{"id":3309,"date":"2026-06-30T04:17:53","date_gmt":"2026-06-30T04:17:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/reliablemovingcrews.com\/?p=3309"},"modified":"2026-06-30T04:17:53","modified_gmt":"2026-06-30T04:17:53","slug":"the-construction-failures-and-risky-geography-behind-venezuelas-quake-tragedy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/reliablemovingcrews.com\/?p=3309","title":{"rendered":"The construction failures and risky geography behind Venezuela&#8217;s quake tragedy"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<div>\n<div>\n<ul>\n<li>Summary<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div>LA GUAIRA, Venezuela, June 29 (Reuters) &#8211; When late Venezuelan leader Hugo Ch\u00e1vez built this coastal housing development bearing his name as part of his socialist revolution, residents found a fresh start after deadly floods had decimated the area more than a decade earlier.<\/div>\n<div>But after two back\u2011to\u2011back earthquakes flattened parts of the \u200b1,100-unit complex on Wednesday, engineers are urging the Venezuelan government to swiftly audit similar public housing that is still standing.<\/div>\n<div>\u201cI lost my whole apartment,\u201d said Yelsa Rojas, who since 2015 has lived on the second floor of the building \u200ccolloquially known as \u2018Los Cocos\u2019, for its proximity to a beach of the same name.<\/div>\n<div>\u201cWe think everyone on the second floor is dead,\u201d she said. The only reason she\u2019s alive is because she was at a medical appointment when the quakes hit, she added.<\/div>\n<div>While engineers and construction specialists said it was too soon to declare exactly why individual buildings collapsed, decades of neglect, a lack of enforcement of building codes and shoddy licensing practices under Chavez and his successor, Nicolas Maduro, likely exacerbated the disaster&#8217;s human cost.<\/div>\n<div>They also pointed to soil instability in the worst-hit state of La Guaira, where Los Cocos is located, making it an especially risky location to \u200bbuild.<\/div>\n<div>As rescuers race to find those buried in the rubble, civil engineers fear other buildings might still be vulnerable after the quakes and want to help the government ensure they are structurally sound and that residents can safely live there. So far \u200bthe government has met with the country\u2019s main professional engineer association, but has not begun assessments, frustrating some.<\/div>\n<h2>UNDER FIRE<\/h2>\n<div>\u201cIt&#8217;s criminal that the government is not taking up offers from engineers and universities more quickly,\u201d \u2060said Enrique Larra\u00f1aga, an architect and urban planner at Simon Bolivar University who has provided guidance to the government on national development.<\/div>\n<div>Venezuela\u2019s Communication Ministry did not respond to a request for comment. On Sunday, interim President Delcy Rodriguez announced she was putting together a commission to \u200bevaluate damaged housing structures. She did not say when the evaluations would begin.<\/div>\n<div>The government has already been criticized for not deploying much-needed heavy equipment and search-and-rescue teams earlier. That left residents on their own, using their hands, shovels and ropes as they scrambled to find relatives in the crucial \u200bfirst days after the disaster.<\/div>\n<div>By Saturday, state TV showed heavy construction equipment sorting through crushed brick and concrete. Residents said foreign rescue teams had helped them pull out bodies, and called for reinforcements.<\/div>\n<div>Larra\u00f1aga said many developments, rushed by the government for political purposes, haveproven to be safety hazards over the years<svg><\/svg><span>, opens new tab<\/span>, while the country also lost much of its engineering know-how during its economic collapse starting in 2013.<\/div>\n<div>\u201cThey need to give people that have know-how access to information and resources,&#8221; he added.<\/div>\n<h2>PRONE TO DESTRUCTION<\/h2>\n<div>Because the government has not yet begun its own assessments, volunteer engineers have been offering their services to citizens, said Glennys Gonzalez, an architect and \u200bcivil engineer coordinating dozens of professionals.<\/div>\n<div>Her group\u2019s initial assessment of the damage suggests that codes were not adhered to in many cases, but studies must be done to determine why some structures withstood the impact and others completely pancaked, Gonzalez said.<\/div>\n<div>La Guaira was also the site of \u200banother of Venezuela\u2019s worst natural disasters, when mudslides wiped out entire coastal communities in 1999, killing 10,000 to 30,000 people.