Photo: Marcelo Volpe

June 24, 9:00 am: University City of Caracas, Fire Station

Upon starting my shift, the first thing a UCV volunteer firefighter does is take inventory of the operational equipment and supplies, and check the condition of the vehicles. While doing this, I think it will be a boring day because it’s a holiday, with few people at the university and therefore little chance of us being called, and with many people at the beach so that Caracas will be relatively quiet. Besides, we have a quarter of a tank of fuel in our ambulance, which restricts our ability to go out. “The day will pass quickly,” I figure. “Tomorrow I’ll hand over my shift and go to class.”

When we’re not responding to calls at the university or in the city, we do drills. During the afternoon of June 24th, we practiced with our firefighter students how to extract a patient from under or inside a vehicle, or even from more complicated situations, such as when they are trapped under one or two columns, or in an elevator shaft.

June 24th, 5:00 pm: University City of Caracas, Fire Station

Seven firefighters and three students are on duty at the station. Two officers leave on motorcycles to buy groceries for dinner, while the others attend to other administrative matters. I continue practicing with the students.

June 24th, 6:00 pm: University City of Caracas, Fire Station

At 6:04 PM, while I am sitting in the station’s courtyard with the students, I receive a Google notification on my phone warning of an earthquake in my region. We immediately move away from the structure of Ciudad Universitaria’s indoor gymnasium and go to the meeting point, as do the other firefighters who were inside the structure. Our station has a panoramic view over Caracas, from Bellas Artes to Bello Monte. At that moment, all the buildings seemed made of fabric or mud. Many birds took flight. Vehicles and pedestrians stopped in the streets, and farther away, at the foot of the mountain and to the east, the air filled with brown dust. These were minutes of confusion, of fear. There had certainly been an earthquake, but how many people had been affected? What was its magnitude? Which areas of Caracas required immediate attention? Would my family be alright?

The answers to our questions didn’t come quickly, since the power went out immediately after the earthquake, and with it, portable radio communication. I was the firefighter on duty, with several students under my responsibility, and I had to honor my oath to my university, whose lives and property I swore to protect.

Ten minutes after the earthquake, we got into the ambulance and set out to patrol the University City, the main campus of Universidad Central (the country’s main public university), an UNESCO world heritage site. The mission was to attend to possible injuries or examine collapsed structures. But there is perhaps an even more critical place, where the damage could amplify the impact of the tragedy: the University Hospital of Caracas, here in the campus.

June 24, 7:00 pm: University Hospital of Caracas (HUC)

Since the campus’s structural integrity appears to have held, we can focus on assisting with the evacuation of the University Hospital and attending to the patients who have begun arriving from all over the city.

The scene resembles a horror movie for anyone, especially for any university firefighter: hundreds of patients evacuated to the street outside the hospital, in the dark, in their hospital beds, with their nurses and doctors always by their side, but with a multitude of new patients, in poor condition, arriving and describing better than anyone what we were struggling to understand but was becoming increasingly clear: the earthquake we had just experienced was unlike any other we had lived through before, something capable of causing structural collapses. The result was head trauma from falling concrete blocks, fractures of the upper limbs of those who tried to protect themselves from the falling objects, and lacerations from broken glass. We all trembled at the thought of an incident with a massive death toll.

June 24, 8:00 pm – June 25, 12:00 am: Maternity Hospital

Ambulance 65-A of the UCV Volunteer Fire Department transports three pregnant women from the Obstetrics ward on the 10th floor of the hospital to the Concepción Palacios Maternity Hospital on San Martín Avenue. One of the women was already in labor.

“Who will we meet today?” I ask her in the ambulance.

“Sofía.”

I wonder if that’s the most fitting name for the circumstances in which this baby girl will be born.

On the way to the Maternity Hospital and back to the University City, we can observe the state of the city. I can notice several half-ruined buildings. People seem afraid, uncertain. There is little to no official information. We only receive fragments of the reality we all share, which unfolds as time passes and the consequences appear. How do we act under these conditions? How do we know where there are affected people needing help?

When I return to the station at midnight, we are no longer seven firefighters but thirty-three. The others have arrived from different parts of Caracas, giving their version of events, more data to contribute to the operations board. We are all mentally prepared for the emergency. After a pause to reorganize, we went out again, this time with two vehicles, the ambulance and rescue unit 253, to two different areas in the north of the city where collapses were reported: Maripérez and San Bernardino, the neighborhood where I am assigned to.

June 25, 12:00 am – 04:00 am: San Bernardino

We arrived at the Rita building, where hours before people had been enjoying their holiday and even celebrating a baby shower. What does a collapsed building smell like? What does a rescue in collapsed structures sound like? There are human beings trapped under the rubble, their throats filled with dust and their minds clouded. You’re several meters above them. There are many scared and confused people, eager to help but also full of questions, and many voices, many orders, many tools, many openings in the concrete, many attempts at openings in the concrete, neighbors, mothers, children, family, construction workers…

“Total silence!” the rescuers and firefighters order.

And for a few minutes there is silence, while Tsunami, the now famous Search and Rescue dog, searches the structure.

“If there is anyone alive, please make a sound!”

We hold our breath during this silence and think about what it feels like to stop breathing, for a few minutes, for several hours.

