“We love you princess,” reads the inscription on the fresh grave of a three-year-old girl among dozens of people killed in a devastating landslide in a Venezuelan city last week.
Gravediggers have their hands full at the cemetery in Las Tejerias, a town of about 50,000 that was devastated by a flood of mud, rocks and trees after hours of rain.
Venezuelan authorities have so far confirmed 50 deaths, 16 of which have been buried. Dozens remain missing.
“That was sad,” said one of the gravediggers, who asked not to be named.
“This belongs to a three-year-old girl who was snatched from her mother’s arms,” ??he said of the landslide, pointing to a blue-tiled grave.
A few yards away, a fresh mound of earth with a bouquet of flowers marks the grave of an elderly couple.
Two more funerals were scheduled for later Friday.
Unusually heavy rains last Saturday caused a large river and several streams to burst their banks and flow through the city in the mountains near Caracas.
The muddy stream washed away cars, parts of houses, businesses and telephone wires, and felled huge trees after a month’s worth of rain in just eight hours.
Interior Minister Remigio Ceballos told Telesur on Thursday that the confirmed death toll was 50.
He did not offer an update on the number of missing, of which 56 people were also believed to be dead as of Tuesday.
President Nicolas Maduro said earlier this week that casualties from Venezuela’s worst natural disaster in decades were likely to reach 100.
– UN aid expected –
Work continued on Friday to clear the city’s streets of a thick layer of mud and debris and restore power while residents struggled to salvage as much as possible from their flooded homes.
Tankers delivered drinking water and some shops have reopened, although many areas of the city remain inaccessible.
On Wednesday, military helicopters had dropped food packages with small parachutes in some of the more remote areas of the mountainous region.
The government has opened shelters and announced plans to place families in public housing in other parts of the country.
Vice President Delcy Rodriguez said 317 homes were destroyed and hundreds more damaged.
A UN commission was planning to visit Las Tejerias with humanitarian aid on Friday, a source told AFP.
The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) said Thursday it had donated “medicines and healing supplies for 5,000 people” and 10,000 tablets, each capable of purifying 10 liters of water.
The rains had caused damage in several Venezuelan states.
San Timoteo, a fishing village on Lake Maracaibo in the west of the country, was hit by an eight-hour storm that destroyed 20 modest stilt houses.
“The bridges were the first to collapse and then the houses,” Eli Rodriguez, a resident in the community of about 7,000, told AFP.
Crisis-stricken Venezuela is no stranger to seasonal storms, but this was the worst so far this year after historic rainfall that caused dozens more deaths in recent months.
