Cabot Phillips
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Appearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
Well, the port city of La Guayra was hit extremely hard.
It's right outside of Caracas.
The UN says more than 100 buildings were destroyed in just that one city alone.
And the country's main international airport was knocked out of service, which obviously is going to severely complicate a lot of the rescue operations and aid shipments that are sure to be coming.
A lot of the high rises in this area were poorly built concrete buildings with little steel reinforcement.
Structural engineers say that this explains a lot of why dozens of these buildings, quote, pancaked, meaning one floor dropped onto the other with no gaps left, which sadly leaves almost no chance of survival for the people who are inside those buildings.
The country's interim president, Delcy Rodriguez, has called LaGuardia a, quote, disaster zone and asked for international help with the search and rescue in particular.
Yeah, it's a grim situation, guys.
In a lot of the hardest-hit neighborhoods, residents say they've seen almost no official rescue crews.
That means no firemen, no medics, nothing.
Just neighbors attempting to pull each other out
of the rubble by hand with little to no heavy machinery.
And there are just terrifying videos showing people trapped beneath these collapsed buildings.
You can hear them screaming up for help, but there is no one there to get them.
There's no machinery there to actually get those survivors out.
Now, Venezuela's rescue services were one of the many government services neglected for years as a result of the economic mismanagement by the Maduro regime.
The country simply was not equipped to respond to a disaster of this scale.
Yeah, since Maduro was taken out and Dilsey Rodriguez took over, she has been largely cooperating with the Trump administration, and that certainly seems to be paying off right now.
President Trump issued a statement Wednesday night saying the U.S.
would, quote, be there for our new and great friends, and that he had told federal agencies to, quote, get ready to move quickly.