Capricious, violent, arbitrary: Venezuela's twin quakes

LA GUAIRA, Venezuela, June 28 - I was lying on my bed, thinking about watching the Brazil soccer game — I can't even remember who they were playing — when the bedframe started moving like a mechanical bull.

I pressed myself against the mattress, staring at the open window, said a blessing for my parents, closed my eyes and waited for the ceiling to fall on me.

The two earthquakes that struck Venezuela early Wednesday evening were 39 seconds apart — magnitude 7.2 first and magnitude 7.5 just after.

Then the rattling stopped.

I picked up my phone and sent a message to a chat with my Reuters colleagues. The power supply held — for the moment. Elsewhere, the electricity was already gone.

My apartment walls had long cracks — like cat scratches on fabric.

The lower I descended the building's emergency stairwell from the sixth floor, the worse the damage got.

On the ground floor, the glass doors had been shattered.

Outside, I had no cell signal. Anxiety crept in. I photographed neighbors in the street, nearby buildings. Then I breathed deeply and told myself that I had to go back up for my laptop and my phone charger.

These were the fifth and sixth earthquakes I have covered since starting as a journalist for newswires in 1991 in Caracas.

All seem similar in their first moments: chaos, silence, pain, uncertainty, thousands of eyes with lost gazes absorbing what had happened, foreign rescue teams pouring in, governments more or less efficient at handling the emergency, delays in aid and looting. Then burials.

RANDOM, INDISCRIMINATE DESTRUCTION

Two days later, I go to the city of La Guaira, about a 30-minute drive from Caracas. Several of my bureau colleagues have already been, when we knew much less about what they would find on the ground. It is described by the government as the quake's ground zero.

Again I was struck by the contrast.

In some places, we found clean streets, buildings standing, almost no one on the avenues, all bathed in the soft Caribbean morning sun.

Then, just one block away, buildings were reduced to rubble on both sides of the road.

The deeper we went into the city's parishes — Caraballeda, Los Corales — the more devastating the scenes. Near silence reigned in the early morning hours.

But as the sun rose, the noise of voices grew as did the movement of people. Swarms of motorcycles ferried aid and transported survivors amid disorder, noise and scattered crying.

Thousands of young people in shorts and t-shirts, some barefoot or in sandals, moved rocks from mountains of debris more than 10 meters high.

Some struck at concrete slabs with sledgehammers in the race to find survivors.

Other exhausted survivors sat motionless in plastic chairs under trees that provided some relief from the relentless heat of the Caribbean midday sun.

I wasn't sure if my body could take it. We had a cooler in the car and I pressed handfuls of ice against my skin, almost bathing in it. Next time, I made a note to myself, I'd bring two coolers.

Many La Guaira residents complained about the delays in the arrival of rescue equipment and food assistance. There was some looting.

In the disaster zone, there's a feeling that the rocks and the mounds of rubble do not get smaller — that they are immovable — and we begin to ask ourselves: when can this be fixed?

What astonishes me more than anything is the sheer virulence of tectonic violence, because it does not discriminate. It strikes equally across neighborhoods, social classes, religions. And yet it is capricious — on one side a building stands intact, and right next to it another is gone.

Back at home, on my night stand, untouched and upright is a glass of wine. The photos of my parents from when they were dating. A photo of my mother, already elderly, at a flower market in Caracas.

All of them standing.

I feel very fortunate. REUTERS