Days after back-to-back earthquakes hit the Caribbean coast of Venezuela, desperate family members are digging through the dirt in hopes of rescuing loved ones trapped under buildings.

They are still waiting – and pleading – for rescue teams and machines capable of moving the debris.

“Rescuers are arriving at wealthier buildings with heavy machinery,” Katherine Vega told the Miami Herald. “We poor people have no help, only our own hands, and it is impossible, impossible, for us to rescue them. Yet they are alive. They are screaming.”

Her sister Wenderly Isabel Vega Garcia, 39, and nephew Gabriel Jose Romero Vega, 14, are buried under the rubble of a building in La Guaira, a coastal state near Caracas that bore the brunt of the devastation in the twin June 24 quakes. Their apartment was leveled, as was the one next door.

Every day her family digs, breaking through concrete with a jackhammer and their own hands, trying to reach them.

At least 1,719 people have died, according to Jorge Rodriguez, president of the National Assembly. But tens of thousands others remain missing, and a website is tracking over 44,000 who have yet to be located.

Dozens of countries, including the U.S., the Dominican Republic, Spain, El Salvador and Mexico, have deployed rescue teams to assist Venezuelan authorities or pledged to send aid. Their expert rescuers and dogs are scouring through the rubble. But families of the missing and dead told the Herald that there is not enough manpower or machinery to save those who may still be buried alive.

In a press release, the U.S. State Department announced that it has deployed 300 first responders, and 23 search canines to aid in the efforts, and pledged $300 million in financial support. The earthquakes have exacerbated the country’s humanitarian crises, and come six months after the Trump administration captured strongman Nicolás Maduro in Caracas and imprisoned him in New York, leaving his vice president in power.

On Monday, Vega stayed at home with her mother while her husband, son, nephew and two brothers dug outside her sister’s 98-apartment building near a strip of beach called Playa Los Cocos. The complex crumbled during the quakes, with the floors stacking on top of the other. Her sister and her sister’s son were in tower B, floor 9, apartment 8.

In a video shared with the Herald, Vega’s husband stands under a huge slab of concrete wearing a mask and gloves.

“Lord give me willpower and strength to keep searching,” he prays. “We know we have certainty that we will recover at least the body. But help us.”

He then drills into the side of the collapsed building, crouched within a crevice.

“We’re opening the hole to reach my sister’s apartment,” one of Vega’s brothers says behind him, in another video.

The buildings are public housing projects built under late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez, the residents said, part of his administration’s agenda to provide housing for all. The government’s Obras Populares y Planificación, OPP, for Public Works and Planning housing initiative, has been criticized for poor construction quality. Some of the surrounding OPP apartments remained standing in videos shared with the Herald, but others collapsed completely.

Vega told the Herald that on Sunday night Mexican volunteers found people alive, but couldn’t get them out because they didn’t have the proper equipment.

“We really need support and help to get our family members out alive,” Vega said, sobbing. “Please help us get rescuers there; there are no rescuers in these buildings.”

Luigi Aranguren lived in the apartment building next to that of Vega’s family, OPP26. During the earthquakes he was in Caracas with his mother, but he went back the next morning to look for his friends and neighbors. He pulled the decomposing body of his 11-year-old neighbor out of the rubble, he said.

He recorded a video of families screaming, climbing over the dust. Now the smell of the dead hangs in the air, he said.

“We are excavating to see if we can find a relative,” Aranguren said.

Families of the people in both apartment buildings – and others that collapsed in the area – have uploaded videos to social media in the days after the earthquake, pleading for help. Hundreds of comments poured in from others, looking for their parents, children, nieces and nephews, aunts and uncles.

From Spain, Robershi Martinez, 25, has been sharing photos of her missing sister on social media in hopes that she’s still alive.

Valeria Alejandra Mirabal Martinez, an 18-year-old tourism student, has been missing since the day the building collapsed. She lived on floor 12 in tower B of OPP27 with her uncle and aunt. Her father and stepmother lived on the same floor with her 12-year-old brother, Diego.

Martinez told the Herald that Diego died when the earthquakes struck. Her stepmother was able to break open and widen a small hole, and pull her father out of the building.

“My father is delicate, very wounded both physically as well as emotionally,” Martinez said.

Her aunt was recovered alive and is in critical condition at the hospital, she said, but her uncle, Javier Enrique Mirabel, and sister are still missing.

“Their bodies have not been found despite searching through the rubble, and the search continues across countless lists at hospitals, shelters, and morgues,” Martinez said.

Today, smoke rises from piles of concrete and metal poles sticking out of a mountain of debris where the apartments once stood, in a video captured by one of the former residents and shared with the Herald.

It’s unknown how many people are under the wreckage.

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