Rescuers search for thousands trapped after Venezuela quake

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0:42Hello and welcome to NewsHour from the BBC World Service. Coming to you live from London, I'm James Kamarasamy.

0:54The sound of chaos and confusion in Caracas. That was the moment a building collapsed in the small town of El Junquito on the outskirts of the Venezuelan capital as two earthquakes struck within 40 seconds of each other 22 hours ago. The footage shows bystanders running for cover and at least four people shielding each other as they are engulfed by dust from the collapsing three-storey building.

1:22And that is what it sounded like inside. BBC reporter Vanessa Silva's apartment just after 6pm local time, as the South American country suffered a double punch from beneath, a pair of quakes known as a doublet. The second had a 7.5 magnitude, making it the strongest to hit Venezuela, not just in this century, but in the last one as well. The latest confirmed number of deaths stands at 188, but thousands more are still unaccounted for, including this woman's child. I'm desperate. I just want to know where my son is, whether he's trapped or at a shelter. I'm desperate. The governor said they were going to send machinery, but look at what time it is.

2:06They still haven't arrived. Look, only we, the neighbours who managed to get out, are the ones helping. As that frantic search for survivors continues, who's the president of the Venezuelan National Assembly, Jorge Rodriguez, has given a televised address in it. He said 250 buildings had been damaged or lost, primarily in La Guayra. It's a coastal city north of Caracas. He also advised the public how they could help.

2:36This is the time to save lives. And the way you can all help is by supporting the collection centres that will be set up at schools, universities, the various NGOs dedicated to this type of work, the International Red Cross, the different churches, and by providing what is requested. Above all, this includes water, medicines, mattresses and blankets. Well, let's hear from some people who have been caught up in this. Kelvin Padilla lives with his partner and dog in the port city of La Guerra, which, as I mentioned, was the worst-hit area. And he told NewsHour's Tim Franks how he had reacted when his building shook violently for 20 to 30 seconds.

3:17Yesterday at 6.05pm, I was on my phone in the living room in my house. Everything started shaking, a little bit soft. So I was thinking, well, maybe it's nothing really big. And I stayed calm. But then in the next seconds, everything started shaking really hard for about 20 to 30 seconds, something like that. and I got really nervous. I tried to hide under my sofa. I couldn't. I was looking for my dog in the moment, in the chaos. I got my dog and I saw half of my house falling off like that, literally. Good grief. I mean, you must have been terrified. Yes, it was a complete disaster. I wasn't prepared.

4:06I wasn't thinking anything like that could happen ever. in my home and in Venezuela in general. And just in terms of the picture around you, Kelvin, I mean, you said that half your house fell down. How badly has La Guaira been damaged from what you've been able to see? I saw like 10 different buildings that doesn't exist anymore. They were like complete crash with people inside, you know? OK, and that's, I mean, that's the key part of this, isn't it? That these were residential buildings, you're saying, where people were likely to have been trapped. Yes, there are people alive trapped in those houses.

4:55What sort of efforts are there to get people out? I mean, have you seen a big response from the emergency services? I mean, in my song, it's a little bit difficult. I think one in the rest, everybody is looking for medicines and for the relative, because some people don't know anything about the relative at this moment. So there's not a lot of information. I assume also it's quite difficult. I mean, presumably we're speaking to you, but I guess often what happens in the aftermath of something like an earthquake is that it can be a lot more difficult to get through to people. Phone lines are down, that sort of thing.

5:41Is that what you're finding as well, that other things have stopped working? Yes, yes. Combined to the natural disaster we were having and I'm having right now, The problem with the electricity, the problem with the internet right now, we don't have anything like that. Anything. I'm charging my phone right now in my car. And where are you staying right now? I mean, from what I understand, the government has suggested that people stay away from their houses, especially if there's been damage because they're worried about collapses. They're worried about gas explosions. Can you just tell me what you're doing?

6:21Yes, something that I was watching yesterday, and I think this is really important, that the really hard damage was to the tall and old buildings. And the houses are better than those buildings. The houses with floor or maybe two floors is okay, the majority. But the buildings, the really old buildings from 50 years ago, everything crashed, everything. and with people inside. That's crazy. What do you need right now and what do you think the people around you need? What sort of help are you hoping to get? Well, first of all, first medical needs for a lot of people, even for my family. Obviously, water, principal foods to stay for these days because the problem is that we don't know how long the recovery is going to take.

