Karina Blanco was just about to start the spinning class she teaches when the earth began to shake. The tremors kept getting stronger, so she grabbed her bag and ran outdoors with everyone else.
“When I realised the magnitude of it, I started screaming ‘my daughter, my daughter’. I sat in my car and drove as fast as I could,” said Karina.
Her only daughter, Fabiana, 12, was at their home when two powerful earthquakes rocked Venezuela within seconds of each other on 24 June. The second quake was one of the strongest tremors to hit the country in a century, at a magnitude of 7.5.
When Karina reached her building in Caraballeda, in northern La Guaira state, she could hardly believe her eyes. “I could see one building, then a gap where my building stood, and then another building.”
Inside their first-floor flat in the 10-storey building, Fabiana was in her mother’s bedroom when she felt the earthquakes. She ran into the kitchen, and was holding on to the counter, when the walls around her collapsed. She was thrown to the ground.
“I saw things shaking, falling, breaking, and then the walls cracked. The wall separating my apartment from a friend’s collapsed. At that moment, I thought, ‘I’m going to die. I won’t survive this. No-one is going to rescue me,’” said Fabiana.
From then began an excruciating 32 hours.
Outside the collapsed building, Karina saw half of her daughter’s bed sticking out of the debris.