Venezuelan security guard pulled alive from building basement 8 days after twin quakes

The rescue was considered a small miracle cutting through a week of tragedy. With teams sustaining him with food and water while they excavated the concrete, they were able to keep him alive far longer than the 48-to-72-hour threshold most rescue operations give to find survivors in disasters.

Gil Flores worked as a night-shift security guard at the complex, and was inside his small security cabin when the first violent tremor struck. While the surrounding concrete structure collapsed around him, his workstation cabin held ground, shielding him from crushing debris and creating a vital pocket of air.

“When we found him, he asked us not to tell his wife that he was alive, just in case he wouldn’t make it,” Costa Rican Red Cross rescuer Minyar Collado told The Associated Press, but she added “We were never going to leave him here.”

A specialized team from the Costa Rican Red Cross first detected signs of life and established contact with him on Sunday.

His wife, Gusbimar González, told the AP that she had days of despair before hearing that rescuers made contact. “When I learned he was alive, I saw a ray of light in the darkness,” she said. The couple has two children, ages 8 and 10.

The operation was coordinated by an urban search and rescue team of Chilean firefighters, who worked around the clock with specialized teams from the United States, Portugal and Mexico, Costa Rica, El Salvador and Venezuela.

Rescuers navigated a highly unstable structure, torrential rain and persistent aftershocks to tunnel down to the survivor. They used a telescopic camera to help maintain constant contact with Gil Flores, passing water and liquid nutrients through a narrow shaft to keep him hydrated during the final three days of the extraction.

María Paz Campos, a veteran firefighter from Chile, talked him through the entire operation, and kept him calm during the final excruciating hours of Thursday.

In a video published by the Chilean firefighters in the hours before the rescue, Gil Flores is seen drawing, seemingly to pass the time. Campos then gently tells him to look at the camera and to wear protective goggles.

“I need you to keep the goggles on, for the small particles that are falling, to avoid them getting into your eye,” Campos told the Venezuelan survivor.

The collapse of the building was triggered by two back-to-back earthquakes on June 24 that registered magnitudes of 7.2 and 7.5, respectively. The shallow, violent tremors damaged or destroyed tens of thousands of buildings across northern Venezuela, killing more than 2,200 people, injuring over 11,000 and leaving La Guaira state as the hardest-hit region in the country.

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Associated Press video journalists Andry Rincón and Brayan Antequero contributed to this report.

Fernanda Pesce And Juan Pablo Arraez, The Associated Press

by The Canadian Press

Venezuelan security guard pulled alive from building basement 8 days after twin quakes

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