One of the most impactful stories is that of Samir Jiménez, a resident of Guarenas, on the outskirts of Caracas. The earthquake caught him on the street while buying bread, and his immediate reaction was to run home out of fear for his mother's safety. "I live on the top floor of a five-story building, and the apartments on the ground floor and the penthouse suffered the most damage," Jiménez explained. Like thousands of Venezuelans, he and his neighbors have chosen to spend the night in parking lots and inside their cars, where they have even felt aftershocks shaking the vehicles from side to side.
In the La Tahona area of Caracas, María Magdalena Capote described an almost surreal experience. She was with a group of friends in a pool when the movement started to create waves overflowing the water. In addition to the tremor, Capote recounted hearing noises like thunder coming from the mountains and seeing columns of smoke. Upon returning to her home in the El Paraíso sector, the scene was devastating: walls with cracks, the fridge displaced a meter and a half from its original place, and furniture knocked over. The distress was exacerbated by the total collapse of communications in the early moments of the disaster.
The magnitude of the event was also captured in the digital world through streamer FeirlyGab. While doing a live stream, the earthquake forced her to leave her room due to the intensity of the movement, recording the fall and displacement of multiple objects. These personal testimonies add to the official figure of 32 deaths and 700 injured in a country that, under the state of emergency declared by Delcy Rodríguez, is trying to come to terms with an unprecedented catastrophe in its recent history.