Nearly a month after the two earthquakes of June 24 left at least 4,930 people dead, 17,854 displaced and thousands more missing, Venezuela is still trying to understand the full extent of the disaster. There is no centralized damage assessment, no authoritative accounting of destroyed buildings and no definitive picture of what was lost.

Reconstruction, however, cannot wait for perfect data. Families need housing and infrastructure must be restored, yet the decisions made today will shape our cities for decades. Engineers, geologists, and other specialists are converging on why the earthquakes proved so destructive, where the limits of current knowledge lie, and which popular explanations are unsupported by the available evidence.

Why the earthquakes were so destructive

The physical characteristics of the June 24 earthquakes are relatively well understood. Instead of enduring a single shock, many structures were hit by a second, more intense earthquake before they had recovered from the first.



Structural engineer and Cazadores de Fake News director Adrián González explains that a structure shaken hard enough to crack without collapsing loses stiffness and consumes part of the reserve capacity built into its design.

Thirty-nine seconds later, the second rupture strikes what is, in effect, a different building: one already weakened by the first earthquake. As González puts it, “the combined effect isn’t equivalent to simply adding the two earthquakes together.”

The aftermath of the disaster quickly generated competing explanations about construction quality, engineering standards and government responsibility. Yet the damage rarely speaks for itself. To draw meaningful lessons from the disaster, the evidence has to be read in context.

Another factor was resonance. Esteban Tenreiro, a structural engineer, has explained in multiple interviews that each structure has a natural swaying period, the rhythm at which it tends to sway. As with sound, when seismic motion

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