Four days buried beneath the wreckage of a collapsed building, a father and his son were pulled out alive in La Guaira, Venezuela, on Sunday, a rare flicker of hope as the death toll from the country's twin earthquakes climbed toward 1,500 and the window for finding survivors continued to narrow, Reuters reported.
The rescue came after roughly 12 hours of painstaking work, with teams using specialized search cameras to navigate unstable debris before reaching the pair.
Rescuers carried the father and son out on improvised fabric stretchers as a crowd gathered near the waiting ambulances.
"They are extremely weak, as any patient trapped under rubble for four days would be, so we are doing everything possible to rehydrate them and administer various medications during the extraction process, which is moving very slowly," a member of the French Civil Security team told the outlet.
GRAPHIC CONTENT WARNING: A father and son were pulled alive from the rubble of a collapsed building in La Guaira, Venezuela, four days after twin earthquakes killed over 1,400 people and left scores missing https://t.co/Nj4mrQQhMt pic.twitter.com/diaWNJCC4X
— Reuters (@Reuters) June 28, 2026
Mexican Army rescuers were also among the foreign teams searching for survivors trapped in the rubble in La Guaira on Sunday, joining French Civil Security personnel and American responders from Virginia's Fairfax County Urban Search and Rescue Team, who had rescued a mother and her 9-month-old baby the previous day.
Venezuela's acting president and National Assembly head, Jorge Rodriguez, said the death toll from Wednesday's earthquakes rose to 1,450, with 3,150 people injured, 12,721 displaced and 774 buildings destroyed.
Interim President Delcy Rodriguez said operations would continue. "Rescue and recovery efforts are ongoing. Today we have recovered people alive and, therefore, operations are not being suspended. We always maintain hope," she said.
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Buildings destroyed by twin earthquakes stand in La Guaira, Venezuela. June 27, 2026.
Photo Credit: (Photo: PTI)
The US Geological Survey estimated the magnitude 7.2 and 7.5 quakes could have caused more than 10,000 deaths, which would rank among Latin America's deadliest disasters in a century. Saturday evening marked 72 hours since the quakes struck, a threshold rescuers consider critical.
"There exists a window of roughly three days, 72 hours, where the probability afterwards decreases that you can save people alive," said Sebastian Eugster, who leads the Swiss rescue team.
At least 33 people have been rescued so far, including several children, while tens of thousands remain unaccounted for, according to Reuters. An opposition-promoted website listed just under 50,000 people as unaccounted for on Sunday, down slightly from 55,000 a day earlier.
A senior US official said an additional aid package worth hundreds of millions of dollars is expected to be announced within days, on top of the $150 million already pledged by the Trump administration.
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