Venezuela quakes knock out power at La Guaira hospitals

Power failed at two of La Guaira’s three public hospitals after Venezuela’s back-to-back earthquakes, cutting emergency care in one of the country’s hardest-hit coastal states just as patients surged in with quake injuries. The outages turned a seismic disaster into a hospital crisis, with medical teams scrambling to keep trauma care, water service and cold-chain capacity running in facilities already under strain.

The tremors hit north-central Venezuela on June 24, when a magnitude 7.2 earthquake was followed 39 seconds later by a magnitude 7.5 quake. Shaking spread across La Guaira, Caracas, Carabobo, Aragua, Yaracuy, Lara, Mérida, Falcón and Miranda. Satellite analysis used by the United Nations indicated possible power outages in parts of Carabobo, La Guaira, Caracas and Aragua, deepening concern that the disaster had already knocked out critical infrastructure in several population centers.

The Pan American Health Organization said it deployed health and engineering assessment teams and completed rapid assessments at seven health facilities, including two in La Guaira. PAHO also said it coordinated with the Ministry of Health, Civil Protection, the United Nations and the Health Cluster as the country responded during a national emergency. Médecins Sans Frontières said it donated emergency trauma kits to hospitals in Caracas and La Guaira and was assessing further medical needs.

By June 26, local authorities had reported at least 920 deaths, 3,000 injuries and more than 51,000 missing. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said roughly 3.9 million people were exposed to severe shaking, while about 1.7 million structures were located in the affected areas. Those numbers frame the scale of the load falling on hospitals that were already operating with shortages and fragile infrastructure.

Health workers in the disaster zone were confronting more than broken walls and fallen debris. Humanitarian updates described hospitals in La Guaira as overwhelmed, with demand far beyond capacity and urgent needs for trauma care, essential medicines, equipment, power restoration, water restoration and cold-chain support. The crisis exposed how years of economic collapse and government mismanagement had hollowed out Venezuela’s public health system long before the ground started moving, leaving emergency care dependent on electricity, supplies and repairs that could fail all at once.