Two powerful earthquakes struck northern Venezuela seconds apart on Wednesday evening, collapsing buildings across several states and killing at least 164 people in one of the worst seismic disasters the country has seen in more than a century. A magnitude 7.2 quake hit first at about 6:04 p.m. local time (22:04 GMT), followed less than a minute later by an even larger magnitude 7.5 tremor centered in the same area of Yaracuy state, west of the capital Caracas.
Acting President Delcy Rodriguez said on Thursday that at least 164 people had been killed and roughly 971 injured, and she cautioned that the figures would almost certainly rise as rescue teams reached neighborhoods cut off by debris and damaged roads. The government declared a nationwide state of emergency, closed Simon Bolivar International Airport over structural damage, suspended school classes for several days and urged medical staff to report to hospitals.
The first quake struck at a depth of about 22 kilometers (14 miles) and the second at roughly 10 kilometers, according to seismic agencies — shallow enough to channel violent shaking to the surface across central and western Venezuela. Tremors were felt as far away as neighboring Colombia and the Amazon region of Brazil, more than 1,700 kilometers from the epicenter, and nearly two dozen aftershocks rattled the region through the night.
The hardest-hit areas included the Altamira and El Paraiso districts of Caracas, where apartment blocks buckled, as well as the Caribbean coastal state of La Guaira and the states of Carabobo, Miranda and Trujillo. In La Guaira, residents described a sleepless night in the streets and neighbors still trapped beneath collapsed apartment buildings as rescuers worked by hand and flashlight.
The United States Geological Survey, which models likely casualties from a quake's strength and the vulnerability of nearby buildings, issued a sobering alert: it put the probability of an eventual death toll between 1,000 and 10,000 at 39 percent, and a 37 percent chance the figure could reach the tens of thousands. Such models are not predictions but estimates of risk, and early official counts in major quakes typically lag the true toll by days.
Venezuela straddles the seam where the Caribbean tectonic plate grinds eastward past the South American plate, a strike-slip boundary capable of generating large, shallow earthquakes. Yet the country has not suffered a catastrophic urban quake in living memory. The deadliest in its history struck Caracas in 1812, killing an estimated 30,000 people, and a 1967 quake killed about 240 in the capital — history that left seismic risk low on the list of everyday concerns for a population consumed by economic survival.
That history matters now because much of Venezuela's housing has expanded informally over decades of crisis, with self-built additions and apartment towers that were never engineered for strong ground motion. The collapse of multiple residential blocks in Caracas and La Guaira points to exactly the structural fragility that disaster experts have long warned about in rapidly urbanized cities along active faults.
The catastrophe also tests a state weakened by years of contraction. Venezuela's economy shrank by more than two-thirds over the past decade, millions of people have emigrated, and the public health and emergency systems have been stretched thin — conditions that complicate any large-scale rescue and medical response. International offers of assistance were expected, though the government did not immediately say whether it would accept outside help.
For now, the immediate priority is the search for survivors in the narrow window when those trapped under rubble can still be saved. Authorities asked residents to stay out of damaged buildings and to brace for further aftershocks, which can topple already-weakened structures. The scale of the loss will not be clear until rescuers finish combing the wreckage in the worst-hit neighborhoods.