7:15We don't know if we're going to get another earthquake, maybe today, maybe tomorrow, because last night we have several, but smaller, you know? Yeah. And I mean, there hasn't been an earthquake. People are saying there hasn't been an earthquake this strong in Venezuela, perhaps for 100 years or more. It presumably is going to be a huge task to rebuild a city like La Guaira. Yeah, I think that the main problem here in La Guayra, and this is an important fact, in 1999, it was a natural disaster here in La Guayra because it started raining, raining and raining. And the rivers and the beach, everything collapsed, everything, all the houses.

7:59And from that moment, they start building different buildings with really bad infrastructure. So I think that most of the buildings that fell off yesterday are the ones that were built with poor conditions. Kelvin Padilla in La Guayra speaking to NewsHouse. Tim Franks, well, from one man who escaped with his dog, we're going to turn to a woman who escaped from her apartment with cats because earlier I got through to Maria. She's an English teacher in Caracas. She was due to move her apartments in a week's time. So when the earthquake struck and she was forced out of her current one, she wanted to find out whether the new apartment was still standing.

8:42I went there at 4 a.m. in the morning to see if we could move to that one. But when I got there, it was a total disaster. So I ended up sleeping in the car with my cats and my partner. So what now? The current apartment where you live is too dangerous to return to. The one you are going to move into is destroyed. What are you going to do? Well, right now I'm living in a friend's house. She has been very signed and we're here now with three cats and me and this other person. So we're going to be here for a couple of days and then we'll see because we don't really know there are many buildings affected and we don't know where to go.

9:24What is happening at the moment in Caracas? What is the rescue effort like as far as you can see? Well, in Caracas, there are some rescue teams that are trying to get people out of the place in which they got trapped. But the thing is that they need more tools like equipment to get them out of there. Now they are doing just manually. They are not like these machines that will help them to make their work faster. You know, like people, the relative families, they are doing that too. and there are groups, civil society groups that they have been creating lists of people who are missing. And they also created a webpage in which you can report not only the person that is missing, but also the name, a photo, and of course, a picture or the name of the building in which this person was supposed to be.

10:21They say the name of the building, the location of the building. and that's how we know a preliminary number of missing people. Of course, this is not an official record, but yesterday by 11.20pm, the amount of missed people was 10 ,000. I mean, the ones that were reported on that page. And about 500 more, they said that information on the page, were found. Can I ask you, Maria, what about your friends and your family? Are they all accounted for or are there any people you... We don't know where they are. Just one person was missing my aunt and we were calling her. We were calling her friends because she precisely lives in Naeguata, which is like a city in La Guayda, in the state that Delcy Rodriguez declared as the disaster area.

11:13And we were really worried about her. We tried to get there, but we couldn't. One hour ago, we received a message and she wrote like, I'm OK. I was rescued. I was reborn again. I had another opportunity. I'm going to Caracas. I will call you as soon as possible. That must have been a huge relief. Yes, it is. It is, to be honest. And can I ask you about communication? I understand that X, what used to be known as Twitter, which has not been working in Venezuela, is working now, for example. Yes, Twitter was blocked in 2024, if I'm not wrong. Yesterday, some organizations, Some NGOs, they were asking, please, unblock X, unblock Twitter, because that's one of the most used social networks here in Venezuela.

12:01People get informed on that social network. All of a sudden, when people were trying to get to open their accounts, they saw that it was not blocked anymore. So they started to share information in there. and that's when we started to see okay like this is like really massive crisis or disaster. And what kind of help would you like to see what kind of support would you like to see from the government? Well I would like to see especially for other people that are in a worse position than I am because we see people in the streets they slept in there all night and there are kids a lot of kids and hundreds of elders they were asking they were trying to get not only like a place to be.

12:47They say like, well, maybe I cannot get a house right now, an apartment, but at least I would like to have a tent because I'm here with my kids and I would like to get also some food because we need to eat. There's a part in Caracas, in San Bernardino, in which there's a residential building and three towers and 48 families were living in each of these towers and all of them were outside and they said like this is unbearable like we cannot live like this for long. That was Maria an English teacher in Caracas speaking to me earlier we'll return to Venezuela later we'll be hearing from our correspondent in Caracas and we'll be hearing more about the international efforts to help with the search and rescue operation.

