LA GUAIRA, Venezuela — A father and his son were pulled out alive from the rubble of a collapsed building on Sunday, four days after the devastating earthquakes that struck Venezuela.

It was a scene that gave hope to the French and US rescue workers active in the area as they raced against the clock to find more survivors of the powerful twin earthquakes that struck Venezuela on Wednesday.

Rescue workers carried the pair, visibly weakened and both wearing masks, on improvised fabric stretchers through debris-strewn streets to a waiting ambulance, as a crowd gathered around the emergency vehicles in La Guaira.

The coastal state was hardest hit by the earthquakes that left at least 1,450 dead and tens of thousands missing.

The rescue of the man and his teen son in Caraballeda, north of Caracas, came after 12 hours of painstaking efforts by teams that combed through the ruins using specialized search cameras, carefully working through unstable rubble to reach the trapped victims.

“They are extremely weak, as any patient trapped under rubble for four days would be, so we are doing everything possible to rehydrate them and administer various medications during the extraction process, which is moving very slowly,” said a member of the French Civil Security.

The rescue team in that area includes members of the French Civil Security and American responders from the Fairfax County Urban Search and Rescue Team in Virginia, who, the previous day, rescued a mother and her 9-month-old baby.

Before extracting the family members, rescuers prepared intravenous drips and cleared debris.........

© The Times of Israel