Dog rescued alive from rubble 5 days after Venezuela earthquakes, video shows

Dramatic video showed the moment a rescue team pulled a small dog from the rubble nearly a week after powerful twin earthquakes rocked Venezuela, killing hundreds of people and destroying thousands of buildings.

Footage captured a search and rescue team from El Salvador pulling the dog from a crumbled building in Caraballeda, a city in the devastated state of La Guaira.

In the footage, the sound of barking can be heard coming from a dark crevice in the rubble. The video then shows the canine enthusiastically licking the face of her rescuer after being taken out of the collapsed structure as a crowd applauded. The footage later shows a doctor feeding the hungry dog through a syringe.

“After 5 hours, we managed to rescue this little dog who responds to the name Giselle, in Residencial El Palmar, Caraballeda,” Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele wrote in a social media post as he shared the video. “If anyone is her owner, they can approach our teams in the area and prove with photos or videos that she is theirs.”

The dog had been trapped under the rubble for five days.

Rescuers have been finding small miracles amid the wreckage, including the rescue of an 18-day-old baby, who, along with his mother, was pulled from a collapsed high-rise after they were both trapped for 32 hours. In another instance, a mother and her 9-month-old baby were pulled from the rubble of a collapsed building with “only minor injuries,” Virginia Urban Search and Rescue Task Force 1 said at the time.

Meanwhile, international rescue teams, including from the U.S. and El Salvador, were working around the clock to try to rescue 44-year-old security guard Hernán Gil Flores, who has been trapped under a partially collapsed 10-story building in La Guaira for six days.  

“It is a very complex rescue,” Manny Sampang, a task force leader from the Los Angeles County Fire Department who is in Venezuela to help with rescue efforts, told CBS News. “I have multiple buildings leaning into that building that we are trying to rescue him from.”

El Salvador’s president echoed that sentiment in a social media post, writing that “the aftershocks have made this one of the most difficult rescues we have ever faced.”

“However, despite all these challenges, Hernán continues to respond, and we have managed to keep him hydrated, so we hold out hope that this rescue will be a success,” Bukele wrote.

The confirmed death toll from the 7.5 and 7.2 magnitude quakes, which struck within a minute of each other just after 6 p.m. local time on June 24, was more than 1,900 as of Tuesday. Tens of thousands remain missing, according to the United Nations.