Medina, director of the Pérez de León Hospital in Caracas, didn’t know what to expect. But she had a destination, her home in La Guaira, and a goal: rescue her neighbours.
Portofino Beach was the name of the sand-coloured nine-storey building. While some residents used it as a holiday spot, for Medina and several other doctors, it was home.
The building’s lower floors had buckled and crumpled in the temblor, leaving neighbours trapped inside and the structure leaning dangerously backward. In some places, Portofino Beach was now just a pile of rebar, wall and dust.
Accompanying Medina on this mission was her daughter Gabriela Herrera, 29, a surgeon.
The team loaded into half a dozen vehicles. They wore scrubs and sneakers and carried flimsy helmets.
The road to La Guaira was packed with buses, cars, aid trucks and people on motorbikes loaded with water and rudimentary excavation tools such as shovels and ropes. It took four hours to get from the hospital to the apartment, a journey that usually takes just one.
Part of the team rode in the bed of a pickup truck. Some, to try to arrive more quickly, trekked partly on foot in the heat. As they entered La Guaira, they passed a crumbling church, its face partly sheared off, exposing its insides, dark like an open mouth.
With so much traffic, Red Cross aid trucks sat paralysed on the road.
Finally, Medina arrived at Portofino Beach. A small team from Civil Protection, the national emergency service, was already there going through the rubble.
Germán Ortiz was the head of the Civil Protection team on the ground. The smell of decomposing bodies surrounded the building.
Speaking quietly, as if trying not to scare survivors who had gathered around, he informed the doctors that his team had heard no voices from inside the building.
Now, they were just trying to recover bodies.
To emphasise his point, he called out: “We are the rescue team! If there is anyone alive here, make some noise!”
Total silence.
He tried again.
Nothing.
The medical team wanted to get into the building anyway. Ortiz said no – they did not have the right helmets or gear.
Medina’s group insisted. Someone, she believed, must be alive inside.
Ortiz relented. The group could work on the building’s periphery, he said, moving away debris, in teams that rotated every 20 minutes to prevent exhaustion.
A yellow excavation machine idled in front of Portofino Beach. It was not used that evening; Medina said later that she struggled to understand why.
At one point, she turned to the rescuers.
You know, she said, this is my building.
A Civil Protection worker hugged her.
I know, he said. We’re all in this together.
The doctors began to comb through the debris. Then darkness fell. With no large lights available to guide them, the search slowed, and then stopped.
Not ready to quit, the doctors decided to move on, to find somewhere they could be useful.
They loaded into the trucks, scanning for buildings that might have survivors. When traffic stymied them, some got out and began to walk.
On some stretches, they trekked in near total darkness. Then they found a team of Colombian rescue workers and saw movement.
Perhaps someone was alive?
A man with a gun – police? military? The people moving in the darkness turned out to be looters, not survivors in need of help.
Then came a tussle among rescue workers, with some calling for silence so they could hear anyone trapped. Others called out to their colleagues: three bodies had been spotted in the rubble.
Exhaustion set in. The medical team piled back into their trucks.
It took hours to get home. They rolled into the capital around 4am. During their 12-hour expedition, the doctors had not treated a single patient. All of the people they sought to help were either out of reach or dead.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Fabiola Ferrero and Julie Turkewitz
Photographs by: Fabiola Ferrero and Adriana Loureiro Fernandez
©2026 THE NEW YORK TIMES
