Yorliana Colmenares stood at the edge of a building turned to rubble on Thursday morning and listened to the taps.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
Her boyfriend was inside the building, she believed, below the crushed walls and knotted wire and dust. She could hear trapped people knocking on the building’s remains. But she had not been able to find her boyfriend — no rescue workers had arrived, no firemen, no medical workers.
Instead, the building’s residents were doing the rescues themselves. “They’ve pulled out a lot of dead people,” said Ms. Colmenares. “Injured people, children, animals.”
La Guaira, a port city outside of Caracas, is among the places hardest hit by the two earthquakes that shook Venezuela on Wednesday evening.
La Guaira is no stranger to disaster. A mudslide a generation ago killed thousands of people. Now it is again experiencing tragedy. Entire buildings crumbled to the ground. Outer walls fell to the earth, leaving apartments looking like skeletons.
By midday Thursday, many residents said that they had seen only a few rescue workers and minimal state presence.
On some blocks, survivors said they were on their own. Residents standing outside one collapsed building estimated that hundreds of people were trapped beneath the ruins.
Outside another, a couple searched for their eight-year-old boy, who had been playing basketball when the quakes hit.
Repeated aftershocks shook the city even as civilians-turned-rescue workers in flimsy helmets dug through the ruins. Some said they desperately needed heavy machinery that could move building walls.
“My sister lived here!” cried one woman who stood by a damaged apartment as civilians scraped away rubble. “I see no one here! This is the government’s neglect!”
Adriana Loureiro Fernandez contributed reporting from La Guaira.
