Satellite photos show devastation after Venezuela's deadly earthquake doublet

Satellite photos showed flattened blocks across Venezuela’s hard-hit northern coast after two earthquakes of 7.2 and 7.5 struck west of Caracas less than a minute apart on Wednesday evening, killing 920 people and injuring more than 3,000 by Friday. From above, the damage line was clearest in La Guaira, where collapsed buildings and shattered neighborhoods marked the worst of the destruction.

The images put the coastal corridor in focus at a time when rescue crews were still searching through collapsed structures on the ground. Authorities said La Guaira was the hardest-hit state and declared it a disaster zone, with severe damage also reported in nearby Catia La Mar, Macuto and Caraballeda. The quake pair, described by experts as an earthquake doublet sequence, ruptured along the boundary between the South American and Caribbean tectonic plates.

Delcy Rodríguez declared a state of emergency after the back-to-back quakes and nearly two dozen aftershocks shook the country. The shaking reached far beyond the capital and was felt in Brazil and Colombia, underscoring how widely the rupture radiated across the region. The U.S. government said it was deploying search teams, medical resources and humanitarian aid, as Washington and other international responders prepared for a prolonged recovery effort.

The U.S. Geological Survey issued a rare red alert and estimated a significant risk of mass casualties, giving the event a 42 percent chance of causing at least 10,000 fatalities under its historical loss model. The agency’s forecast reflected the force of the shaking, not a final toll, but it captured the scale of the threat as emergency workers tried to reach damaged communities and assess where the collapse was most severe.

The earthquake pair was among the strongest to hit Venezuela in more than a century and the strongest since 1900. The last time Caracas faced destruction on that scale was in 1967, when an earthquake killed more than 200 people and heavily damaged the city. This week’s satellite images showed that the country is again confronting a disaster large enough to overwhelm local ground reporting, with the heaviest damage concentrated where roads, buildings and aid routes all broke at once.