The outcome that morning was negative; neither survivors nor bodies could be recovered. We needed tools and equipment, which would indeed arrive hours later. We were needed most in La Guaira. Then we learned that not only had buildings collapsed in Caracas, but three, five, or even ten buildings had fallen along the coast.

June 25, 9:00 am: University City of Caracas, Fire Station

When dawn broke on June 25, our Fire Station had become the first collection center within the University City, where many members of the UCV community—students, professors, and alumni—could gather, as well as other colleagues from several fire departments across the country. From that early morning, we established a situation room to monitor the location and condition of the 96 firefighters who make up our institution, as well as their families. We had the support of the Rector’s Office from day one, and a UCV bus was assigned to us to transport a total of 31 personnel to La Guaira, in addition to eight firefighters traveling in our Rescue 253 vehicle, a modified Toyota Land Cruiser. We boarded the vehicles at 9:00 am. We brought tools, personnel, logistics, and supplies. We said a prayer. Everything we considered necessary based on the information available at that time. Would it be enough?

June 25, 10:30 am: Caracas–La Guaira Highway

Normally, when I’m on my way to attend to someone injured in a car collision, I mentally prepare myself from the moment the emergency alarms sound, and I get in the ambulance. During the always brief journey, I listen to the sirens and review the protocols, possible scenarios, and lessons learned from previous calls. It’s a sequence: you arrive at the scene, secure and control the situation, attend to the person, resolve the hemorrhage, the open fracture, or simple abrasions; then you head to the hospital and, within hours, you’re back at the station.

That day, on the way to La Guaira, no sirens were wailing, no injured person whose location we knew, no sequence. That day, and the following ones, we would follow a different order. First, search: employing all available equipment and senses to locate a person. If we found someone alive, we moved on to step two, rescue: a set of specialized techniques and maneuvers to stabilize and extract a person from a location inaccessible by conventional methods. In this case, collapsed structures. If both phases of the operation go well, the next step is to repeat everything, from the beginning, in another location, person by person, building by building.

On the bus, I can only look out the window, running to the coast that can be seen once we emerge from the Boquerón 2 tunnel, and hope for the best.

June 25, 11:00 am – 6:00 pm: Caraballeda

Once the command post was set up in Caraballeda, we began operations. The collapsed buildings were generally more than three stories high. I can reach the roof of all of them by climbing over a couple of slabs and stacked blocks. The structures were extremely unstable after the collapse, so each aftershock reported or felt that day forced all personnel and civilians working on the site to quickly evacuate the building and wait until it was a little safer to re-enter. The search was divided into zones among different fire departments, rescue teams, and civilians, generally residents of the community.

“My wife and daughter are here, firefighter,” a man I ran into while trying to access one of the floors told me. “Tell me what you need to know. I’ll help you.”

At that time, in the Los Corales housing development, contact was made with a person trapped inside using the call-and-listen technique. He was a young man named Ángel. It required great effort to break through the concrete to reach him, with so few oxy-fuel cutting and percussion tools and the instability of the structure. The work was exhausting, but there was no shortage of support from everyone there, nor of water and food arriving from all over, and all kinds of encouraging messages. As darkness begins to fall, a group of motorcyclists form a line with their bikes and turn on their headlights, pointing them at the building. Everyone wants to help pull people from the rubble, any way they can.

As a firefighter, I am truly grateful to all the civilians in my country, because even though they had fewer resources than we did, they never gave up.

June 25, 7:00 pm: Caraballeda

Hours pass, and we get closer to reaching Ángel. I see night fall, human and material resources dwindling, and just then, how quickly panic can grow and spread due to a false tsunami alarm.

Disinformation exists, it is harmful, and it can spread very quickly. While we work to try to pull out survivors, the rumor of an approaching tsunami spreads among the people around us, along with the order to get into vehicles and head for the mountain. Hundreds of people and vehicles rush out, gripped by panic and confusion, shouting or honking their car and motorcycle horns. 

Those of us working in the darkness were suddenly left alone. What to do now, with so many people still trapped? The chances of a tsunami increase after an earthquake, but is this alarm real?

June 26, 12:00 am – 07:00 am: Caraballeda

In the hours that followed, the wave of panic passed, and we all knew the tsunami was a false alarm. Ángel was successfully rescued in the early morning while I helped recover a body. All the UCV Firefighters who went down to La Guaira on this mission returned to the station safe and sound, ready to go back the next day. Since then, we have gone to La Guaira every day.

I only returned home five days later, when I was ordered to rest.

Venezuelan society was able to organize itself and mobilize resources for a natural disaster we didn’t expect and for which we weren’t really prepared. That aid reached its destination, and those who managed to survive are proof of that. We were all volunteers: students, laborers, healthcare workers, journalists, cooks, miners… each contributing from their own sphere, region, and with their own unique skills. It is under this ideal of volunteerism that we can rebuild our country.

Prevention can save many lives in the future, at “the house that overcomes the shadows,” the UCV, in our country, and around the world. The UCV University Volunteer Fire Department has been working with discipline, study, and selflessness for 66 years. This tragic event will be the seed for new generations of volunteer firefighters who will be trained at our university and who, like those days in June 2026, will not hesitate to dedicate themselves to the service of Venezuela.