes and businesses, but the destruction is such that it will take time. Maria wants a place to live. “All there is in my house is mud,” she says.