​Tragic evening: On the earthquake in Venezuela

On Wednesday two earthquakes, of magnitudes 7.1 and 7.5, struck seconds apart , levelling large parts of Caracas, Venezuela. On Friday, Jorge Rodriguez, the president of the country’s National Assembly, put the dead at 920 and the injured at 3,360 . In La Guaira, the worst-hit State, over a hundred buildings crumpled to rubble. Geologically speaking, such destruction is, in Venezuela, an aberration. The country sits where the South American and Caribbean plates grind past one another, a boundary that slips sideways rather than thrusting upward — unlike the frequent quakes along the Pacific’s Ring of Fire. Strain here accumulates quietly, over generations, before the ground settles its accounts in a single afternoon. It is early days, but seismologists have explained the twin quakes as a ‘doublet,’ what the US Geological Survey (USGS) calls a “complex rupture-interaction”. Northern Venezuela saw a smaller doublet last year; the Türkiye-Syria earthquakes of 2023, which killed over 55,000 people, were of the same provenance. Their shallowness — under 30 kilometres — drove the fury straight into the streets above. The USGS has flagged a plausible toll exceeding 10,000, and the past is proof that such fears are likely to bear out rather than be refuted.