Aging Infrastructure and Lax Building Standards Leave Venezuela Reeling After Deadly Quakes
Older buildings, substandard construction, and challenging geography left many Venezuelan neighborhoods dangerously exposed to the powerful earthquakes that struck the country this week, engineers and disaster experts said.
The twin quakes on Wednesday were among the most intense recorded in Venezuela in more than a hundred years. They toppled multistory buildings, trapped hundreds under debris, and left more than 900 dead—a toll that officials expect to rise as rescue teams sift through the wreckage. Satellite imagery and videos reviewed by The Associated Press show scores of collapsed structures in the hardest-hit coastal areas.
Microsoft's AI for Good Lab analyzed satellite data from Catia La Mar, a city in La Guaira state along the Caribbean coast, and determined that roughly one-third of its nearly 30,000 buildings sustained damage, using AI-based damage assessment models.
Experts pointed to several root causes. During Venezuela's oil booms in recent decades, housing complexes were thrown up rapidly, often without adhering to best practices for seismic safety. Many of those buildings were constructed before modern earthquake standards were adopted, particularly those erected in the 1950s and 1960s, and were never retrofitted. The region's soft soils and geography further amplified the shaking.
David Cocke, a California structural engineer and former president of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, said the widespread collapse—especially the floor-by-floor pancaking seen in many buildings—stemmed from a lethal mix of soft soils, tall towers, and older concrete structures. “They just don’t have the more modern reinforcing steel connections that we put in those kinds of buildings today,” Cocke said.
Since the 1970s, engineers have known that concrete buildings are especially vulnerable to earthquakes and have advocated steel reinforcement. While wealthier nations like Japan, New Zealand, and the United States have forced property owners to retrofit or raze dangerous structures, many middle- and lower-income countries—including Venezuela—have lagged, often distracted by more immediate crises.
“Some of the more advanced countries ... have made those changes, but some of the other countries have not,” Cocke said. “It’s a very typical kind of construction all over the world.”
Other experts noted that many collapsed buildings had non-structural walls made of heavy bricks or featured “soft stories”—ground floors used as garages or open spaces. That design dramatically increases the risk of pancake collapse. “Soft stories are a huge problem everywhere in the world,” said Eduardo Miranda, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University. “And in Venezuela, they are particularly prevalent. If you combine softer soils with a soft story, buildings can collapse.”
Marcos Ferreira, a geophysicist at the Geological Survey of Brazil, said the back-to-back quakes—known as a doublet—compounded the destruction, much like the February 2023 earthquakes in Turkey and Syria that killed nearly 60,000 people. “It is as if I am screaming and then someone starts screaming, too,” Ferreira said. “That amplifies the vibration and adds to the potential hazard.”
Venezuelan officials updated building codes after a deadly 1967 quake, but it remains unclear how many older buildings were actually retrofitted to meet those standards. Following floods and landslides in late 1999—during Hugo Chávez’s first year in office—the government launched a massive construction campaign to replace destroyed housing and shelter displaced families, said Juan Carlos Vielma, a Venezuelan civil engineer and head of academic affairs at Pontifical Catholic University of Valparaíso, Chile.
Yet even some of those newer buildings crumbled. “Something that leaves me perplexed is the fact that, among the collapsed buildings, more than one was recently designed and built in accordance with current standards,” Vielma said. “We need to embark on a process not only of reconstruction, but also of reviewing the applicable standards, since something might have gone wrong within our engineering processes, too.”
The disaster has reignited a broader conversation about building safety across Latin America and the Caribbean, where rapid urbanization and weak enforcement of codes often leave populations vulnerable. As rescue operations continue, the focus is shifting to how Venezuela—already grappling with political and economic turmoil—can rebuild more safely.