Venezuela earthquake death toll rises to 920

By Raphael John-Lall

The death toll from Wednes­day’s dev­as­tat­ing earth­quakes in Venezuela has climbed to 920, ac­cord­ing to an up­date pro­vid­ed at 1.30 pm on Fri­day by Pres­i­dent of the Na­tion­al As­sem­bly, Jorge Ro­dríguez.

Ro­dríguez said 3,360 peo­ple have been in­jured and 3,007 oth­ers af­fect­ed by the dis­as­ter.

Two earth­quakes, mea­sur­ing 7.2 and 7.5 mag­ni­tude, struck Venezuela a minute apart on Wednes­day night. The sec­ond quake was the strongest to hit the coun­try since 1900.

The dis­as­ter caused wide­spread de­struc­tion to build­ings, schools and hos­pi­tals.

Ear­li­er on Fri­day, act­ing Pres­i­dent Del­cy Ro­dríguez re­port­ed that au­thor­i­ties had record­ed 214 af­ter­shocks across the coun­try since the ini­tial earth­quakes.

She al­so an­nounced the im­me­di­ate mil­i­tari­sa­tion of the state of La Guaira as a se­cu­ri­ty mea­sure aimed at main­tain­ing pub­lic or­der and pro­tect­ing res­i­dents’ prop­er­ty.

Del­cy Ro­dríguez praised the ef­forts of cit­i­zens and res­cue work­ers in­volved in the re­sponse and thanked the thou­sands of vol­un­teers and emer­gency per­son­nel who re­main de­ployed in af­fect­ed ar­eas, re­mov­ing de­bris and search­ing for sur­vivors.

The Unit­ed States Ge­o­log­i­cal Sur­vey re­port­ed on Thurs­day that Venezuela could suf­fer eco­nom­ic loss­es equiv­a­lent to sev­en per cent of its Gross Do­mes­tic Prod­uct as a re­sult of the dis­as­ter.

The Gov­ern­ment of Trinidad and To­ba­go, along with sev­er­al coun­tries around the world, has ex­pressed sol­i­dar­i­ty with Venezuela and of­fered fi­nan­cial and oth­er forms of as­sis­tance.