Earthquakes cause devastation in Venezuela

0:00This week on Consider This in New York, big primary wins for congressional candidates backed by New York City Mayor Zoran Mamdani, a Democratic Socialist. Does his brand of politics offer a new blueprint for Democrats? For far too long, we haven't been able to answer what we're fighting for, only who we're fighting. And now we have the answer. So Ron Mamdani on Consider This, listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Today on State of the World, earthquakes cause devastation in Venezuela.

0:32You're listening to State of the World from NPR. We bring you the day's most vital international stories up close where they're happening. It's Thursday, June 25th. I'm Greg Dixon. What appear to be back-to-back earthquakes hit Venezuela on Wednesday, with a death toll that's likely to be in the hundreds at least. A state of emergency has been declared in a nation that was politically and economically fragile before this natural disaster hit. Rescue workers are searching buildings for survivors as help begins to arrive from nearby countries. In a few minutes, how unusual is it for two earthquakes to hit back-to-back?

1:09We'll hear from scientists. First, reporter Manuel Rueda is in neighboring Colombia. He's been talking to people in Venezuela to get a better sense of what's happening. After the earthquake struck, firefighters and volunteers worked to clear debris from the Petunia, a 13-story apartment building in Caracas that collapsed. More than a dozen people were rescued from the building, according to local officials. but many are still thought to be trapped there. Sebastián Arias showed up with a shovel and a sledgehammer to see if he could help. Rescue workers are so short of equipment, they've been asking volunteers to show up with their own tools.

1:49In a place like this, you just feel shocked, he said. I don't even feel like taking photos. By the time Arias got to the Petunia building, there were too many volunteers on site. So he set out to other neighborhoods where there were also reports of collapsed buildings. Maybe they need more tools there, he said. Earthquakes are relatively rare in Venezuela, and residents of Caracas seldom feel even minor tremors. The quakes hit hardest in Caracas and five northern states along Venezuela's Caribbean coast. Claudia Castillo says she was working at home on her computer when the first earthquake struck.

2:31Everything was moving, she says. My flower vases were crashing on the floor, and even paintings were falling off the walls. I had never experienced something like this. Ana Sofer lives in Los Palos Grandes, a neighborhood in Caracas where at least three buildings have collapsed. She was driving past a shopping mall when the first earthquake struck. And I saw people running out of a shopping mall. I saw a big smoke of sand. I decided to breathe, to do breathe exercises because all my body was shaking. In La Guayra, a city of Lomb Venezuela's Caribbean coast, dozens of buildings have collapsed, according to officials.

3:13Videos shared by local journalists show people trapped inside concrete structures, screaming out their names as they wait for help. As rescue crews searched for survivors, neighboring countries began mobilizing aid. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio says rescue teams from Virginia and California are also on their way. We're also helping them with some overhead imagery, especially in coastal areas where they don't have full visibility over what the damage has been and what the impact has been. The response to these earthquakes is expected to test relations between Venezuela and the Trump administration, which seized former Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in January in a pre-dawn raid.

3:54Acting President Delcy Rodriguez has thanked the Trump administration for its quick response. In a nationally televised address, she declared a state of emergency. We need all doctors and nurses to report to their places of work, she said. Venezuela's main airport has been closed after its ceiling was damaged, and schools will be shut down for the remainder of the week. Rodriguez urged residents to evacuate buildings that remain standing and are no longer safe because of structural damages to their foundations.

4:28Please stay calm, she said. We need to stay united. The last time Caracas experienced such an intense earthquake was in 1967, when more than 200 people were killed in a 6.7 magnitude quake. Thousands are now sleeping outdoors, fearful of more aftershocks. For them, the recovery has only just begun. For NPR News, I'm Manuel Rueda in Bogota. As scientists sort through the data from this event, they say this earthquake sequence appears to have some unusual features. NPR's Katia Riddle tells us more. In Caracas, many older buildings are vulnerable to strong shaking. One major earthquake could have caused widespread damage.

5:12A pair of them proved catastrophic. William Barnhart is a geophysicist at the U.S. Geological Survey in Golden, Colorado. A magnitude 7.2 earthquake alone in this region would be a devastating earthquake, but it was followed 39 seconds later by a magnitude 7.5 earthquake that's about three times more powerful. The fact that they struck on land close to major population centers, says Barnhart, made them especially deadly. It's just an awful tragedy. Barnhart says it's too early to say conclusively exactly what happened under the Earth. It appears these two quakes may have occurred on two separate faults.

5:49That's because of the unique geology underpinning the region. Several faults intersect. There's not just a single easily identifiable fault that you can point to and say the earthquake definitely happened on this fault. Historically, when experts evaluate earthquake risk, they haven't necessarily accounted for this multi-fault scenario, says Chris Goldfinger. He's a paleoseismologist at Oregon State University. We always tend to kind of assume that earthquakes will just be on one fault and only on one fault. Ten years ago, a multi-fault event like this in New Zealand took people by surprise, says Goldfinger.

6:22If this one turns out to be similar, he says, it will be important information for those who study this kind of risk. And the first one was completely out of the blue. We had no idea that could happen at all. And here's a second one 10 years later, where two really big earthquakes happened on separate faults. Parts of California's fault system, including the San Andreas, have similarly complex tectonics. Experts say that area is far more prepared than Caracas, but Goldfinger says that's rare. Many of these buildings around the world were built before plate tectonics. So it's just an intimidatingly difficult thing to think about retrofitting entire cities.

7:02Hopefully, he says, experts like him and his colleagues can learn from this unusual event so that the next one might not be quite as tragic. Katie Arudel, NPR News.

7:17That's the State of the World from NPR. Thanks for listening. This week, Jesuit priest Father Greg Boyle examines how our sense of self influences our capacity for forgiveness. We're all wounded and we're broken. And how do we become friends with our wounds so that we can enter into relational wholeness with each other? Find out where divine grace comes from on Ye Gods with Scott Carter. Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Your favorite toys are back in Toy Story 5, and they're facing some new competition, the dreaded tablet. How will Buzz and Woody handle kids glued to screens?

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