‘I can only describe it as a war zone’: the rescuers navigating Venezuela’s post-quake hellscape

Firefighters and international rescuers search the remains of a collapsed building in La Guaira, Venezuela. Photograph: Manu Quintero/The Guardian View image in fullscreen Firefighters and international rescuers search the remains of a collapsed building in La Guaira, Venezuela. Photograph: Manu Quintero/The Guardian ‘I can only describe it as a war zone’: the rescuers navigating Venezuela’s post-quake hellscape Thousands of volunteers are joined by overseas teams in the hope of finding more survivors in the rubble When twin earthquakes tore through Venezuela’s northern coast last week, Israel Rivas was at home hundreds of miles away in the industrial city of San Félix. As the scale of the catastrophe became clear, the 24-year-old knew he had to react. A mechanic and budding photographer, Rivas gathered the money he had been saving to buy a new camera lens and jumped on a bus to make the 12-hour journey to La Guaira, the coastal state that has suffered the most damage. Destroyed buildings in La Guaira, Venezuela – loop “I couldn’t eat well. I couldn’t sleep well, knowing that my brothers and sisters from this country are dying, so I … came here and I’m doing the best I can,” he said on Wednesday, exactly a week after the disaster, as he stood outside Residencia La Gabarra, a 12-storey block of beachside apartments that had collapsed into a jumble of reinforced concrete and bricks with at least three children inside. View image in fullscreen A Brazilian firefighter climbs over the rubble of an apartment block in La Guaira. Photograph: Manu Quintero/The Guardian View image in fullscreen International teams from Brazil, Ecuador and the UK inspect a ruined building in La Guaira. Photograph: Manu Quintero/The Guardian View image in fullscreen Israel Rivas, centre, a volunteer interpreter from San Félix, has been helping British rescuers search for survivors. Photograph: Manu Quintero/The Guardian Roaming the devastated streets of Caraballeda, a resort town east of La Guaira’s capital, Rivas stumbled across a group of British search and rescue workers who had flown in from Merseyside, the West Midlands and Wales. “If you need me, I’m here,” he remembers telling them. They told him that they did. Since then, Rivas, who is a fluent English speaker, has been working as the interpreter for the UK’s International Search and Rescue team (UK ISAR) as its members navigate a hellscape of broken properties to try to find life beneath the debris. “It’s a hard job. It’s hard to see so many dead people around you. It’s hard to say we can’t recover the body because it is 10 floors down and we don’t have the equipment. It’s hard,” Rivas said as his British colleagues and searchers from Ecuador investigated possible signs of life detected under the wreckage of La Gabarra. “But that’s one side of the coin, which is death The other side of the coin is life. Coins are always flipping and we are always [hoping they land] on life.” Rivas is one of thousands of Venezuelan v