Shortages of Rescue Equipment Hampered Venezuela’s Earthquake Response

In the hours after Venezuela’s devastating earthquakes, residents dug through mountains of collapsed concrete with their bare hands. Some pleaded on social media for excavators. Rescuers worked without generators or the demolition tools needed to reach survivors trapped beneath collapsed buildings.

Volunteers and experts say the country lacked the specialized equipment needed for a disaster of this magnitude, slowing rescue efforts during the critical first days after the quakes, which so far have killed more than 1,900 people.

“Desperation is reigning because everyone wants rescuers at their specific location, but the rescuers know that without tools, they can’t do anything,” said Samuel Hernández, a 34-year-old mechanical engineer volunteering in La Guaira, a northern coastal region most ravaged by the temblors. “It’s the ugliest thing I’ve seen in my life. I feel like crying every second I am down there.”

Venezuela had shortages of a wide range of specialized equipment, said Jacobo Vidarte, an emergency management specialist in the country. That included fiber-optic cameras to search under collapsed buildings, sound-detection equipment to identify survivors, high-frequency radios that work inside concrete structures, hydraulic lifting equipment, power cutters, proper flashlights and trained search dogs.

Equipment like that can make a big difference in finding people in the first days after a disaster, before the window for finding survivors starts to close, experts said.

Foreign countries are sending in hundreds of rescue workers as well as trained search dogs, but international search teams are forced to make impossible triage decisions because of the volume of building collapses.