Over 40 search-and-rescue teams have been mobilized from 27 countries to aid in the effort to free any people trapped in collapsed buildings and structures, according to the United Nations International Search and Rescue Group (INSARAG), which is coordinating the international response. The agency and Venezuelan authorities have already agreed to procure 10,000 body bags in preparation for recovery operations. 

It is too early for full-scale assessments of the damage to buildings in the quake zone, but the UN currently estimates that between 2,000 and 2,500 structures have been damaged, and many have fully collapsed, according to Gianluca Rampolla, UN resident and humanitarian coordinator in Venezuela. The latest official numbers from the Venezuelan government as of Monday said 855 buildings have been damaged with 189 collapsed. 

For the moment, the UN mission is currently focused on addressing Venezuelans injured and displaced by the earthquake, Rampolla said.

“Together with the search and rescue operations, we are focusing, together with the [Venezuelan] government, on providing emergency healthcare, shelter, food assistance, water and sanitation, and logistical support to ensure not only the storage but also the distribution of all the supplies arriving in the country, as well as protection,” Rampolla told reporters during a UN press conference June 29. He added that the UN has had an ongoing humanitarian mission in Venezuela since 2019 and already has an administrative and logistical framework in place for distributing and delivering aid in the country.

With Uneven Code Enforcement, Some Older Buildings See Major Damage

The greatest damage to buildings from the earthquake seems to follow early estimates by experts, with buildings built before Venezuela adopted modern seismic codes in recent decades. And there is the broader issue of uneven enforcement of building codes that can expand the potentially damaged buildings, notes Andre R. Barbosa, structural engineering professor at Oregon State University.

“Overall [Venezuela] seems to have updated building codes. New buildings, if designed and built to code, should perform well. So building code enforcement and mitigating informal construction would probably be the most important measures in Venezuela to prevent similar damage,” explains Barbosa, who is also a contributing researcher with the National Science Foundation’s Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure network. "Meanwhile, existing buildings that did not collapse under this sequence of events, but that fall outside the building codes should still be retrofitted since they can fail in subsequent earthquake ground shaking in the future, as was observed in Mexico and New Zealand in the 2010s."

As response efforts shift from search-and-rescue operations to structural assessments of buildings in the coming weeks, Barbosa says inspectors will have their work cut out for them. “[Inspectors] will be looking for indicators of the failure modes, such as damage in beams, columns, walls, and connections, between beam-column joints.”

Furthermore, he adds, “since in Venezuela they have a lot of masonry infill walls that are used as partition and facade walls, when these have large cracks they become a life safety hazard and often require people to be displaced for the duration of the repairs.”