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Veronica Cañas Hardly She had just enough time to grab her 6-year-old son and put on her shoes before running out of her apartment in Caracas. As she descended the stairs, the walls began to crack and part of the facade began to collapse. A few kilometers away in Altamira, 50-year-old Eduardo Berger saw a building swaying while another collapsed.
Neither of them knew that this was not just one terrible earthquake, but a rare phenomenon. On June 24, Venezuela witnessed a Double seismic Who saw Earthquakes of magnitude 7.2 and 7.5 He spoke only 39 seconds apart. The first tremor occurred and its epicenter was in Yarakoy. Just a few seconds later, a more powerful earthquake shook the same area again.
Both occurred at a shallow depth of Between 10 and 20 kilometers (6 and 12 miles), causing the energy to reach the surface with greater intensity and allowing seismic waves to be felt as far away as Colombia, northern Brazil, and several Caribbean islands such as Aruba, Bonaire, and Curacao. While a single strike alone would have caused damage, it was the double strike that created the conditions that brought down many buildings and made it difficult to rescue survivors as the death toll mounted.
Technical explanation: tectonic plates, damage and resonance
“The dining room table started shaking,” Kanias says. “We thought it was an earthquake; then it started shaking harder. The walls were cracking, and pieces of the ceiling were falling. We thought it was going to collapse on top of us.”
She and her family were able to reach a sports field across from the building, where other neighbors began to gather. There they had another tremor.
“We all hugged each other, terrified, because we are not used to this,” she says. “In Mexico and Chile, there is a culture of earthquake preparedness, and people are already prepared when the alarm goes off or they feel certain movements, but we are not.”
Cañas’ experience highlights one of the main differences between Venezuela and other countries with high seismic activity. Although the country lies on the border between the Caribbean Plate and the South American Plate, earthquakes of this size are relatively rare.
The locations and movements of plates are why earthquakes are not as common as in other regions, and why they are so strong when they do occur, explains Alan Damián Sánchez Pulido, a civil engineer from the Iberoamerican University in Mexico who specializes in assessing structural damage.
“In Venezuela, the interaction between the Caribbean and South American plates involves parallel movement; this is what may have caused two earthquakes of great magnitude in such rapid succession,” he points out.
In contrast to Mexico, where the Cocos plate is subducted beneath the North American plate, lateral movement in Venezuela leads to different results. “It’s a very rare phenomenon, but its probability is not zero. It could happen anywhere in the world where there is interaction between tectonic plates,” says Sanchez Pulido.
What was surprising was that not only were there two large earthquakes, but that the second earthquake occurred only 39 seconds after the first. For Sánchez Pulido, that short period is what made this set of earthquakes so devastating.
“Many structures sustained some sort of damage from the first earthquake,” he says. “This does not mean the damage was extensive, but any damage changes the original behavior for which they were designed. When another earthquake of the same magnitude hits immediately after, there is no longer any opportunity to reinforce, inspect or repair the structure. As a result, it no longer functions as intended.”
