Two massive earthquakes hit Venezuela within sixty seconds of each other on Wednesday, and if that sounds like a cruel cosmic joke, the punchline is that at least 235 people are dead, roughly 4,300 are injured, and rescue workers are still pulling people out of rubble across a coastline that, in some neighborhoods, has been reduced to powder. These are the strongest quakes to hit the country in over a hundred years. The shaking reached Colombia and Brazil.
One Minute Apart, No Time to Run
Here's the thing that makes this disaster particularly brutal. CBS News reports that the two earthquakes, one measuring 7.2 and the other 7.5, struck within a single minute of each other. Northwestern University professor emeritus Emile Okal told CBS News that this meant most people caught in collapsing buildings during the first quake had absolutely no window to get out before the second one hit.
CBS News meteorologist Rob Marciano said the quakes were shallow, only about six miles deep, which translates to more violent shaking at the surface. When you combine back-to-back major tremors with shallow depth and densely packed residential towers along Venezuela's northern coast, you get exactly what the world is now looking at: entire city blocks reduced to broken concrete.
The epicenters were west of Caracas. The capital felt it hard. The coastal state of La Guaira felt it worst.
Catia La Mar: 'Everything, Everything Collapsed'
La Guaira sits on Venezuela's northern coast and took the full force of both quakes. Acting President Delcy Rodriguez declared a state of emergency and said the state was the hardest hit in the country. That tracks with what survivors are describing on the ground.
In the neighborhood of Catia La Mar, home to nearly 200 housing towers, resident Yilsmaris Blanco told AFP that "everything, everything collapsed." She said people are still trapped under their relatives with no way to get them out. Larry Rojas, 49, told AFP his family was buried in a collapsed building and that residents don't even have access to water. "Really, we need someone to help us, to send machinery," he told AFP. He said nobody wants to enter the buildings still standing because they're terrified those will fall too.
Jose Pacheco, operations chief of the United Rescue Group of Venezuela, told AFP he has never seen anything like this in 30 years of emergency response work. Thirty years. He called specifically for specialized technical teams from Caracas to get to La Guaira as fast as possible.
A Journalist Trapped in an Elevator, a Country Trapped in Grief
Tony Frangie, a journalist, was stepping out of his Caracas apartment building to watch a World Cup match when the first quake hit. He told CBS Mornings he was stuck in an elevator, pressing every button, praying, waiting for the doors to open. The elevator eventually let him out in the basement. His building stayed standing. He was one of the lucky ones.
He said he went online and that's when the scale of it hit him. Two massive quakes. Tsunami alerts. A country in chaos. He told CBS Mornings he has been watching "hundreds of posts and stories and lots of messages of people" searching for missing family members. His MBA graduation, scheduled for Friday, has been suspended. He is waiting to find out how he can help.
"We've seen videos of buildings collapsing and a never-ending amount of people looking for families," Frangie told CBS Mornings. "So, yeah, we expect it to get worse."
The U.S. Is Showing Up, Which Is Complicated
Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters Thursday morning that the U.S. is deploying search and rescue teams from Fairfax County, Virginia, and Los Angeles, along with medical resources and humanitarian aid. He said he spoke directly with Acting President Rodriguez and offered the full assistance of the United States. Qatar and El Salvador have also offered help, per CBS News.
Now look, the U.S.-Venezuela relationship has been a dumpster fire for years. The Trump administration has been in the middle of a complicated "stabilization process" with the Maduro government, which is a diplomatic way of describing two hostile governments trying not to actively destroy each other. Rubio acknowledged the awkwardness, telling reporters that "earthquakes are not part of the stabilization process" and that the administration is "just going to focus on the human aspect of this."
That's the right call. Rubio said it plainly: there are people trapped in rubble, hurt, and dying, and the U.S. is going to help. Credit where it's due. The politics of U.S.-Venezuela relations can wait. The people of La Guaira cannot.
The Dingo Take
Two hundred and thirty-five confirmed dead, 4,300 injured, and a rescue chief with three decades of experience saying he has never seen anything like this. The death toll is going to climb. Frangie said it, Pacheco implied it, and the sheer density of collapsed residential towers in Catia La Mar makes it mathematically inevitable. Venezuela was already a country on its knees economically and politically before Wednesday. Now its coast looks like a war zone.
The cruelest detail in this whole story is the sixty-second gap between the two earthquakes. One minute. Not enough to get out of the building you were already scrambling to escape. Just enough time to think you might have survived, and then the ground starts screaming again. That's the kind of fact that sits with you.
Search teams are in the air. Aid is moving. But the people still alive under that rubble in La Guaira are running out of time right now, while the rest of the world watches videos on their phones. Machinery. Water. Specialized rescue crews. That's what Larry Rojas asked for from the rubble of his neighborhood. It's a short list. Whether it gets there fast enough is the only question that matters today.
