After eight days buried under 140 tonnes of concrete, Hernán Gil was pulled alive from the rubble of a collapsed car park in Venezuela. The security guard had been on duty in a small concrete booth in the basement of the Galerias Playa Grande mall in Catia La Mar when twin earthquakes struck on 24 June. The booth created a shell around him, protecting him from the collapsing structure.
Emergency workers from Venezuela, Chile, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Mexico, Portugal and the United States worked for more than 100 hours to reach him after he was first located. The operation was so precarious that parts of the access ducts collapsed several times, endangering both rescuers and the trapped man.
“Hernán Gil rescued alive after eight days under 140 tonnes of rubble in Venezuela earthquake”
Allan Madrigal, a paramedic with the Costa Rican Red Cross, was the rescuer who first heard Gil’s faint cries for help. “It was an emotional moment,” Madrigal recalled. He initially doubted himself and asked a colleague to confirm he “wasn’t just imagining it”. From that moment, teams raced to dig Gil out. Madrigal later said Gil had “emerged just perfect” from the ordeal.
A Chilean firefighter described the rescue as “without doubt the most complex and technically difficult which I’ve had to tackle”. Gil was given water and an intravenous drip while trapped. Another Costa Rican Red Cross worker said shortly before he was freed: “He has told us that he does not even have a crushed nail.”
Venezuela’s acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, visited Gil in hospital on Thursday and called him a “living miracle” in a video shared on social media. At a press conference, Rodríguez described the earthquakes as “a natural tragedy on a scale we never imagined”. She rejected criticism of the government’s response, saying thousands of officials had been deployed. “We’ve done everything in our power, and we’ll continue to do everything in our power and more,” she said.
As of Thursday evening, 2,595 people are confirmed to have died in the quakes, and tens of thousands remain missing. The rescue of Gil offered a rare moment of hope in a disaster that has overwhelmed the country.