Survivors of the catastrophic earthquakes in Venezuela — including a journalist who was in a Caracas elevator when the first temblor struck — recounted scenes of devastation as “everything collapsed.”
The man in the elevator, journalist Tony Frangie, told “CBS Mornings” that the quake was “quite terrifying.” He had been on his way to watch a World Cup match with friends on Wednesday and was just leaving his building when the shaking started.
“I started to pray and to press every button, waiting for it to open up,” Frangie said. The elevator let him out in the building’s basement. When he went outside, he saw that the structure was shaking. The building stayed standing, he said, and he spent the next several hours waiting as neighbors and family came downstairs.
At first, he didn’t realize how big it was. But when he went online, he learned that two earthquakes, one with a magnitude of 7.2 and the other 7.5, had struck west of Caracas. The quakes are the strongest to hit Venezuela in over a century, and were so powerful that the shaking could be felt in parts of Colombia and Brazil. They also sparked tsunami alerts.
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La Guaira, a state on the country’s northern coast, was the hardest hit, Venezuela’s Acting President Delcy Rodríguez said. At least 164 people were killed and more than 900 injured, Rodríguez said, with the toll likely to rise as rescuers search collapsed buildings. Rodríguez has declared a state of emergency.
La Guaira resident Antonio Bermudez told the AFP news agency that the shaking began “all of a sudden.” He was in his living room, he said, but escaped his building before it collapsed.
“I started to move, I looked for shelter under a column. I was between my room and the shower. It shook harder and harder,” Bermudez sid. “I held onto the wall and the building started to come down.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the U.S. is deploying search teams, medical resources and humanitarian aid to Venezuela. A state department official told CBS News that Rubio called Rodríguez and offered the full assistance of the United States. El Salvador has also offered its assistance.
“We expect it to get worse”
The two quakes took place within a minute, Northwestern University professor emeritus Emile Okal told CBS News. That meant that many people did not have enough time to evacuate the buildings they were in between the first and second rounds of shaking, Okal explained.
CBS News meteorologist Rob Marciano said the quakes were shallow, only about six miles deep, creating “more violent shaking at the surface.”
In the neighborhood of Catia La Mar, which holds nearly 200 housing towers, “everything, everything collapsed,” resident Yilsmaris Blanco told AFP.
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“We thank God because … we’re alive, but there are people right now suffering with their relatives buried, with their relatives crushed and they can’t get them out,” Blanco, 39, said.
Larry Rojas, 49, said his family was trapped in a collapsed building.
“We have nothing, right now we have nothing, not even the strength or the courage to go in there,” Rojas told AFP. “Just imagine.”
Photos show buildings with large cracks and fallen walls. Other structures were completely reduced to rubble. Much of the area has no electricity. People do not have access to water, Rojas said, leaving them “dying of thirst.”
“Really, we need someone to help us, to send machinery. That’s what we need to get into the buildings that have collapsed,” Rojas told AFP. He said that area residents are afraid to enter any buildings, even the ones left standing, because “we’re afraid it will collapse too.”
Federico Parra /AFP via Getty Images 
Jose Pacheco, the operations chief of the United Rescue Group of Venezuela, told AFP that he had never seen anything like the aftermath of these earthquakes in his 30 years of experience. He said La Guaira needs “help, above all technical help,” calling on specialized teams from Caracas to travel to the region.
Frangie told “CBS Mornings” that he has seen “hundreds of posts and stories and lots of messages of people” looking for help and searching for loved ones. He was supposed to be graduating from his MBA program on Friday, but that is “definitely suspended,” he said. Instead, he is waiting to see how he help survivors.
He also said he fears the death toll will rise.
“We’ve seen videos of buildings collapsing and never-ending amount of people looking for families,” Frangie said. “So, yeah, we expect it to get worse.”