A man has been rescued alive after spending eight days trapped beneath the rubble of a building that collapsed following twin earthquakes in Venezuela.
Emergency teams freed Hernán Gil more than 100 hours after first detecting his presence under around 140 tonnes of debris, reports BBC.
A Chilean firefighter involved in the operation described it as “without doubt the most complex and technically difficult” rescue he had ever faced.
As of Thursday evening, 2,595 people have been confirmed dead in the earthquakes that struck Venezuela on 24 June, while tens of thousands remain missing.
Allan Madrigal, a paramedic with the Costa Rican Red Cross, said Gil had “emerged just perfect” after the ordeal. Madrigal was the first rescuer to hear Gil’s faint cries on Sunday, recalling that he initially doubted what he was hearing and asked a colleague to confirm he “wasn’t just imagining it”.
From that moment, rescue teams worked continuously to reach him.
Gil had been working in a small concrete security booth in the basement of a parking structure beside the Galerias Playa Grande mall in Catia La Mar when the quakes struck. The structure appears to have formed a protective shell, shielding him from the massive collapse.
“He has told us that he does not even have a crushed nail,” a Costa Rican Red Cross worker said shortly before his extraction.
He was given water and placed on an intravenous drip as rescue teams from Venezuela, Chile, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Mexico, Portugal and the United States worked through the debris. The operation remained extremely hazardous, with access tunnels repeatedly collapsing.
Rescuers eventually established visual contact with him overnight, using a small camera inserted into the rubble. In footage from the scene, a Chilean firefighter can be heard asking Gil to turn toward the camera as efforts to bring him out finally succeeded.
