Scenes of collapse: The emergency at Venezuela’s hospitals after twin earthquakes

Isayen Herrera and Julie Turkewitz

LA GUAIRA/CARACAS – Children with battered faces and broken legs. A patient facing his third night on a gurney in a hospital yard, his intravenous fluid drip held up by a tree branch. A morgue designed to hold two bodies was packed with 30. Deprived of electricity, the morgue’s refrigeration units failed, and the heat accelerated decomposition. The stench was overwhelming.

Two days after a pair of history-making earthquakes struck Venezuela, hospitals and morgues in Caracas and the nearby state of La Guaira were overwhelmed with patients, with the dead and with family members hoping to find their loved ones alive. Doctors who have spent years working in woefully underfunded public hospitals said they had never seen so much pain at once.

The scene inside and outside the region’s hospitals on June 26 laid bare just how unprepared Venezuela’s government was for this disaster. The country’s medical system has been one of the chief victims of an economic crisis and chronic government mismanagement that dates back more than a decade.

On June 26, patients lay outside in hospital yards; rubble surrounded clinics. And in the absence of state help, citizens and medical volunteers showed up, carrying water, medicines and supplies.

Field hospitals sprung up, too, including one in a bus terminal in the city of Catia La Mar.

At a hospital in Caracas known as Periferico de Catia, a five-year-old girl had arrived after being pulled from debris. As a doctor waved an ultrasound wand over her abdomen, the girl kept repeating, almost in a whisper: “There was an earthquake.”

Her voice trembled, as did her hands. Others in her family were not so lucky; her nine-year-old brother and her grandmother, who were with her when the building fell, had died, said one of the girl’s godmothers.

Images circulated online of children who had been found in the debris without their parents, including a six-month-old baby whose face was red and scratched as if it had been clawed.

At a state-run morgue, Bello Monte, the atmosphere was one of suppressed shock. Dozens of families had arrived to try and find their missing loved ones, or identify people they already knew were dead.

Occasionally, the silence was broken by the sobbing of those witnessing another family arrive with confirmation of a death.

Among them was Stuart Pinto, 49, who said he had gone two days without sleep. He was waiting to receive the body of his son, Deyker Pinto, 34, who he said had been dismembered during the quake.

Pinto had cried the day before, he said, but now he was dry-eyed. He said he simply wanted to claim his son’s body, so he could lay him to rest.

At the Jose Maria Vargas Hospital in Caracas, some patients who had been hospitalised before the earthquake said the clinic’s interior had been severely damaged.

Outside, people gathered around patient lists, looking for their relatives.

A young patient recovers in the emergency room of the Dr Ricardo Baquero Gonzalez Hospital in Caracas, Venezuela, on June 26. PHOTO: ADRIANA LOUREIRO FERNANDEZ/NYTIMES

With so few ambulances available, people who had been found in rubble arrived at Hospital Domingo Luciani in regular cars.

One vehicle raced into the clinic’s carpark with a sign in the window: HURT. EMERGENCY. As it screeched to a stop, passengers poured out and started calling for help. A young man emerged, his face anguished, and he screamed in pain.

From a second car emerged an older woman, looking lost, and men in red helmets guided her in for care.

To the north of Caracas, in Caita La Mar, the Dr Alfredo Machado Community Clinic had survived the quake but was surrounded by collapsed buildings.

Since the night of June 24, a clinic accustomed to routine patient check-ups and everyday emergencies had been transformed into a disaster triage centre.

But by the late afternoon on June 26, its purpose had shifted again. Vehicles had stopped arriving with the sick and injured, and were now arriving with the dead. NYTIMES

• This article originally appeared in The New York Times.