Translated from the original Spanish field notes by Jesús Valdez.
On the third day, we went to La Guaira. We left very early in a truck with a driver arranged by our local friends Luis and Ulises. We crossed part of Caracas, and I confirmed that the city in general was calm. The areas with damage were limited, and the ten collapses that occurred in the city did not change its overall appearance. It gave the impression that an intense earthquake had not occurred. Only by looking closely at the buildings could one see that many were missing some walls, and in some city parks people were living in tents.
We took the road connecting Caracas with La Guaira, and we knew the first challenge would be passing the military checkpoint. We had been told that, to go to La Guaira, the military required safe-conduct passes, with the idea of preventing people from going there to loot or of losing control of the emergency response with so many people trying to reach La Guaira.
Along the way, I observed how people build houses on very steep land. Between Caracas and La Guaira there is terrain full of hills, and, as in many countries, there are many houses built with little seismic-resistant technique, probably built by the residents themselves.
When we arrived in La Guaira, we met the Cancún rescue team, who were loading their equipment to head to the disaster zone in the Catia La Mar neighborhood. They had been assigned to an apartment complex that had partially collapsed in two nine-story towers. There, they would search for survivors, since neighbors reported hearing noises inside the debris.
The team leader asked me to review the structures that remained standing but had destroyed upper floors. The idea was simply to determine for them the level of risk they were facing and whether, from my point of view, it was safe to perform certain maneuvers and access routes for search and rescue.
The Cancún rescue team applied all the search techniques established in their manuals, including canine search with a dog named Muuneek, whose name means tender star in the Mayan language.
At those buildings, government personnel and colleagues of the victims were waiting for their companions to be found inside the debris. Unfortunately, the result was negative.
While the USAR team carried out the final searches, I used the time to walk the area within a quarter-mile radius. I saw a completely devastated zone, where 90 percent of the buildings I observed had severe damage that made them unusable, and 20 percent had collapsed to the ground with different collapse types, including pancake collapses, collapses with lateral displacement, overturning, and upper-floor collapses. Some others were simply piles of debris.
In some of them, heavy machinery was being used to search for and rescue people alive or recover bodies. Many others looked abandoned, especially those at high risk of collapse, but without being cordoned off, which meant people could freely enter them.
Neighbors told us how they had experienced the earthquake. During the walks, I took photographs of damaged buildings, and one of the owners invited me inside to review his building, which had 30 percent of its joints crushed, visible structural deformation, and many collapsed walls.
Another thing I observed was that low-rise buildings had also been heavily affected because of the frequencies of this earthquake. Unreinforced masonry and poor construction practices without seismic-resistant criteria caused many houses to be damaged as well. In that case, approximately 60 percent of the low-rise houses had damage.
Around midday, I received a message from the leader of the Red Cross rescue team asking me to advise him on the stabilization and shoring strategy and to establish the risk level of the building that had overturned behind the Galerías Playa Grande shopping center.
I gave my point of view and suggestions to the rescue leader, who told me that engineer Joe Carry from Los Angeles and another engineer from Chile agreed with me. They then got to work and changed their strategy to achieve the rescue sooner than expected.
Later, I returned again to the Cancún team, who had received another task assignment. They were heading to search for the possibility of life of a person and a pet, a dog.
In that case, they asked for my opinion on cutting reinforcing bars in a slab to avoid risks while improving their access and evacuation route. I also evaluated the fractured elements and how the structural system was behaving with large cracks in its beams.
The rescuers carried out the victim location work, and all the neighbors began removing debris to achieve the extraction using techniques the Cancún rescue team taught them. At that point I had to return to Caracas, but I left the work moving forward with my structural engineering recommendations.
Before taking the vehicle back to Caracas, I walked again through the area of condominiums facing the sea. They remained standing but had severe structural damage, some on the verge of collapse because of compression-fractured columns.
