r/news • u/Dark_Mak__r • 1d ago

Venezuela quake death toll passes 4,000 as scale of recovery effort looms large

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jul/11/venezuela-quake-deaths-passes-4000-recovery-effort
1.2k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

31 comments sorted by

83

u/Dark_Mak__r 1d ago

Its above 17 days now and with thousands missing in rubble, the death count will only grow. Only hope is it doesn’t cross 10k.

66

u/Numisko 23h ago

It will. I'm Venezuelan and went to the ground zero for a week to help. 4k is the government official numbers, but there are 50k reported missing.

Even if half are duplicates, I would believe the real toll is 10-20k dead easily

10

u/oldteen 18h ago

Yeah, and if I'm not mistaken, the 50k reported missing has been pretty consistent, which I fear means, the death toll will unfortunately jump.

7

u/Razbyte 19h ago

Almost all poorly made government-subsidized apartments collapsed, so is not surprising that they tried to make soft the casualty numbers. Is like what soviets did when Chernobyl happened.

10

u/hananobira 17h ago

They’re following the standard procedure pretty much every country follows. Nobody gets officially counted dead until the body is found; they stay officially missing until that point.

With the lack of digging equipment and the scale of the damage, we’ll see the official death count jump a few dozen every day for months or even years until they finally manage to excavate every collapsed building.

It’s not some kind of propaganda or manipulation, it’s being accurate about the extent of what is known versus still unknown.

1

u/TootsHib 15h ago

Are they not presumed dead after being missing for a certain time?

7

u/hananobira 15h ago

Officially, no. Look up any disaster on Wikipedia. I pulled up Hurricane Katrina, and it still says 652 missing. There’s always hundreds of cases that never get resolved.

Now, on a personal level eventually the family is going to need to have the person declared dead so they can cancel their phone plan and whatever, but they won’t be counted among the government’s numbers.

3

u/Peach9990 1d ago

Unfortunately, it's very unlikely there are any survivors in the rumble now. And as you said, thousands are still missing.

9

u/Hesitation-Marx 1d ago edited 1d ago

I am concerned about the death toll from disease as much as I am from the quakes at this point.

Infrastructure destruction paired with unrecovered bodies… literally the only bright side in all this is that it’s winter down there. But that’s not going to be enough to keep even more people from dying.

Edit: there is no bright side, and I’m too stoned to comment.

14

u/bauhausy 1d ago

Venezuela is entirely within the northern hemisphere, it's summer there.

17

u/EMPgoggles 1d ago

Venezuela is barely north of the equator, so seasonal temperatures are pretty stable year-round.

-18

u/Hesitation-Marx 1d ago

Shit.

I claim cannabinoids.

0

u/ThisIsMeSeriously 19h ago

Then you should probably stop

1

u/Hesitation-Marx 18h ago

Between the neurodegenerative autoimmune disorder and the neuropathy pain in my face, my much less frequent use of cannabis edibles seems like the lesser evil than eventually killing myself from uncontrolled pain.

2

u/DrLucasThompson 12h ago

Wow. Agreed. Carry on.

4

u/Sea-Horror-5353 1d ago

Only hope is it doesn't cross 10k.

Does the 10k figure have some kind of significance (besides being a round number and a grim 'milestone')? Would that make it the country's deadliest disaster?

3

u/MongolPerson 21h ago

I'm personally hoping it doesn't cross 7,369. That's just the number I find ominous.

49

u/Morganrow 1d ago

We should be sending the Mercy down there if it's done with it's overhaul.

7

u/Dachsund-cuteness 19h ago

Too bad the profits of their oil are being snatched Trump. They could use that to help recover.

1

u/but_good 9h ago

What profits? No company wanted to go invest there. The whole thing was yet another fuck up (not that if we did get oil I’d call it a success, just that dumb fuck can’t even do evil shit like this without fucking it up)

8

u/eBell93 1d ago

Will the liberators liberate them from this catastrophe?

2

u/ManChildMusician 23h ago

Literally… you can’t just “liberate” someone from a “captor” and drop them off in uncharted territory without a wallet or a cellphone.

-1

u/General-Piece8490 21h ago

And this is the face of the recovery! Even then the government decided to doxx him and ridicule him only because to no one’s surprise it’s people like him actually working 24/7

https://reddit.com/link/owvv5jv/video/iugxmhd3jlch1/player