Rescue teams race to Venezuela amid fears thousands killed in earthquakes

Rescue teams are racing to Venezuela’s shattered northern coast after a sucker punch of almost simultaneous earthquakes reduced dozens of buildings to rubble, with thousands feared to have been killed. The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said the Department of Defense would help search and rescue teams deploy to the affected region after Venezuela’s main gateway, the Simón Bolívar international airport, was badly damaged by 7.2 and 7.5 magnitude quakes, less than 40 seconds apart, late on Wednesday afternoon. “[Their] most immediate need right now is search and rescue efforts. They have [lots of] collapsed buildings and so they will need a lot of help in terms of digging through that,” Rubio told reporters, adding that the next 72 “golden” hours were critical. “In search and rescue you are trying to get to people while you can still save their lives – they are buried under rubble,” Rubio said. The coastal area near the international airport – around the cities of La Guaira, Catia La Mar and Caraballeda – appears to have sustained by far the worst damage, with a string of large tower blocks completely levelled and locals desperately hunting for missing loved ones. In some cases entire families of four or five people have disappeared. “This is an utter tragedy,” the acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, said in a televised broadcast, declaring the La Guaira region a “disaster zone”. …