13:30You're listening to the BBC World Service this is NewsHour coming to you live from London with James Kamarasamy. astronomers have discovered what they are calling two giant super puff planets orbiting a very distant star they are each said to be as big as jupiter and lighter than candy floss huge in size and but tiny in density their atmospheres are thought to be rich in hydrogen and helium according to the study published today by the royal astronomical society the study was led by the University of Oxford. Dr George Dransfield is an astrophysicist from that university and I asked her what is a super puff planet?

14:09As you said before a super puff planet is a planet that's you know really really big but very under dense for its size. So I mean you know things that are roughly the size of Jupiter we might expect them to be the density of Jupiter but these things are about 20 times lighter than Jupiter itself so it's a very very surprising find. Two of them together. yeah exactly so i mean we've discovered so far about 6 300 odd planets of those about 37 of them are superpuffs but only four other systems contain more than one super path so this system is really special because it's not just multiple superpuffs but they're the biggest ones you've ever found and the star is nice and bright so that means that we can actually do a deep dive to you know investigate the system further.

15:00And I was going to say the brightness, is that how you found them? Because the star, nice and bright, but what, more than a thousand light years away? Yes, definitely. Over a thousand light years away. The brightness of the star helped, but we actually discovered them using the transit method, which is when a planet passes in front of the star along our line of sight and blocks out a small amount of light temporarily. So we get that dip in brightness that allows us to infer the presence of a planet. Interesting. I'm not sure if this is your turn of phrase but it's a rather lovely one that they are comparable to a nice blob of shaving foam.

15:34That is indeed my turn of phrase yeah if you squirted some shaving foam into your hand then that's the kind of density that we're talking about for these planets overall. Wow and what do we learn from them? So whenever we find something that's an outlier that doesn't kind of fit our understanding of planet formation it allows us to kind of extend our understanding of how planets can form and the diversity of the outcomes of planet formation. I mean, if you look at the solar system only, then you really wouldn't think planets are that diverse. But exoplanets have shown us that some very weird and wonderful things can happen out there.

16:14And superpuffs, especially double superpuffs, they're huge outliers. So it really allows us to understand our place in the cosmos. Just remind us, and I think you're at a conference about exoplanets that remind listeners what exoplanets are. So exoplanets are planets outside the solar system. Most of them we think are just orbiting other stars, so any star other than the sun. There's a bunch of them that are free floaters. We call them rogue planets, and they're just kind of, you know, wandering solo through the universe. Wandering lonely as a planet. Yes, very poetic. Dr George Dransfield, astrophysicist from Oxford University, who actually led that team of international astronomers who discovered those two super-puff planets.

17:03It seems that the already shrinking space to speak and write freely in Hong Kong is getting smaller. The owners of one of the territory's last remaining independent bookshops were arrested this week and charged with displaying seditious items. Letitia Wong, former pro-democracy district councillor and her business partner at the Hunter Bookstore have also been accused of receiving remittances from foreign political organisations. Carmen Lau is a Hong Kong activist in exile here in the UK. She has a bounty of HK$1 million on her head under the 2020 national security law, which is being used against people espousing anti-Beijing views.

17:40She's also a friend of Letitia Wong's. I asked her why she thought her friend had been arrested. It is because of her idea of remaining resilient after the government tries to repress further to the city. And what kind of books was she selling? What are the kind of items that will have led the authorities in Hong Kong to arrest her? There are a couple of books being deemed sensitive by the National Security Police. And that includes actually one of the children's books called The Ship Village that she displayed in her bookstore and also one of the bibliography of Jimmy Lai and among the other political books or books offered by former political figures.

18:33And Jimmy Lai, of course, someone who's fallen foul of the authorities as well. Yes. For his publishing. Yes, that's true. Now, tell us about her. You know her. What kind of a person is she? How will she be coping with this? How will she be viewing what has happened to her? So I actually got to meet her when we both served at the Civic Party and when we both were the district councillor. But before that, she was also a journalist in Hong Kong. And after the crackdowns and the implementation of the national security law in 2020, she resigned from her seat as district councillor. Then she founded this bookstore.

