Two Quakes, 39 Seconds Apart, Kill at Least 32 in Venezuela
A pair of powerful earthquakes struck Venezuela's northern coast within a minute of each other, collapsing buildings in Caracas and killing dozens as officials warned the toll would rise.
The ground in northern Venezuela moved twice in under a minute on Wednesday evening, and by Thursday morning the country was counting its dead.
Two earthquakes, measured by the U.S. Geological Survey at magnitude 7.2 and 7.5, struck the coast near the towns of San Felipe and Yumare, roughly 100 miles west of Caracas. The second and larger quake hit about 39 seconds after the first. At least 32 people were killed and more than 700 injured, Acting President Delcy Rodríguez said in an address on state television early Thursday.
Those numbers are provisional, and Rodríguez was blunt that they will climb. They do not yet include casualties in the coastal state of La Guaira, north of the capital, which she described as a disaster zone and "a true tragedy." It is the strongest seismic event to hit Venezuela in more than a century.
In Caracas, rescue crews worked through the night at collapsed buildings in the Altamira and Los Palos Grandes districts, where a branch of the Bancaribe bank came down. The main airport reported damage and suspended flights. A tsunami advisory issued in the minutes after the shaking, covering coastlines within 300 kilometers of the epicenter, was later lifted with no destructive waves reported.
Rodríguez declared a nationwide state of emergency and said first responders had deployed across the affected states. She said Venezuela expected to receive search-and-rescue teams from the United States early Thursday after President Donald Trump voiced support, with further help promised by the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Mexico and Qatar. For a government long isolated and short of resources, the speed of those offers is itself part of the story.
Venezuela sits where the Caribbean and South American tectonic plates grind past each other, a setting that has produced devastating quakes before. The 1812 earthquake that struck Caracas during the country's war of independence killed thousands and flattened much of the city. Wednesday's double rupture was far stronger in raw energy than most events Venezuelans have lived through, and it landed on housing stock and infrastructure weakened by years of economic crisis and deferred maintenance.
That is the worry beneath the casualty count. Older concrete buildings that were never retrofitted, hillside barrios built without engineering oversight, and a health system already stretched thin all shape how a 7.5 is survived or not. The figure that officials kept returning to overnight was not the magnitude but the unknown: how many people remain under the rubble in La Guaira, where the assessment had barely begun when dawn broke over the coast.
