Venezuela has begun formal repairs on 9,055 homes damaged by the double earthquake registered on 24 June, and workers were already rebuilding walls and facades at Los Ojos de Chávez in Caracas as the recovery phase moved from inspection to construction.
The start matters because the work is now visible on the ground, not just on paper. At Los Ojos de Chávez, a housing complex with 170 apartments across eight floors, residents were still staying in a temporary camp in the patios of Nuevo Circo while crews labored around the clock with 150 workers, technical staff, professionals and coordinators. Joan Rojas, who visited the site with Xinhua, said the workers had done a grandísimo trabajo and described them as seasoned professionals from assistant level to engineer.
Los Ojos de Chávez is part of Gran Misión Vivienda Venezuela, and it sits among the buildings assessed after the quake wave hit Caracas and La Guaira. The inspection system sorted structures into three bands: green for buildings that can be occupied, yellow for buildings with restricted access that need masonry work before they can be lived in again, and red for buildings with structural danger. In La Guaira, Jacqueline Faría said 49.3 percent of inspected buildings were green, 23.5 percent were yellow and 27.2 percent were red, a spread that shows how uneven the damage was in the hardest-hit area.
That is why the yellow label on Los Ojos de Chávez does not read like a clean bill of health, even though Héctor González said the complex’s structural elements are in perfect condition. Engineers from the Comisión Presidencial para la Habitabilidad inspected the building and gave it the yellow classification, meaning the immediate task is masonry work rather than a full structural rebuild. The friction between those two facts is the story inside the story: a building that can hold, but not yet reopen.
For families waiting to leave shelters, relatives’ homes and the temporary camp in Nuevo Circo, the unresolved question is not whether repairs have started. They have. It is how long the masonry work will take before Los Ojos de Chávez, and the other 9,055 homes now under repair, can safely take people back in.
