Deadly double earthquakes in Venezuela leave hundreds trapped, feared dead

Emergency crews were still digging through collapsed buildings in Caracas, La Guaira and San Felipe after two earthquakes measuring magnitude 7.2 and 7.5 struck Venezuela less than a minute apart on Wednesday, killing at least 188 people and leaving hundreds trapped or unaccounted for. The larger quake hit about 16 kilometers southwest of Morón at a depth of 10 kilometers, and acting President Delcy Rodríguez declared a state of emergency as USGS modeling warned the toll could climb sharply, with a 42% chance of at least 10,000 fatalities in one model cited by CBS News.

Martin Hudson, the geotechnical engineer who discussed the disaster on CBS News, underscored how unusual the sequence was, and that rarity mattered because two large ruptures arrived back to back. The bigger picture points to a familiar disaster pattern: a shallow source at 10 kilometers, vulnerable buildings and infrastructure, and ground conditions that can worsen shaking. Dave Petley said the shallow depth, vulnerable buildings and limited response capacity magnified the impact, while USGS landslide and liquefaction maps pointed to ground-failure risks west of Caracas. A Venezuelan seismic commission that studied the 1967 Caracas earthquake had already found that subsoil conditions helped intensify damage and that modern buildings were badly hit.

Reuters counted nearly two dozen aftershocks, and CBS News said at least 30 had followed the main shocks, keeping rescue crews on edge as they searched rubble for survivors. The shaking was felt across northern Venezuela and into Colombia, and Simón Bolívar International Airport in the Caracas area was closed after severe damage, complicating the flow of aid and evacuation of the injured.

The closest historical comparison is the 1967 Caracas earthquake, the benchmark for catastrophic shaking in the capital. That quake lasted about 35 seconds, heavily damaged the Caracas valley and killed more than 200 people, which is why the 2026 disaster is already being measured against it as one of the strongest earthquakes to strike Venezuela in more than a century.