A Search Through the Rubble of Two Towers in Venezuela

The Conjunto Residencial Belo Horizonte, twin apartment towers in the Venezuelan state of La Guaira, stood 16 stories high and offered sweeping views of the Caribbean Sea. Erick Rosas, a few weeks shy of his college graduation, was living with his family on the third floor, but when the shaking started on Wednesday, he was visiting his uncle, about 15 miles up the coast. It was a national holiday, commemorating a 19th-century battle that led to Venezuela’s independence, and Rosas was in the swimming pool.In those first terrifying moments of back-to-back earthquakes, more powerful than any the country had experienced in more than a century, Rosas could think of little but escape, he told me. He pulled himself from the water and leapt from the pool deck over a concrete wall that dropped about 10 feet to the street. Apartment buildings behind him, and to his left and right, were falling to the ground. Shirtless, in flip-flops, he set out to find his family. To reach the Belo Horizonte, he walked and caught rides on the backs of motorcycles through dust and smoke, amid the clamor and confusion of the trapped and wounded, past rubble and burning wreckage of once-familiar streets. It took him five hours to get home, only to discover that much of the tower had pancaked and collapsed.Matias Delacroix / APThe Belo Horizonte residential complex was damaged by the earthquakes in La Guaira, Venezuela.Near the end of the first week of one of Latin America’s worst natural disasters in years, at least 1,700 people have been confirmed dead, some 5,000 are injured, and more are missing. The death toll is sure to climb. The hardest-hit state of La Guaira is teeming with search-and-rescue workers and humanitarian help from dozens of countries, including the United States. The United Nations is coordinating more than 2,000 rescue workers out of a command center in a stadium. American military forces have helped reopen the nearby international airport that serves Caracas. And a Navy war