‘I ate ketchup and cheese’: girl, 12, survived on condiments for 32 hours in Venezuela quake rubble

Fabiana, 12, survived on ketchup and cheese while trapped under the rubble of her 10-storey residential building for 32 hours after two powerful earthquakes rocked Venezuela on 24 June. The second tremor, a magnitude 7.5, was one of the strongest to hit the country in a century. Her mother Karina Blanco was about to start a spinning class when the earth began to shake. ‘When I realised the magnitude of it, I started screaming “my daughter, my daughter”,’ she told the BBC. She drove as fast as she could to their home in Caraballeda, in northern La Guaira state, but found only a gap where her building once stood. Inside, Fabiana had been in her mother’s bedroom when she felt the earthquakes. She ran into the kitchen and was holding on to the counter when the walls collapsed around her. ‘I saw things shaking, falling, breaking, and then the walls cracked. The wall separating my apartment from a friend’s collapsed. At that moment, I thought, “I’m going to die. I won’t survive this. No-one is going to rescue me,”’ said Fabiana. Outside, Karina saw half of her daughter’s bed sticking out of the debris. She ran from one end of the complex to the other screaming ‘She’s dead. My daughter is dead.’ Under the rubble, Fabiana lay face up, trapped on all sides, the ceiling almost touching her face. ‘I’m someone who gets very anxious and claustrophobic. But I don’t know why, a strange calm came over me. Maybe my mind was in shock,’ she said. A nurse who worked as a carer for her upstairs neighbours began calling out. Fabiana responded. ‘She told me to stay calm and that everything would be alright.’ Six hours after the earthquake, around midnight, the nurse was rescued. She told volunteers that a girl named Fabiana was alive inside. Karina, who had surrendered to God asking for strength to begin a new life without Fabiana, was told by someone, ‘Your daughter is alive.’ She ran back to the building screaming into gaps in the debris. Rescue teams eventually pulled Fabiana out on Friday, after more than 30 hours. Apart from a fracture in her left foot and a few scrapes and bruises, she suffered no other injuries. As of Sunday, 3,342 people were confirmed to have died in the quakes, with tens of thousands still missing. Karina says it will take a while to recover, but her family will move on.