One Year After Epic Mudslides, American Red Cross Still Helps Venezuela Recover

Families are forced to live in the upstairs of homes still half-filled with mud.

A year ago, Venezuela experienced its worst disaster in 100 years. Weeks of steady, torrential rains swelled rivers and formed new, raging waterways that washed away thousands of homes. Massive mudslides sent boulders careening down mountainsides, burying entire communities. Some 190,000 were safely evacuated, but tens of thousands lost their lives.

Because Venezuela had not experienced a disaster of this magnitude, the devastated country required substantial assistance. The American Red Cross arrived immediately, providing food and water to homeless mudslide victims and offering its technical expertise to the Venezuelan Red Cross.

One year later, the American Red Cross is still there, helping the national society, disaster victims and communities become stronger and better prepared should another disaster strike. This is the first in a series of stories highlighting the anniversary of the floods and the work of the American Red Cross to help mudslide victims in Venezuela.

Hillsides still have bare spots where mudslides occured.

Caracas, Venezuela - Maria Dolores Romero’s home sits just inches from a deteriorating hillside of the Avila Mountains in the northern Venezuelan state of Vargas. Following last year’s mudslides - considered the country’s worst disaster of the 20th century - a government worker told her that her home was at risk. On the anniversary of the mudslides - the worst of which hit on Dec. 15 and 16 -- she and her 37-year-old son still live along the precarious slope.

“The back of the house was destroyed by the river, so I’m afraid,” says the 76-year-old widow, who watched helplessly last year from atop the mountain where her house sits as boulders bulldozed over nearby homes. She could hear her neighbors below screaming for help. Despite the horror of last year’s disaster, she is reluctant to relocate. “I’m old so I don’t want to leave,” she says.

Throughout Vargas, and much of last December’s disaster zone, people still live in damaged, mud-filled homes, without clean water or electricity. They also live in constant fear of dark rain clouds - which appear more and more regularly in the characteristically sunny, tropical state.

The American Red Cross, along with the Venezuelan Red Cross and other national societies, is still here - helping people to recover from both their physical and emotional losses.

“There have been concerted efforts to help disaster victims” says Jennifer Peavey, head of the Venezuelan delegation for the American Red Cross. “Unfortunately, there was such an overwhelming need in a country that isn’t accustomed to disaster that it’s a tremendous task. It takes time, particularly in a place that’s not used to rebuilding after a disaster of this scale.”

The most pressing need remains psychological care, according to Red Cross workers and community leaders of the devastated neighborhoods. Symptoms of post traumatic stress, depression and aggression linger, especially in children and the elderly. Many children remain afraid to be separated from their parents. The elderly, forced to move to less disaster-prone inland communities, struggle, and often refuse, to leave the only homes they’ve ever known - despite the dangers.

Others mourn for loved ones or neighbors who were killed in the disaster -- their corpses never found under the mountains of mud that still fill the streets and homes of many communities. “There still are a number of people who have no closure,” Peavey says.

In the wake of the disaster, the American Red Cross developed and funded a set of training sessions to teach hundreds of mental health professionals working as Venezuelan volunteers how to help mudslide victims cope with their losses and fears. Throughout the affected states, these American Red Cross-trained volunteers have set up programs to help thousands of men, women and children deal with their emotions.

The American Red Cross also helped the Venezuelan society develop its tracing system in an effort to reunify the thousands of families separated during the disaster. As a result, some 2,000 lost family members have been located. The Red Cross is still working on connecting another 1,250 families, some of them children.

An American Red Cross-trained Venezuelan Red Cross volunteer talks with a young disaster victim.

American Red Cross assistance is directed toward helping the Venezuelan society increase its capacity to respond the next time a disaster hits - an inevitability, some say. “Every time the river rises, I’m afraid,” says Juan Rodriguez, a fisherman in the coastal community of Macuto in Vargas. Despite the danger and his fears, Rodriguez remains.

“I don’t have any friends outside of Vargas. I need to stay here, where I can go to the beach and fish,” he says. The government is trying to ease the flooding in some areas by digging deeper riverbeds and underground ditches that lead to the sea. But following another bout of mudslides that killed at least four people in Vargas last month, many Venezuelans have realized that last year’s disaster is a sign of more to come, community leaders and relief workers say.

Says Victor Hernandez, president of the Macuto neighborhood association, “The river is so strong that nothing will stop it.”

The American Red Cross is dedicated to helping make families and communities safer at home and around the world. A humanitarian service organization currently operating on a budget of $2.7 billion, the American Red Cross annually mobilizes relief to the victims of more than 63,000 disasters nationwide and has been the primary supplier of lifesaving blood and blood products in the United States for more than 50 years. The American Red Cross also trains more than 11.7 million people in vital lifesaving skills, provides direct health services to 2.5 million people, provides more than 24 million locally relevant community services, assists international disaster and conflict victims in more than 50 countries, and transmits nearly 1.4 million emergency messages between members of the U.S. Armed Forces and their families. Dr. Bernadine Healy is president and CEO of the American Red Cross. If you would like information on Red Cross services and programs please contact your local Red Cross.