<\/div>\n<div>Because steep mountains drop sharply to a narrow coastal strip in the area, floods and landslides tend to channel directly through populated areas, said Richard Casanova, director of Venezuela\u2019s College of Engineers, \u200cthe main professional \u2060association that advises the government.<\/div>\n<div>This geography has soft soil, he added, making it particularly prone to destruction during the double earthquakes. Over 50,000 people were killed in Turkey and Syria when they were hit by a similar phenomenon in 2023.<\/div>\n<div>Five days after the 7.2-magnitude and 7.5-magnitude earthquakes, Venezuelan officials confirmed on Monday at least 1,719 people dead, 5,034 injured and 15,866 left homeless. Citizen-led efforts to register the missing have collected nearly 50,000 names.<\/div>\n<h2>QUALITY CONTROL<\/h2>\n<div>Nicol\u00e1s Labr\u00f3poulos, a civil engineer and professor at Universidad Cat\u00f3lica Andr\u00e9s Bello in Caracas, said the loose sand, gravel and debris that La Guaira sits on can make seismic waves travel more slowly, but increase in intensity, amplifying the shaking.<\/div>\n<div>Trapped between the mountains and the sea, the soil can become even more fluid during an earthquake, making construction there riskier, said Casanova.<\/div>\n<div>Many private developments there also collapsed, likely due to \u200ba mix of those same soil weaknesses, years of corrosion and \u200black of quality control, he added, noting that older buildings may \u2060also not have been retrofitted to withstand such impact after the government updated codes following a 1967 earthquake.<\/div>\n<div>\u201cYou can build there,\u201d he said, \u201cbut you have to really adhere to strict codes, and given how the government has handled construction over the past two-and-a-half decades, I have my doubts in many cases.\u201d<\/div>\n<div>After La Guaira\u2019s 1999 catastrophe, the government updated construction laws and building codes, said Casanova. But the problem in Venezuela is \u200bnot the code, it is a lack of enforcement, he said.<\/div>\n<div>Chavez\u2019s government began building complexes like Los Cocos right before the country\u2019s 2012 elections as part of a push to erect millions of \u200bcheap units across the nation. Maduro \u2060continued the project, expanding access to housing for low\u2011income Venezuelans.<\/div>\n<div>But as Chavez and then Maduro centralized power, institutions became weaker and so did quality controls over new construction and maintenance of existing structures, say architects and engineers.<\/div>\n<div>Developments were built quickly by a mix of state agencies and contractors from China, Turkey and Belarus under military oversight but with little public disclosure, Gonzalez and Casanova said.<\/div>\n<div>A lack of enforcement of the more stringent codes in public buildings also signaled to private builders they could get away with cutting corners, Casanova said, in contrast to countries like Chile where such rules were more \u2060rigorously enforced and death \u200btolls have been relatively low.<\/div>\n<div>A magnitude\u20118.8 earthquake in Chile in 2010 killed about 525 people, an outcome widely attributed to strict, well\u2011enforced building codes. By contrast, a \u200bweaker magnitude\u20117.0 quake in Haiti in 2010 killed hundreds of thousands.<\/div>\n<div>Shoddy construction and corruption schemes<svg><\/svg><span>, opens new tab<\/span> linked to public housing in Venezuela have been reported by several organizations and news outlets in recent years. Independent reporting<svg><\/svg><span>, opens new tab<\/span> and studies found several buildings were constructed in geologically risky areas, some with cracks and leaks, and a range of other deficiencies.<\/div>\n<div>\u201cThe history of Chavez\u2019s \u200bpublic housing is one of corruption and low-quality constructions built without supervision, inspection or adherence to specific codes in many cases,\u201d said Casanova.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/reliablemovingcrews.com\/?p=3307\">Fuel shortages spread to more parts of Russia as Ukrainian attacks bite<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/reliablemovingcrews.com\/?p=3305\">Stalled US permits threaten $121 billion in wind and solar investment, report shows<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/reliablemovingcrews.com\/?p=3303\">NBCUniversal may enter video game business after Comcast split, sources say<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Engineers are urging the government to swiftly audit public housing that is still standing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3308,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[94,143],"class_list":["post-3309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-americas","tag-venezuela"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.6 - 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