On Thursday morning, Billy Ebrin set out to search for bodies.He’d spent a short, anxious sleep in his silver Aveo car, too afraid to go back to his seventh-floor apartment in Caracas, Venezuela.Recommended Stories list of 3 itemsend of listJust hours earlier, he had been startled by the piercing alarm on his mobile phone. There was an uncomfortable pause. Then, the building began to violently shake.His three dogs darted beneath the beds, terrified and trembling, while Ebrin took shelter beneath a doorframe and began to pray.“I thought I was going to die. You could hear pieces of concrete breaking off the walls,” he said.Two back-to-back earthquakes struck Venezuela with little warning shortly after 6pm local time (22:00 GMT) on Wednesday, triggering panic as people scrambled for safety.The first was a 7.2-magnitude quake, followed by another that reached 7.5 on the nine-point Richter scale, both considered major seismic disasters.When the shaking stopped, Ebrin rushed to the ground floor along with hundreds of others fleeing their buildings.“People were bumping into each other in the confusion: elderly people, people carrying their pets, even squirrels and parrots. There were people in their underwear,” he told Al Jazeera. “It was all terrifying.”Near Ebrin’s home, many residents slept in the streets or in their cars after being warned not to enter buildings. They woke, if they slept at all, to find apartment blocks crumpled into heaps of conc …
