It was clear that major disaster had struck the port town of La Guaira. When I hiked in to survey the scene the morning after the back-to-back earthquakes hit Venezuela last week, I was confronted by an enormous mountain of debris where apartments had once stood.
“No,” a volunteer rescuer told me. “This is just the first mountain. There is more.”
But the destruction was so complete, the terrain so flattened, that it was impossible to find a vantage point. Only when the drone image above and others like it started coming in a few days later did it become possible to grasp — and even then only partially — what happened.
OPPE 26 was one of the public housing projects built years ago under the government of Hugo Chávez. As it happens, many of its residents moved there after losing their homes in the powerful mudslides that hit the country in 1999.
Now, La Guaira is believed to have sustained the worst damage from the quakes. And given the concentration of people at OPPE 26, many think this housing project will be among the gravest casualties.
When I first got to the scene, a deathly pall hung over it.
With little help from outside rescuers and no heavy equipment, the only sounds were from the ordinary tools residents were using to try to dig out loved ones in the rubble. The bodies were pulled out and laid on the ground, often covered by blankets.
One man I talked to, Oswaldo Tovar, 45, had used a small hammer to dig a hole large enough to find the remains of his wife and daughter. But he could not free them. He sat there with them as we spoke, waiting for help.
Mr. Tovar said that his wife’s name was Ivonne Ladera, and that she had been 46. His daughter, he said, was 8. I asked him her name, but he could not answer.
Written by Eric Nagourney. Drone piloting by Andres Conde.
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