BATON ROUGE — Leo Verde talks to his aunt and uncle in Venezuela every day. He was on the phone with his aunt on Wednesday, June 24 when twin earthquakes rocked the country’s northern coast.
“Everybody was getting ready to watch the Brazil game because, you know, we never make it to the World Cup. So Brazil is the biggest team that everybody follows,” Verde said. “At 6:03 all hell broke loose. 7.2 and 7.5 on the Richter scale, back-to-back earthquakes. They lasted like three minutes.”
Verde co-owns Stab’s Prime Steak and Seafood on Jefferson Highway. When the earthquakes struck west of Caracas, his family was already mourning a cousin, the son of the aunt and uncle he talks to daily. He had died six months earlier from a mysterious illness.
Verde’s aunt and uncle survived the quakes, but their son’s widow and three children were missing. They lived on the fifth floor of a high-rise residential building. Their bodies were just found yesterday, he said.
Officials have placed the death toll from the quakes at more than 4,800 people, according to multiple sources, but Verde said 30,000 to 40,000 people are still missing in Venezuela.
“It’s really bad,” he said. “It’s a crisis of a magnitude that no one can imagine.”
His aunt and uncle slept on the patio of their building for days after the quakes, still dealing with hundreds of aftershocks.
Verde told UWK he’s had to tear himself away from the news coverage and images online.
“I had to stop looking at the videos and the stuff coming in because. . . it just breaks your heart. It breaks your heart every day,” he said. “But at least they found them. They’re going to be able to have . . .their services and, you know, a proper burial. I mean, they’re doing mass burials right now.”
Josh Gill of the United Cajun Navy is currently in Venezuela with a small team helping with recovery and cleanup.
“The entire coastline has been impacted,” he said. “It’s turned from a response and rescue mission to a recovery mission.”
He described the situation there as “absolutely horrific, catastrophic, cataclysmic, apocalyptic.”
Gill said he saw a 26-story apartment building and others nearly the same size “pancaked down.”
The current situation is also frustrating, Gill said. He’s located the remains of an American buried under the rubble. Unable to get heavy equipment on their own to retrieve the remains, Gill said he called the American embassy. He was told he should call elected officials in the U.S. to seek their help.
“They’re useless,” he said.
The international Red Cross, Samaritan’s Purse and World Central Kitchen are hard at work there trying to help the people who survived with food and resources.
“We’re here doing everything we can possibly do with the small team we have,” Gill told UWK.
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