With the win­dow for find­ing sur­vivors shrink­ing fast, Venezue­lans combed Mon­day through more ru­ins of build­ings top­pled by last week’s dev­as­tat­ing back-to-back earth­quakes, and a 4.6 mag­ni­tude af­ter­shock rum­bled through the dis­as­ter zone in the north­ern state of La Guaira.

Five days have passed since the twin earth­quakes struck north­ern Venezuela, killing more than 1,450 peo­ple, ac­cord­ing to the gov­ern­ment. Re­lief or­ga­ni­za­tions say the first 72 hours af­ter a nat­ur­al dis­as­ter is the most cru­cial time pe­ri­od for res­cues, though sur­vival can be ex­tend­ed if peo­ple have ac­cess to food and wa­ter.

Fam­i­lies kept vig­il at search sites in hard-hit La Guaira, where lo­cal and in­ter­na­tion­al res­cue teams bat­tled ex­haus­tion and the grim knowl­edge that the chances of find­ing life were rapid­ly di­min­ish­ing.