19:21And the reason of she founding this bookstore is that she wants to create a space for ideas, exchanging, and also for promoting reading and also thinking in the already tightened freedom in Hong Kong. And she remains one of the most resilient people that I've met. And she also decided to stay in Hong Kong. I think this is very courageous of her. But she now faces potentially years in prison if she's found guilty. Yes. So she is facing one charge of sedition and the other charge of money laundering under the National Security Ordinance. That is the Article 23. and uh did she did she go into this with her eyes open i mean she must have realized that this was a possibility a strong possibility from the previous uh interviews that she had with some hong kong media outlets uh she mentioned that she had that expectation of uh uh mental expectation of being arrested eventually it's just a matter of time um but i think she doesn't think that's you know, selling books or owning a bookstore is anything.

20:47I think no one would ever believe that owning a bookstore is a crime in Hong Kong. But she is not the first independent bookseller in recent months to face arrest, is she? And how many independent, genuinely independent bookstores are left? So, yes, she is the second case. So around three, four months ago, there was another bookstore owner being arrested under the national security law as well. And for now, approximately we still have around 70 independent bookstores in Hong Kong. It is a significant decreased number than before the implementation of the national security law and the Article 23.

21:32And that was Carmen Lau, a Hong Kong activist currently in exile here in the UK, speaking about her friend Letitia Wong, the bookseller who has been arrested. And just to bring you an update on what's going on in the Strait of Hormuz, where the UN's International Maritime Organization, the IMO, has paused the planned evacuation of more than 11 ,000 sailors who were stranded in the strait after a cargo ship passing through the waterway was attacked. In fact, the head of the IMO, Arsenio Dominguez, said several boats had already been evacuated, but the agency wanted to ensure that necessary safety guarantees would continue to be in place.

22:09The British Maritime Security Agency has reported on Thursday a ship had been stuck 7.5 nautical miles southeast of Amman's port of Dahit by an unknown projectile. No casualties were reported. You are listening to NewsHour from the BBC World Service.

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23:45Mike and his guests offer their perspective on how policy changes could affect what you do with your portfolio. Download the latest episode and follow at schwab.com slash Washington Wise or wherever you listen. You're listening to the BBC World Service. This is NewsHour, coming to you live from London with James Kamarasamy. Coming up next on the programme, we'll be heading to Caracas, getting an update on the situation in the Venezuelan capital after those twin earthquakes on Wednesday. But we're going to turn now to the heatwave in Europe, where more temperature records have been broken today in both the UK and France.

24:22Now, depending on where you're listening to us, You might be looking at this current European heatwave and thinking, so what? But people in the UK are quick to point out that cities, homes and other parts of the infrastructure here are not built to cope with intense heat. So what can be done about it? We've spoken to one woman in south-east London who has taken an ambitious approach to keeping her house cool. This report from Lucy Thomas. It's absolutely sweltering here in Sydenham in south-east London. It's about 35 degrees. And I'm on the street in which Catherine's house is. And all the houses do look quite similar, but I'm about to find out why Catherine's is so different.

25:07Hi, Lucy. Your house looks quite similar to a lot of the other houses on the street, but it's not similar. Can you tell me why that is? Yeah, so we've done a retrofit for the house. So it's a 60s townhouse, a very standard British build. So we've got ground floor, we've got a first level and a second level. And basically what we did was replace the double glazed UPVC windows with triple glazed windows. We've added external blinds and an awning. And also what we've done is we've added a mechanical ventilation system to bring in air so that when the windows are shut, the house air doesn't stale.

25:46okay so we're just heading up the stairs to the top of the house

25:56and this is where we have the white external blinds if it's a sunny and not super hot then we can have the blinds down but still have airflow into the room so that the sunlight doesn't come directly into the room and i'm just looking up and there's what looks like a kind of white circular disc on the ceiling. And what is it? It's an outlet for the mechanical ventilation that we've got in the house. I've just gone into the bathroom. I'm actually going to get in the bath to have a look up. On the left, that's the inlet of the MBHR. So the air comes into there, it goes into a machine. In the winter, it's great because there's a heat recovery.

26:44So basically, the heated air in the room is then recovered before it goes out and new air is brought in and then it's preheated. But in the summer, it bypasses this heat recovery part. The air is then distributed throughout the house, throughout these different vents. It was a bit of a costly exercise with the summers getting hotter. It probably is a lot more comfortable in the winter and a lot more energy efficient. And in the summer, it's also a lot cooler. One woman there in South London who's put a lot of time, thought and money, as she said there, into adapting her home for the changing climate.

27:24That report was from the BBC's Lucy Thomas.