The exterior walls of the Miguel Perez Carreno Hospital in the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, are being covered with photographs of missing people, as relatives move from one hospital to another in search of loved ones still unaccounted for after a devastating earthquake, the BBC reports. With several thousand people still missing, families are continuing to search.
Every hour, more people arrive carrying leaflets bearing photographs of missing relatives and paste them to the hospital walls. Among the missing are many residents of the coastal area of La Guaira.
Yeringker Bermudez, who came searching for relatives, said he had narrowly survived the earthquake. He was entering his building just as it collapsed. Now injured and moving with the help of a stick, Bermudez is searching for friends who lived in that building.
Expressing anger at the government’s response, he said: “The police and the government gave us no help. Along with neighbours and volunteers, we pulled the living and the dead from the rubble ourselves. We dug through the debris with our bare hands.”
Outside the hospital, countless people were waiting in the hope of finding a familiar name on the lists of admitted patients.
Inside the hospital, too, the situation was extremely tense. A hospital doctor, Santiago Casanova, said the first few days had been very difficult, but the situation had since stabilised as the number of injured had fallen somewhat.
He cautioned, however, that the falling number of injured was not a positive sign. As time passes, he said, the chances of recovering survivors from beneath the rubble are also diminishing.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report