Caracas.- Hundreds of Venezuelans joined this Sunday the cleanup day organized by the Angel Smile Foundation in La Guaira, with the intention of helping to reduce pollution in the state most affected by the double earthquake of last June 24.
The organization’s founder, Yarlín Salazar, explained to EFE that she traveled from Carabobo, 202 kilometers from La Guaira, to carry out cleaning work in the coastal region in coordination with the Fuerza Azul project.
“We are volunteers from Valencia, Maracay, and Caracas. We have been working for approximately five sessions, this is the fifth, where we have already collected a lot of trash bags. We came here because the planet belongs to everyone,” noted Salazar from the entrance of El Yate beach, in Caraballeda, one of the areas hardest hit by the disaster.
From there, the 210 volunteers who joined the cleanup day this Sunday set out, dividing into several groups and walking the streets of the region with trash bags, cloth and latex gloves, protective goggles, shoe covers, and face masks, for work they carry out from 09:00 local time (13:00 GMT) to 17:00 (21:00 GMT).
“We try to avoid as many infections in the environment as possible,” added Salazar.
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All the tools they use for the cleanups, as well as the buses that transport the volunteers from Caracas, are donations they receive from other citizens.
The bags with the trash they collect are then placed on the edges of the main roads so that the trucks can pick them up without any issues.
“The trucks often tell us that they don’t pick them up because there are areas that are blocked,” the activist explained.
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You can also read: Venezuela seeks to repair nearly 4,000 homes damaged in La Guaira by earthquakes
In addition, this Sunday they were also able to bring 35 trash cans that they distributed throughout different points of La Guaira to “avoid so much pollution on the ground“.
Jofrer Romero, one of the volunteers for the day, is a native of La Guaira and decided to join so that “the state may flourish again“.
“We are still broken but we feel hope that the state can rise again“, he told EFE.
For her part, Yilkry Martínez maintained that it is important to maintain aid in La Guaira and urged companies to continue donating the necessary implements to be able to carry out these cleaning days.
Martínez runs a tourism company but pointed out to EFE that his main goal now is to collaborate in any way he can in La Guaira, which is why he decided to join the activity.
The double earthquake of magnitude 7.2 and 7.5 last June has left at least 6,125 dead, according to the most recent official report from last Monday.
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According to that bulletin, 346,755 tons of debris have been collected by the authorities.
This Sunday, the Venezuelan Minister of Public Works, Juan Ramírez Luces, reported -on Instagram- that in La Guaira there are three rubble crushing plants with the capacity to process more than six hundred tons per hour.
