DON GONYEA, HOST:
In Venezuela, there is a rush to try to find survivors. It has now been nearly 72 hours since powerful twin earthquakes left parts of the country in ruins. Authorities say the death toll has risen to nearly 1,500 people, and over 3 1/2 thousand are injured. Many remain missing as the critical window to find survivors continues to narrow.
NPR's Eyder Peralta is in La Guaira, the area hit hardest by the devastation. Eyder, thanks for being there. Tell us what you're seeing and what you've been hearing today.
EYDER PERALTA, BYLINE: It's utter devastation here. Right now, I'm in front of a building - or what was a building. It's pancaked, and you can count the floors, one on top of the other - one, two, three, four, five. You can probably hear the backhoes behind me. There's dozens of people. They're using whatever they can - hand shovels - to try to find people. And what they told us here is that they know that someone is there. They don't know if they're alive or if they're dead or if they're a man or a woman because all they can see is their feet. And so this is a sort of thing that's playing out all over the state.
And there's also, like, these big high-rise buildings that did not fall, but they lost, like, whole facades, and you can look into it, and you see life has sort of stopped. In one of them, I saw, like, a kids bedroom with - like, you know, the Mickey Mouse sheets were still on. There were still teddy bears on the beds. So it's a place where life has been disrupted in the most awful way.
GONYEA: So we mentioned that it's been three days since the earthquake hit. So this really is a critical moment, right?
PERALTA: It is. You know, experts say that the first 72 hours are key. It's when you have, you know, a bigger chance of finding people alive. There is a rush here, and, you know, one of the sort of hopeful things that you see is you see regular people who have gotten on motorcycles, and they have shovels and picks on their back, and they're digging through this rubble sometimes with their bare hands.
GONYEA: Venezuela was already facing significant challenges before the earthquake. How does all of that affect the recovery effort?
PERALTA: I mean, they've been in a crisis for more than a decade. I mean...
GONYEA: Yeah.
PERALTA: The economy has been in free fall. Institutions and the healthcare system have been faltering. And, of course, in January, the U.S. came into the country and arrested and deposed President Nicolás Maduro, you know, and it threw the country into more uncertainty. So this is a punch that Venezuelans did not need. And, of course, there's questions. Does the Venezuelan state have what it needs to deal with this kind of huge natural disaster? I think it's also worth noting that this is also the first time since the 1960s that Venezuela has had an earthquake this bad, so it's also a country that is unaccustomed to this type of natural disaster.
GONYEA: So we can hear all this activity behind you. Obviously, the search will continue. But beyond that, what are the next steps that you'll be watching for? What happens next?
PERALTA: Look, I think the government is very worried about the sanitary conditions here. I mean, right now, you can already smell some, you know, what smells like rotting flesh. And so they're militarizing this place. They're cordoning it off to try to prevent a bigger health crisis. And then also there's the question about what to do with all the displaced people. The government is opening shelters. You know, do they have enough? That's what we'll be watching for.
GONYEA: That's NPR's Eyder Peralta, talking to us from La Guaira, Venezuela, the center of the devastation from this week's earthquakes. Eyder, thank you.
PERALTA: Thank you, Don. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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