​Tragic evening: On the earthquake in Venezuela

On Wednesday two earthquakes, of magnitudes 7.1 and 7.5, struck seconds apart, levelling large parts of Caracas, Venezuela. On Friday, Jorge Rodriguez, the president of the country’s National Assembly, put the dead at 920 and the injured at 3,360. In La Guaira, the worst-hit State, over a hundred buildings crumpled to rubble. Geologically speaking, such destruction is, in Venezuela, an aberration. The country sits where the South American and Caribbean plates grind past one another, a boundary that slips sideways rather than thrusting upward — unlike the frequent quakes along the Pacific’s Ring of Fire. Strain here accumulates quietly, over generations, before the ground settles its accounts in a single afternoon. It is early days, but seismologists have explained the twin quakes as a ‘doublet,’ what the US Geological Survey (USGS) calls a “complex rupture-interaction”. Northern Venezuela saw a smaller doublet last year; the Türkiye-Syria earthquakes of 2023, which killed over 55,000 people, were of the same provenance. Their shallowness — under 30 kilometres — drove the fury straight into the streets above. The USGS has flagged a plausible toll exceeding 10,000, and the past is proof that such fears are likely to bear out rather than be refuted.

India, which has already offered help, should make relief its first duty — search teams, medical supplies, and the unglamorous logistics of a disaster zone. But there is a lesson here that it ought not to file away and forget. This year the Bureau of Indian Standards withdrew a decade’s worth of commissioned work that found seismic hazard along the Himalayan front badly underestimated — a revision that nearly doubled design forces in the highest zones and added a sixth zone to a map that stopped at five. It was shelved after a Cabinet Secretariat order warned the standards “materially affected” ongoing infrastructure, metro projects among them. India’s Zone V still designs for 0.36g, where g measures for how much the ground can shake. Pakistan and Nepal, on the same colliding front, reckon on nearly 0.75g, the United States and Japan on a full g or more. Nearly 79% of Indians live under moderate to severe seismic threat, and 95% of earthquake deaths occur in the one- to three-storey houses that no code ever reaches. Venezuela is a portent of the implicit danger that exists. The science of prediction will remain, for the foreseeable future, hope filling the gaps of uncertainty. What can be done is build structures that hold and keep their inhabitants safe. The earth follows its rhythm; the only choice is whether or not to be ready.