“We have not experienced a landslide of such magnitude in Venezuela in many years,” President Nicolas Maduro told Venezolana de Televisión on Monday when he visited the area.

The landslide occurred on Saturday and has already become the worst natural disaster of the century in Venezuela. Maduro said authorities counted almost 400 houses that had been destroyed and 400 more with some damage.

Las Tejerias is nestled in the mountains about 30 miles from the country’s capital, Caracas, and home to about 54,000 people. Agence France-Presse reported more than 3,000 rescuers had been deployed to the town to help those affected.

Isaac Castillo, a resident of Las Tejerias, said one of his main concerns was the people who are still missing. Maduro said there were about 60 missing as of Tuesday.

“We don’t know if there are still people under this rubble,” Castillo told AFP, pointing to the ground next to him.

The community, along with the authorities, have come together to clean up the debris from the streets and the homes. But some homes have been deemed uninhabitable, adding to the residents’ frustration.

“Civil Defense says the house is uninhabitable,” Miguel Segovia, a resident of Las Tejerias, told AFP. “They won’t give me a house, and if they ever do, it will take years.”

The United Nations in Venezuela acknowledged the devastating events in a tweet on Sunday evening.

Gianluca Rampolla, resident coordinator of the UN team, tweeted the organization was “mobilizing support in close coordination with the authorities.”

Excessive rainfall fueled at least in part by Hurricane Julia and La Niña, a climate pattern marked by cooler-than-normal water across part of the Pacific near the equator, played a role in the disaster, AccuWeather meteorologists say.

“As much rain fell in eight hours as normally falls in a month,” Vice President Delcy Rodriguez said, as she blamed the “climate crisis.”

Hurricane Julia went on to claim at least 26 lives in Central America as the storm unleashed flooding rainfall across the region and resulted in widespread damage from Panama to Guatemala.

Castillo said regardless of the recovery and aid efforts, not all residents were eager to start cleaning up. Some had expressed their concerns about the area’s ability to recover properly.

“We have not yet begun to clean up the little that can be cleaned—if it can be cleaned up—because here the majority of the neighbors agree to abandon this area,” Castillo told AFP.

“Tejerias will never be the same again, it will take a thousand generations to recover these towns, this was totally devastating.”

Produced in association with AccuWeather.

This story was provided to Newsweek by Zenger News.