Why the true death toll of Venezuela’s quakes is so hard to know

It has been six days since devastating twin earthquakes flattened entire residential neighborhoods in Venezuela, and dozens of newly found bodies are still being hauled out of the rubble.

On Monday, rescuers piled up coffins inside an improvised morgue at the sun-scorched port in the town of La Guaira, one of the hardest-hit areas. Small trucks arrived with more bodies, leaving them arranged in a long row by a concrete dock.

“Every day the number of victims keeps going up,” said Jennifer Moreno Canizales, a spokesperson for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Caracas. “And we expect it to keep rising.”

The official death toll after Venezuela’s earthquakes rose Monday to 1,719 people, an increase of nearly 300 since Sunday. It is based on the number of bodies recovered during the search operations, Moreno Canizales said.

But sobering as it is, that figure could be a substantial undercount. Many more Venezuelans remain missing, with chances of finding them alive shrinking every day.

The uncertainty of the number is not just a matter for the journalistic or historic record. For many Venezuelans, it signifies their anguished limbo as they search for friends with bleeding hands, trapped between uncertainty and a desperate refusal to accept the worst.

There is no official or reliable toll for the missing. And with so much debris from tall residential buildings pressed tightly together, and a shortage of heavy machinery to remove the rubble, estimates of how many people might still be trapped inside vary widely.

Two forensic doctors at the main morgue in the capital, Caracas, estimated a death toll of about 4,000, basing that on the number of bodies that had been arriving at a morgue in La Guaira every day.

In anticipation of the toll increasing, the United Nations has been procuring 10,000 body bags in coordination with Venezuela’s government, said Gianluca Rampolla del Tindaro, the organization’s resident coordinator for Venezuela. “That is the applying assumption; it’s very sad,” he said.

According to an unofficial website where Venezuelans can report the missing, more than 46,000 people were still unaccounted for. The New York Times could not independently verify the figure, which can include people who survived but became separated from relatives.

To veteran rescue workers, the high number of reported missing may be ominous.

“Contact is difficult, but not that difficult that you wouldn’t have gotten in contact,” said Linda Hornisberger, the president of REDOG, a nonprofit Swiss search-and-rescue association that has deployed eight dogs and 88 emergency responders to Venezuela since Friday. “We must assume most to be dead.”

Hornisberger said that despite working eight- to 12-hour shifts for days, “we have not been able to rescue anybody.”

Disaster response experts say that it often takes several weeks for a full picture to emerge after disasters of this magnitude.

When Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in 2017, the official government death toll was 64 people. Nearly a year later, they updated it to 2,975, nearly 50 times as high. After the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, when entire coastal villages were completely erased, it took the authorities more than a year to settle on the final estimate of 230,000 victims.

Several signs out of Venezuela indicate that there might also be a delay before a final death toll is reached.

The day the earthquake struck was a holiday in Venezuela, when it was more likely that families would have been home, or had traveled to the seaside area of La Guaira. Many buildings there were built during an economic boom in the 1970s and 1980s, when developers erected tall towers, many 10 stories or more. A mountain range limited building space, which led developers to choose to build vertically, said Josué Araque, a Venezuelan geographer.

Now, many of those buildings have been pancaked into a dense tangle of debris.

“They are mountains of rubble from buildings of many, many levels, made of concrete, which basically turns them into tombs,” Araque said. It is difficult to search the lowest floors of the buildings, he said, “because there are 10 floors that fell on top of them.”

Araque said he believed that there were probably many more missing people whom “they probably will not be able to recover.”

There is 1.2 million tons of debris in the hardest-hit areas of La Guaira, the U.N. Development Program said Monday.

Moreno Canizales, from the U.N., said 700 buildings had collapsed. Despite the rescue teams’ best efforts, she said, “it is hard to reach them all in time” to rescue those who might still be trapped alive.

Del Tindaro, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator in Venezuela, also said in an interview that the high number of collapsed buildings indicated that the official toll was an undercount.

Ilan Kelman, a professor of disasters and health at University College London, said a full accounting of the number of deaths might never be known. But a preliminary projection that the final toll could exceed 10,000 — shared by the U.S. Geological Survey based on factors including the magnitude of the earthquake, the population density, and local infrastructure — remains grimly feasible, he said.

The work of recovering bodies is painstakingly slow, and it’s not a priority for most response teams that are trying to save those who may be still alive. On Sunday, 49 rescue teams coordinated by the U.N. rescued seven survivors, Moreno Canizales said. Sometimes, she said, the teams are responding to families telling them that they can hear a relative crying from the rubble.

When the disaster response shifts, more bodies are likely to be found, experts said.

“The focus of the search-and-rescue teams is to look for those who might be alive” based on reports of sound and motion, said Phil Gelman, a Latin America coordinator with GOAL, an international humanitarian response agency. “When the search-and-rescue phase is ended, and heavy machinery is moved in to move rubble, the casualty count will rise.”

Even in well-organized response efforts, many survivors end up being rescued by untrained friends, family, and neighbors, said Emily So, a professor of architectural engineering at the University of Cambridge.

One Caracas resident, Rosmaria Herrera, 30, said she had lost at least three relatives. Family members and other civilians pulled the bodies of her father, her cousin, and her grandmother out of the rubble. But they couldn’t find her uncle.

“It’s strange, because there is practically nothing left of the building,” she said.

Witnesses and aid workers described a shortage of heavy machinery as one of the biggest obstacles to rescue efforts, saying volunteers often lacked the equipment needed to move concrete slabs and reach survivors trapped beneath collapsed buildings.

In videos widely shared on social media, residents pleaded for excavators and other heavy equipment. In one, a man says neighbors pooled their own money to hire machinery after waiting days for government assistance to arrive.

“If we keep waiting for our wonderful authorities, another week will go by with our relatives still buried there,” he says. “We had to start doing this ourselves.”

Some victims will likely die from their injuries, in part because of Venezuela’s already overstretched health system, Kelman said.

So said the final toll would likely be determined by the number of people reported missing, the extent of visible damage to buildings, and impeded access to the worst hit areas, which has stymied some responses.

“Tragically, until they recover the bodies from underneath the rubble,” So said. “The count will be low.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.