Two powerful earthquakes struck northern Venezuela on Wednesday evening, killing at least 164 people and injuring more than 900, according to Venezuelan authorities. The first tremor, magnitude 7.2, hit near San Felipe at 18:04 local time; a second, larger quake of magnitude 7.5 followed just 39 seconds later, with an epicentre roughly 5 to 10 kilometres away. The shallow depth — about 10 kilometres — amplified ground shaking, causing buildings to collapse in the capital Caracas and the coastal state of La Guaira.

Interim President Delcy Rodríguez declared a state of emergency and said at least 10 buildings had collapsed in Caracas, with many more in La Guaira, which she described as a 'zone of disaster'. The Simón Bolívar International Airport was closed because of damage. Tsunami alerts were issued for parts of the Caribbean but later cancelled after assessments showed no significant threat.

Seismologists in Spain and Britain described the sequence as a rare 'seismic doublet', in which two large quakes of similar magnitude rupture distinct fault segments almost simultaneously. The US Geological Survey (USGS) noted that the first event likely transferred stress to a neighbouring fault, triggering the second. 'It is probable that the first earthquake ruptured a fault segment and transferred stress to another fault, which then ruptured, causing the second earthquake,' said Mark Allen, a professor of earth sciences at Durham University in Britain, speaking to the Science Media Centre. The USGS estimated that fatalities could range from 10,000 to 100,000, a wide interval that reflects uncertainties about population density, building vulnerability, and ground-motion propagation, according to Spanish seismologist Lucía Lozano.

The quakes occurred along the boundary between the Caribbean and South American tectonic plates, where the plates slide past each other at about two centimetres per year. This strike-slip setting, similar to California’s San Andreas Fault, has produced large earthquakes before, including a magnitude 7.7 event in 1900. The region’s complex network of faults makes doublets possible, though they remain uncommon; a notable recent example was the 2023 doublet in Turkey and Syria.

Rescue teams continued to search through rubble in Caracas and other affected areas, with the death toll expected to be provisional. Aftershocks are likely in the coming days and weeks, Venezuelan and international seismologists warned, and the scientific investigation into the precise rupture mechanisms is only beginning.