Over 50,000 people missing after Venezuela quakes, UN aid chief tells AFP

GENEVA - More than 50,000 people are missing after powerful twin earthquakes rocked Venezuela, the United Nations’ aid chief said on June 26, warning that the death toll was likely to “rise significantly”.

“It’s a very, very complex emergency response,” Tom Fletcher, the UN under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator, told AFP in an interview.

“We’ve got over 50,000 people missing, over 500 people dead, so a massive job to go through the rubble”.

His comments came after Venezuela’s interim president Delcy Rodriguez said the official death toll from the earthquakes more than doubled on June 26 to 589, as rescuers raced to find survivors beneath collapsed buildings.

The 7.5- and 7.2-magnitude earthquakes struck north of the capital Caracas on June 24.

Earthquakes of similar magnitude claimed more than 200,000 lives in Haiti in January 2010 and 73,000 lives in Kashmir in October 2005.

Fletcher said the UN humanitarian agency OCHA, which he runs, did not yet have an estimate for how high the death toll was likely to go.

But, he said, “50,000 people are missing”.

“It’s our job to find as many of them as possible, and to keep that death toll as low as we can get it, but it’s clearly going to rise significantly.” AFP