Emergency declared after powerful twin quakes rattle Venezuela

Venezuela’s interim leader declared a state of emergency Wednesday as two massive earthquakes caused buildings in the capital to crumble and forced the closure of the country’s main airport.

Delcy Rodriguez said 20 aftershocks had followed the earthquakes of magnitude 7.2 and 7.5, which struck the same area of Venezuela, according to the United States Geological Survey (USGS).

The quakes triggered panic in the capital and drove people into the streets, AFP journalists saw.

“The stairs came away, the whole wall cracked. Things fell from the ceiling. It was horrible,” said 54-year-old bank employee Odalis Escalona.

It remained unknown if there were fatalities, but some people were injured and buildings had collapsed, Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello said earlier.

An AFP journalist saw a 22-storey building completely destroyed in the capital’s Altamira neighbourhood, where people cried out relatives’ names as volunteers climbed over the rubble. “We need flashlights,” one of them said.

The first quake, with an epicenter 21 kilometers (13 miles) west of the coastal town of Moron, occurred at 2204 GMT, USGS said. Within a minute, a 7.5-magnitude quake struck about 45 kilometers away.

“This earthquake was the second event in a doublet. This magnitude 7.5 mainshock was preceded by 39 seconds by a 7.2 foreshock,” USGS said.

Cabello asked people to leave their homes, adding that gas supplies had been cut to several buildings as a precaution.

“We have some damaged structures and we don’t want any kind of accident involving gas to occur,” he said.

The Maiquetia International Airport, located near Caracas, was closed due to “serious damage” to its infrastructure, Rodriguez said, with social media posts showing its severely damaged facilities.

– ‘We couldn’t get out’ –

At a depth of 22 kilometers and 10 kilometers respectively, the tremors prompted screams of panic at a shopping center in Caracas, an AFP journalist observed.

“It was unbelievable, I don’t even know how long it lasted,” said shopkeeper Heidi Romero, who was on the top floor of the shopping center when the quake struck.

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“We went out through the emergency stairs; that’s how they got us out,” the 42-year-old told AFP.

Dozens more in the capital exited buildings and waited outside before returning to their offices and homes.

Carmen Guedez, 69, was in the same room as her bedridden sister when she felt the jolt.

“It kept getting stronger,” said the administrator, who lives in a hilly middle-class neighborhood above the capital. “I started to see the windows begin to move and then everything shook.”

She described how she “huddled together” with her sister and a neighbor, adding that “we couldn’t get out. The neighbors are still out on the street.”

The states of Trujillo, Carabobo, Miranda and La Guaira were the hardest hit, according to Cabello.

– Further afield –

The quake was felt as far away as the Colombian capital of Bogota, where alarms sounded and some residents evacuated buildings as a precaution.

Freddy Tovar, coordinator of Colombia’s National Seismological Network, said they had received more than 200 reports of tremors nationwide.

“The conditions of this seismic event mean that some aftershocks may occur, which could also be widely felt across Colombian territory,” he said in a video posted on X.

The Colombian disaster management agency UNGRD ruled out the possibility of a tsunami taking place in the aftermath.

“NO tsunami, NO danger from a recent earthquake,” the US National Tsunami Warning Center said in an X post.

The strongest tremors in earthquake-prone Venezuela’s recent history occurred in the northeast in 1997, killing 73 people, and in Caracas in 1967, when 236 people died.

Shortly after Venezuela’s twin quakes on Wednesday, a 6.9 magnitude tremor hit northern Japan, the country’s weather agency said, with no casualties or material damage reported.