'I thought I was going to die' - Venezuelans describe earthquake panic

When the ground beneath Venezuela started violently rocking on Wednesday evening, Verónica feared the walls of her Caracas apartment would bury her.

"I thought I was going to die," she told BBC Mundo.

She was at home celebrating a national holiday with her mother when tremors from two large earthquakes hit the city, seconds apart, around 18:00 local time (22:00 GMT): the first at a magnitude of 7.2 and the second at 7.5.

At least 235people have been confirmed dead so far and more than 1,500 others are injured - but authorities have warned they have not even begun to gauge the losses in some of the hardest hit areas.

Officials said 250 buildings were damaged or lost, mostly in the coastal area of La Guaira, and debris was strewn around the streets of Caracas, Venezuela's capital.

Rescuers were digging through the wreckage of collapsed buildings to locate survivors, and in some footage, people could be heard calling for help.

Juan Ortiz told the BBC one of his close friends had been confirmed dead, another was believed to be under the rubble, and around 20 people he knew who live in the coastal area were missing.

"I'm in shock and confusion, and frustrated that I can't help," the medical student in Caracas said.

As night fell, dazed locals - many rendered functionally homeless - milled the streets, waiting for news on their homes or loved ones.

Verónica is the sister of BBC Mundo's Valentina Oropeza - and the journalist spent hours trying to track down her family after the quakes.

Valentina's phone had pinged with a breathy voice message from Verónica describing the "awful" tremors in real time, their mother's voice distant in the background. Then radio silence.

Panicked, Valentina began asking her network for help to contact the pair as images of crushed buildings on their street began filling her phone.

When she finally was able to reach them, Verónica confirmed she and her mother were safe but said she has likely lost her home.

"The building is completely destroyed, the walls are cracked."

This is not the first time the Venezuelan capital has been hit by a major earthquake.

In 1967, a 6.6-magnitude quake struck Caracas and killed more than 200 people, destroying buildings in Palos Grandes and the upper-class area of Altamira.

But the ones on Wednesday felt worse - much longer and more intense, said Valentina's mother.

"I never thought we would experience something like this," she said, audibly shaken.

BBC Mundo contributor Nicole Kolster saw the windows of her seventh storey apartment in Palos Grandes, a prime district in central Caracas, begin to shake and had just moments to shelter.

"The only thing I could think to do was to get between the front door and a stone wall... to try to protect myself."

"I thought the building was going to fall on top of me."

Evacuating to the street, she said she could hear voices coming from mountains of rubble. Survivors, so desperate to flee that they had not paused to put on shoes, were hugging and crying.

Hours later, many were unable - or too fearful of aftershocks - to return to their homes.

Hundreds of people around the city slept in squares or on the streets, tents packing sections of pavement and parked cars turning into makeshift beds.

Leander Pérez - whose home is in the Santa Rosalía parish in the centre of Caracas - spent the night on the pavement in a public square with his neighbours as his apartment block was unsafe.

He told the BBC that he and his neighbours "are in deep shock".

"All the walls cracked during the earthquake and we had to evacuate the building," he said, adding that they were trapped for a while as one of the security gates was bent and would not open, but they eventually kicked it open.

One Los Palos Grandes woman, who was not even pretending to sleep, told BBC Mundo she was in shock.

"How do you go back to living like this? This is like something out of a movie," she said in the early hours of Thursday.

A handful of people in the suburb - one of the most affected areas of Caracas - managed to escape with their pets.

Others across the country, like teacher Alan Chung, face an anxious wait to see whether theirs have survived.

"I have two cats. Unfortunately I've not been able to get back to my apartment to see if they are okay... fingers crossed," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

Information flow from places like La Guaira - the most affected state, north of Caracas - has been hampered by infrastructure damage.

But images and footage from the area show flattened buildings, large fires, and the injured flooding field hospitals in the state capital.

Interim President Delcy Rodríguez said "dozens" of buildings had collapsed in the city, calling it a "disaster zone" and a "true tragedy".

The situation is so dire authorities have not yet been able to estimate how many people have died.

Other hard-hit regions include the states of Miranda, Aragua, Carabobo and Falcón.

Additional reporting by Gabriela Pomeroy

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