Survivors tell of ‘brutal and fast’ Venezuela quake as hunt for survivors goes on

Nearly all of Ligia Level’s family lived in a trio of apartment blocks along Hotel Avenue, a seafront sweep of palm-specked resorts and high-rise condos along Venezuela’s Caribbean coast. When a powerful “doublet” of earthquakes jolted the region on Wednesday afternoon, those buildings and the lives within them came crashing down. Level, 67, leapt from her first floor window, breaking her foot as she scrambled to safety. Her relatives appear to have had less luck. On Thursday, she sat outside one of the three buildings, Residencias Villamar, wondering if there was any chance her niece and nephew had made it out alive, perhaps by jumping from their fifth floor apartment on to a mattress outside. Level believed her mother and sister, who had lived next door in a condominium called Residencias Anna Mar, were almost certainly dead. “We’ve lost them,” she wept as she waited by the wreckage of the buildings for news – and for government help to arrive. “Please, we absolutely need international help here. Anything and anyone we can get,” she implored, as volunteers scoured the rubble for survivors in the absence of civil protection teams. “We were not prepared for something like this – we’re not used to this.” Satellite imagery shows La Guaira before and after the earthquakes. Photograph: Vantor/Reuters Hotel Avenue is in La Guaira, a rundown port city surrounding Venezuela’s main international airport that has been shattered by the devastating earthquake. …