Venezuela Reports Rising Death Toll After Powerful Twin Earthquakes. Yet Families Describe Distressing Conditions While Identifying Loved Ones.

Ten days after two earthquakes devastated northwestern Venezuela, the death toll continues to climb. On July 2, interim President Delcy Rodríguez said at least 2,595 people had been killed in the disaster, while at least 12,400 others were injured and 6,462 people had been rescued from the rubble.

Many buildings that once stood tall in the city of La Guaira have been reduced to ruins. Others that remained standing have been repurposed to serve different functions. That is the case with a port storage facility known as Los Silos which according to BBC Mundo has been turned into a makeshift morgue where hundreds of people are searching for loved ones killed in the earthquakes.

“I’m afraid of what I’m going to see in there, but it’s the only way to end this agony,” a woman who has been searching for her nephew for more than a week told the BBC.

As the outlet noted, the smell inside the facility is overwhelming because hundreds of bodies covered with plastic bags are left exposed to the sun, speeding up the decomposition process.

Inside, the Venezuelan government has offered families free cremations for their loved ones and is also identifying bodies through forensic dentistry.

Those who are able to identify relatives, friends or loved ones by the clothes they were wearing are directed to another area inside the facility. Those who are not as fortunate are taken to a row of television screens, where, according to BBC Mundo, they search through hundreds of photos showing bodies moments after they were pulled from the rubble, their faces still swollen and their skin darkened.

“This feels like a horror movie,” Liliana González, a 60-year-old resident of Catia La Mar, told BBC Mundo. González said she initially went looking for her aunt, but later learned her 37-year-old nephew was also at the facility. She was able to identify him after looking through the photos displayed on the monitors.

“It’s the first time I’ve ever done this. I saw my mother when she died, but this… this isn’t the same,” González said of her experience at the makeshift morgue. “There are swollen bodies, eyes bulging out, little children… I had never seen anything like this in my life.”

Everyone who enters Los Silos recounts the same traumatizing experience.

Jéssica Soto, a 42-year-old woman who went inside looking for her 15-year-old daughter and her 3-year-old grandchild, told BBC Mundo she had already spent two days waiting for their remains to be released.

“They make you wait and wait until the paperwork arrives, the trucks arrive, and I don’t even know what else we’re supposed to wait for,” she told BBC Mundo.

Soto said the worst part was having to identify the bodies.

“When I saw her, it was the worst. My daughter looked… she looked awful. I recognized her because of her shirt, and I knew it was her, but her face wasn’t her face anymore. It was the face of a monster.”

The June 24 earthquakes struck one after the other in northern Venezuela, about 105 miles west of Caracas. As noted by The Associated Press, the doublet earthquakes, one magnitude 7.2 and the other a 7.5, rank as the second and fourth strongest in the region since 1900.

Originally published on Latin Times