Tom Phillips

speaker

367 appearances 5 recordings 3 series first heard May 2026 last heard 7 Jul

Tom Phillips’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.

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Today in Focus · Searching for earthquake survivors in Venezuela · 7 Jul 2026 podcast

And yet...

Miraculously, search teams still are finding signs of life and actual survivors all these days after.

I think at this stage, unfortunately, those stories are the exception and not the rule.

I mean, I was at a destroyed apartment building with a grandmother whose eight year old grandson was inside.

And she's been camped out in a destroyed building basically ever since the earthquake, waiting for news, hoping that he's in there.

He was playing at his cousin's house.

So he was there with an eight-year-old and a 10-year-old cousin, three young kids who have not been found.

and the British and the Brazilian and the Ecuadorian search teams detected signs of life.

And they spent the whole day looking for these signs of life, and she was just so convinced that those were the kids.

And she came up to me and she said,

yeah and there's ninos on those ninos and yes the kids is it and and then i went to speak to one of the brazilians and and it wasn't and i just didn't have the courage to tell her that you know there is no hope and she's there in this you know sometimes smiling because she thinks they're getting closer and sometimes just breaking down it's really really heartbreaking you just don't

Well, the building I was in with the British team from the International Search and Rescue Group, a group of firefighters and medics and structural engineers who have flown in from the UK, they were using very sophisticated equipment, listening devices.

to try and hear the tiniest sounds from within.

So they would put this device in the building.

Then two of the men would put these headphones on and I put them on myself.

And it sounds like you're underwater and you can hear the tiniest scratch on the pavement.

And everyone is asked to be completely silent.

Someone shouts out, silencio total.

and everybody has to shut up and they raise their hands in the air and these guys listen for any sign of life and they detected some kind of indication that something perhaps an animal but hopefully a human being or human beings were under that rubble and they spent hours and hours I was there from 9am until 10pm and they were going to work through the night the Brits and the Ecuadorians and the Brazilians to try and get these people out alive if they were there

So it's extraordinary and extremely dangerous.

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