A father and his son were pulled out alive from the rubble of a collapsed building, four days after the devastating earthquakes that struck Venezuela.
It was a scene that gave hope to the French and US rescue workers active in the area as they race against the clock to find more survivors.
Rescue workers carried the pair, visibly weakened and both wearing masks, on improvised fabric stretchers through debris-strewn streets to a waiting ambulance, as a crowd gathered around the emergency vehicles in La Guaira.
The coastal state was hardest hit by the earthquakes on Wednesday that left at least 1,450 dead and thousands missing.
Their rescue came after 12 hours of painstaking efforts by teams that combed through the ruins using specialised search cameras, carefully working through unstable rubble to reach the trapped victims.
“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,” said a member of the French Civil Security.
The rescue team in that area includes members of the French Civil Security and American responders from Virginia, who the previous day rescued a mother and her 9-month-old baby.
Before extracting the family members, rescuers prepared intravenous drips and cleared debris. Others remained beside the rubble searching for signs of life and communicating with their colleagues among the remains.
At least 33 people were rescued over the weekend, though tens of thousands remain missing, heightening fears that time is running out to find survivors.
According to specialists, after 72 hours following an earthquake, the odds of finding victims alive beneath the rubble drop dramatically.
Rescue teams raced on Sunday to find more survivors of the two powerful earthquakes that struck Venezuela this week, with signs of life bringing occasional relief to a grim quest to whittle down a list of tens of thousands missing.
Volunteers become emotional as they help rescue workers search for survivors in the rubble of the Residencia Rita, an apartment building that crumbled when the quakes hit in Caracas, Venezuela. Photograph: Fabiola Ferrero/The New York Times 
Dozens of emergency responders and volunteers search for survivors in several collapsed buildings in the Caribe neighborhood of La Guaira, Venezuela. Photograph: Adriana Loureiro Fernandez/The New York Times
In La Guaira, the hardest-hit state of a country long mired in a deep political and economic crisis, dozens of buildings collapsed into piles of sand and rubble.
“Rescue and recovery efforts are ongoing. Today we have recovered people alive and, therefore, operations are not being suspended. We always maintain hope,” said interim president Delcy Rodríguez, after announcing a presidential commission that would determine the habitability of buildings.
Flanked by several of her ministers, Rodriguez said school classes would be suspended for one more week and the electricity supply in La Guaira had been restored to 75 per cent.
The government – headed by Rodriguez since her predecessor was ousted by the US in a January raid – had thanked civilian volunteers ferrying aid to La Guaira, but then tightened access to the road, saying traffic was preventing efficient movement of emergency vehicles.
Earlier, Jorge Rodriguez, the acting president’s brother and president of the National Assembly, said the death toll rose by 20 people on Sunday to reach 1,450. He added that 3,150 people remained injured, 12,721 had been displaced, and 774 buildings had collapsed.
“We are in critical hours, in crucial hours to continue rescuing lives and to build camps where those people who have lost their homes, or who cannot return, for whatever reason, to their residences can stay,” he said.
Families and volunteers spent days pulling survivors and bodies from the rubble before the arrival of the more than 2,600 foreign rescue workers, often complaining of scant heavy equipment and a limited official presence, as hundreds of aftershocks deepened damage and kept residents on edge.
So far over the weekend, the government said at least 33 people had been rescued by Saturday evening, including several children, while tens of thousands remained unaccounted for.
Although the government has given a figure of hundreds missing or trapped, just under 50,000 people were listed as unaccounted for on a website promoted by the country’s political opposition on Sunday, a slight decline from 55,000 people a day earlier.
A woman wears a T-shirt reading “help me find my family” as emergency vehicles and rescuers operate near collapsed buildings in Caraballeda, La Guaira state, Venezuela. Photograph: Miguel Medina/AFP/Getty Images 
People look for the names of their family members after earthquakes struck Venezuela and other regions in the Caribbean last week. Photograph: Edilzon Gamez/Getty Images
The US Geological Survey estimated more than 10,000 deaths were possible from the magnitude 7.2 and 7.5 quakes, which would place them among Latin America’s deadliest of the last century.
“There exists a window of roughly three days, 72 hours, where the probability afterwards decreases that you can save people alive,” said Sebastian Eugster, the leader of the Swiss rescue team.
The 80-strong team had found multiple people alive in the rubble thanks to alerts from their eight search dogs, but had not been able to pull them out in time to save them, he added.
Saturday evening marked 72 hours since the quakes.
The US state department hailed the rescue of an infant by US rescue crews on Saturday, posting a video on X showing helmet-clad rescuers removing the blanket-wrapped and wailing child from the rubble.
A Colombian rescue team also saved an 11-year-old boy, Moises, who had been trapped some three meters deep in rubble, after identifying his location with a scanner.
He was removed on a stretcher with a broken arm, his eyes covered by cloth to protect them from the shock of daylight. His mother and sister were killed.
Mexican rescuers working at a collapsed building in the town of Caraballeda rescued another 11-year-old boy, Rodriguez posted on X late on Saturday, showing crews carrying a small figure on a stretcher out of the rubble.
Pope Leo on Sunday told worshippers gathered for the Angelus prayer in Rome that he wanted “to express my closeness to the Venezuelan sisters and brothers affected by the recent earthquakes” and expressed gratitude to rescue workers. – Reuters
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