This is what it is like to look through the eyes of Arnaldo Dos Santos, who is visiting Venezuela from Vancouver when disaster struck.
“The fear that was going through my head is inexplicable; it’s everything that goes through your mind: my kids back home with my wife,” he told CityNews.
Dos Santos was in a 14-story condo when the earthquakes struck on Wednesday.
He says it’s a miracle that it stayed standing, unlike so many other buildings.
In the time since, he’s thrown himself into the relief efforts with his own money and donations sent to him by Vancouver’s Venezuelan community.
He’s purchasing and delivering supplies to those in need in the hardest-hit places like La Guaira, where he says the death toll is only just beginning to come into focus as morgues get overrun.
“There was no room for bodies. Bodies were piled up outside in the yard and containers, in body bags, no body bags,” he said.
Thousands of Venezuelans are still missing, and some estimates of how many people have died are in the tens of thousands.
Dos Santos says that as a father, seeing the number of children in the street is one of the hardest parts.
“The orphanages do not have the capacity to bring in all these children that are now left without parents. As a country, we do not have the resources to deal with the massive tragedy like it is,” he added.
With the critical 72-hour period to locate survivors amid the rubble now having passed, search and rescue teams will largely be uncovering the dead.
Rahul Singh with GlobalMedic, a charity that focuses on providing medical aid to areas struck by natural disasters, says the closest comparison he can think of is the 2010 earthquake that decimated Haiti.
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“If you look at the modelling, there’s a one in five chance that there’s going to be 10,000 killed in a two in five chance that it’ll be up over 100,000,” Singh told CityNews.
“It’s going to be a significant death toll. And then the people that survived, they are going to overwhelm the medical system.”
Despite the severity of the situation, Singh says that Canada’s strained relationship with Venezuela has made it difficult to deliver aid when it’s needed most.
“The politics of this has to go to the side, and we have to focus on the humanitarian imperative,” he added.
For Dos Santos, witnessing the extent of the nation’s trauma firsthand has made the need for more aid, whether it’s from neighbours back in Canada or international partners, painfully obvious.
“I had cried like I never thought I would in my life. I thought it was a really tough individual, but I’m telling you, this will break you,” Dos Santos said.