50,000 People Still Missing After Twin Earthquakes Rock Venezuela

Tens of thousands of people remain missing after twin powerful earthquakes struck Venezuela, a senior United Nations official has reported, warning that the death toll is likely to ‘increase significantly’.

‘This is a very, very complex emergency response,’ said Tom Fletcher, UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, according to AFP on Saturday.

‘We have more than 50,000 people missing, more than 500 dead, so a huge job of sifting through the rubble,’ he continued.

His comments came after Venezuela’s interim president, Delcy Rodriguez, said the official death toll from the earthquakes had more than doubled to 589 on Friday, as rescue teams raced to find survivors beneath the debris of collapsed buildings.

The earthquakes, measuring magnitude 7.5 and 7.2, struck north of the capital Caracas on Wednesday.

Quakes of similar magnitude claimed more than 200,000 lives in Haiti in January 2010 and 73,000 lives in Kashmir in October 2005.

Fletcher said that OCHA, the UN humanitarian agency he leads, did not yet have an estimate of how high the final death toll might climb.

‘Our job is to find as many of them as possible and keep the death toll as low as possible, but clearly it is going to rise significantly,’ he said.