CARACAS, Venezuela — For years, engineers analyzing Venezuela’s construction patterns have voiced a major concern: That the country’s precarious combination of soft ground soil and tall concrete structures — many lacking sufficient seismic reinforcement — could result in catastrophic destruction when a major earthquake struck.
That doomsday scenario came to pass in devastating fashion on Wednesday, when two massive, back-to-back quakes damaged or collapsed scores of buildings, leaving at least 1,430 dead, more than 3,200 injured and spurring a desperate search for survivors buried beneath the rubble. Hundreds remain missing.
“The risk was known,” said Eduardo Núñez Castellanos, a Venezuelan structural engineer working as an associate professor and head of the Department of Civil Engineering at the Universidad Católica de la Santísima Concepción in Chile.
The dual quakes left a path of destruction from Caracas, the capital, to the coast and elsewhere. The death toll is on pace to be Venezuela’s deadliest in more than a century, surpassing the estimated 1,600 body count in the magnitude 6.7 Cumaná earthquake and tsunami of 1929.
Michael Schmitz, a geophysics professor at Simón Bolívar University and Central University of Venezuela, said he feared casualties could reach 50,000 people. That’s the midpoint of the most likely range estimated by the U.S. Geological Survey, which estimated there’s a 44% chance the death toll could be 10,000 to 100,000.”
It’s still early to draw definitive conclusions for why the damage, and death toll, were so high. But initial photos appear to show collapsed buildings “in some cases higher than 15 stories, with significant construction deficiencies and poor supervision during the construction phase,” Núñez said.
A likely contributing factor: An emphasis on profit over safety.
The widespread damage likely reflects building construction “adapted to investors’ needs rather than structures properly designed and constructed in accordance with seismic code requirements,” Núñez said. “Unfortunately, this is a common problem in Latin America.”
Núñez coauthored a study published in 2023 in the journal Buildings that examined a type of concrete building higher than 20 stories and built to minimum Venezuelan code requirements. The study found those buildings placed on soft soils had a more than 80% chance of collapse when shaken violently in an earthquake.
“The situation may be even more critical for buildings designed according to older codes,” Núñez said.
But outdated safety standards and a build-on-the-cheap ethos are likely just among various factors explaining why so many buildings across Venezuela came crashing down in this week’s earthquakes, the largest to hit the country in more than 125 years.
Contributing factors include concrete buildings designed without accounting for local soft-soil conditions, using a type of structural system in buildings taller than 10 stories that are vulnerable to earthquakes, and, “most critically, insufficient oversight during the construction process due to weakened institutional supervision,” Núñez said.
“Such institutional control existed in the past, but it has deteriorated under the current governing authorities,” Núñez said.
“The problem is a lack of control in building standards,” Alejandro Giuliano, former director of Venezuela’s National Institute of Seismic Prevention, told the Venezuelan broadcaster Radio Mil20 a day after the twin quakes. “It’s fundamental that the norms of seismic-resistance construction are respected.”
That the country had not experienced a mass-casualty quake in more than a quarter-century was no excuse.
“One cannot be surprised at this event,” Giuliano said. “Venezuela has a history of large earthquakes.”
Most of the worst damage appears to have hit older concrete frame buildings, as well as masonry buildings and informal hillside construction, said Ramón Mata Lemus, the lead author of the 2023 study and an assistant professor who specializes in seismic behavior at Universidad San Sebastián in Chile.
Another flaw: “soft-story” buildings, where the ground floor is flimsier than the upper floors, making it easier for it to topple in a quake.
“The most severe cases involved complete or partial building collapses, often associated with soft-story mechanisms in buildings with open ground floors, as well as slab and balcony failures in multi-story residential structures,” Mata said, adding that ceiling and slabs have collapsed in public and residential areas, pavement has ruptured, masonry walls have cracked and facades fell off buildings.
While the timing of when quakes will strike is notoriously unpredictable, Venezuela has long been known to be vulnerable.
The country sits on the edge of a giant east-west fault that is the boundary between the Caribbean and South America tectonic plates.
However, international researchers have concentrated less on the southern edge of the Caribbean plate and the potential seismic consequences for Venezuela, a nation of 28 million people, than on dangers on the northern edge of the plate. Movement on the northern edge of the Caribbean plate caused the magnitude 7 earthquake in 2010 in Haiti that killed 316,000 people, one of the worst natural disasters in modern history.
The last big quake to dramatically shake up Caracas was in 1967, when a magnitude 6.6 left 240 people dead. There was also a magnitude 6.4 quake in 2009, but the offshore epicenter was farther away from the city.
Other notable quakes have occurred farther east. A magnitude 7 earthquake in 1997 farther east resulted in 81 deaths, hitting the cities of Cumaná and Carupano, according to the USGS.
A catastrophic earthquake in 1812, estimated to be a magnitude 7.7, may have killed more than 15,000 people. Estimates indicate that one-fourth of the population of Caracas died from that quake, Schmitz said.
Wednesday’s magnitude 7.5 earthquake — the second of the two quakes that hit started 39 seconds after the first one began — is thought to have ruptured about 100 miles of fault, according to the USGS.
The first fault that fractured is believed to be on the Boconó system, about 25 miles from the coast, Schmitz said. The rupture, Schmitz said, raced up from the valley down to the sea, where movement was transferred to the San Sebastián fault, which separates the Caribbean plate from the South American plate.
“It seems that this rupture was directed from southwest to northeast, and then completely east,” stopping just short of the port city of La Guaira, north of Caracas, Schmitz said. According to USGS shaking intensity maps, the quake rupture sent shaking energy directly toward both the international airport, which was heavily damaged, and then into the port city.
“This probably caused the very heavy damage we have in La Guaira, with maybe up to 100 buildings collapsed,” Schmitz said.
Older buildings are particularly vulnerable.
Buildings constructed before the early 1980s, and especially those built before the 1967 earthquake, “don’t have much earthquake-resistant engineering,” he added.
Still, many questions remain about why La Guaira was so hard hit. Feliciano De Santis, president of the Venezuelan Geological Society, said La Guaira will be a focus for scientists, “because the fact that so many buildings in that area have collapsed is truly abnormal.”
Factors include “older buildings that do not meet modern seismic standards, as well as hidden defects or structural vulnerabilities,” De Santis said.
Other issues that will likely receive attention are the construction of buildings — from low-income housing to luxury developments — with cheap materials and without proper permits. A lack of building maintenance, water leaks, structural overloading, corruption regarding issuing of permits, as well as the overall chaotic state of affairs in much of government may also play a role.
Venezuela has been engulfed in economic and political turmoil for more than a decade. Still, providing cheap housing for poor and working-class Venezuelans — the longtime base of ruling-party support — remained a central tenet of more than a quarter-century of socialist governance.
Some collapsed buildings were built through government programs in La Guaira, and “we always had some doubts about the reliability of the structures,” Schmitz said.
First responders gather at a destoryed building in the Los Palos Grandes district of Caracas, Venezuela, after strong quakes struck Venezuela and other regions in the Caribbean on Wednesday.
(Jesus Vargas / Getty Images)
Schmitz conducted a study, published in 2020, to help identify areas around Caracas to prioritize buildings that should be retrofitted. Neighborhoods that suffered severe damage would’ve been such high-priority areas.
Installing seismic protections hasn’t been a priority for a government in economic free-fall.
Schmitz proposed a similar seismic study for La Guaira. “I had been asking for funding for about six or seven years, but I didn’t manage to get it,” Schmitz said.
Lin reported from San Francisco and McDonnell from Mexico City. Mogollón, a special correspondent, reported from Caracas.
