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.
“I was running from one end of the complex to the other screaming ‘She’s dead. My daughter is dead’. I didn’t know what to do,” said Karina.
Under the collapsed building everything had gone quiet for Fabiana. She was lying face up, trapped by rubble on all sides, with the ceiling almost touching her face.
“I’m someone who gets very anxious and claustrophobic. But I don’t know why, a strange calm came over me. Maybe my mind was in shock,” she said.
A little while later, a nurse who worked as a carer for her upstairs neighbours started calling out to see if anyone could hear her. Fabiana responded.
“She told me to stay calm and that everything would be alright,” said Fabiana.
Six hours after the earthquake, at around midnight, the nurse was rescued. She told the volunteers who pulled her out that a girl named Fabiana was alive inside.
“I had surrendered to God asking for strength to begin a new life without Fabiana. And then someone told me, ‘Your daughter is alive’,” said Karina.
She ran back to the building screaming into gaps in the debris, calling out her daughter’s name.
