In brief
Teenagers Deivi and his brother Winder fled their devastated Venezuelan home after twin earthquakes that killed three family members. They relocated to Cali, Colombia, only to experience a new aftershock that rattled their new refuge. The brothers began a desperate search for relatives, crawling through rubble and hoping to locate their missing mother and siblings. Their story illustrates how repeated seismic events threaten migrant families and underscores the need for improved building codes, emergency planning, and community resilience.
"The earthquake is haunting me," Deivi Delfín, 15, says while recalling the twin quakes that struck La Guaira, Venezuela, early on 24 June. These tremors reduced their 12‑storey apartment to rubble and killed three family members, including his mother.
Afterward, the siblings evacuated to Cali, Colombia, where their father works. Three days later, a faint tremor felt in their new home triggered another quake that rattled the city. The brothers and father braced for the shock, eventually finding shelter outside a barbershop.
Grief pressed on the brothers as they combed through collapsed structures, threading through narrow concrete corridors with only a flashlight or phone for light. Their search yielded personal items—a short, a Bible, an unfinished shopping list—reminding them that life once existed here.
At a critical moment, Winder awoke to the sight of his mother’s body crushed beneath concrete, surrounded by a plastic hair dye bag. The discovery left the father in tears, as the little child remained clutching his mother’s hand, evidence of their close bond.
After the Colombia quake, the family settled into modest houses on Cali’s northeastern outskirts, hoping to rebuild. However, Monday's tremor brought a wave of familiarity as Colombia's strongest earthquake of the century—a 7.4 magnitude—struck again. Cali’s residents felt the raw impact of devastation across the nation, echoing the earlier Venezuelan tragedy.
Such repeated seismic shocks emphasize the urgent need for stronger, greener building materials, improved seismic design in regional construction, early warning systems, and community training to reduce future vulnerability.
In the end, the brothers highlight the resilience of young people facing displacement: “We’ve been through this before,” they reassured their father and each other, a testament to human adaptability amid climate‑driven disaster risks.
