When the ground beneath Venezuela started violently rocking on Wednesday evening, Verónica feared the walls of her Caracas apartment would bury her.
“I thought I was going to die,” she told BBC Mundo.
She was at home celebrating a national holiday with her mother when tremors from two large earthquakes hit the city, seconds apart, around 18:00 local time (22:00 GMT): the first at a magnitude of 7.2 and the second at 7.5.
More than 160 people have been confirmed dead so far and hundreds more are injured – but authorities have warned they have not even begun to gauge the losses in some of the hardest hit areas.
Debris is strewn around the streets of Caracas, Venezuela’s capital, as rescuers dig through the wreckage of collapsed buildings to locate survivors. In some footage, people can be heard calling for help.
Across other affected parts of Venezeula, a picture of the damage is still emerging as power and internet outages add to the chaos.
Evacuating to the street, she said she could hear voices coming from mountains of rubble. Survivors, so desperate to flee that they had not paused to put on shoes, were hugging and crying.
Hours later, many were unable – or too fearful of aftershocks – to return to their homes.
Hundreds of people around the city slept in squares or on the streets, tents packing sections of pavement and parked cars turning into makeshift beds.
Leander Pérez – whose home is in the Santa Rosalía parish in the centre of Caracas – spent the night on the pavement in a public square with his neighbours as his apartment block was unsafe.
He told the BBC that he and his neighbours “are in deep shock”.
“All the walls cracked during the earthquake and we had to evacuate the building,” he said, adding that they were trapped for a while as one of the security gates was bent and would not open, but they eventually kicked it open.
One Los Palos Grandes woman, who was not even pretending to sleep, told BBC Mundo she was in shock.
“How do you go back to living like this? This is like something out of a movie,” she said in the early hours of Thursday.
A handful of people in the suburb – one of the most affected areas of Caracas – managed to escape with their pets.
Others across the country, like teacher Alan Chung, face an anxious wait to see whether theirs have survived.
“I have two cats. Unfortunately I’ve not been able to get back to my apartment to see if they are okay… fingers crossed,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
