Here’s an explanation in terms of earthquake science:

Wednesday’s earthquake was actually two separate ruptures, magnitude 7.2 and magnitude 7.5, that occurred just 39 seconds and 5 kilometers apart in northern Venezuela, killing at least 900 people and injuring thousands more, while causing widespread building damage across the region. The quakes occurred where the Caribbean tectonic plate grinds eastward relative to the South American plate along a multitude of faults. But they didn’t really surprise [Venezuelan earthquake expert]] Audemard. He had seen them coming.

In a 2017 study in Tectonics, he and his colleagues had studied the slip rate of one of the faults within the plate boundary, the Boconó fault, going back thousands of years. They found that the fault had not ruptured since a devastating magnitude 7.1 earthquake in 1812 that leveled Caracas, which meant strain had been accumulating on the fault for 2 centuries. The resulting “slip deficit,” they estimated, was enough to produce a magnitude 7 to magnitude 7.6 earthquake. The earthquake duo that hit this week is like “the 1812 earthquake’s brother,” Audemard says.

And about the fact that there were two earthquakes so close together in time and location:

Back-to-back “doublet” earthquakes are not uncommon. Higgins [geophysicist at Florida International University] says the stresses released by rupture along one segment of the fault probably triggered an adjacent segment’s rupture. But the short time gap between the two—less than 1 minute—seems exceptional, says Germán Prieto, a seismologist at the National University of Colombia. Doublets such as the 2023 Kahramanmara? earthquake in Turkey or the 1997 Kagoshima earthquake in Japan were separated by hours or days. The short interval between Wednesday’s shocks makes disentangling the signals particularly complicated for seismologists, and helps explain why the quake locations have been hard to pin down.

But at the moment, the science of the quakes is the least of Venezuela’s worries. The death toll is large, but it’s not only that. As with many earthquakes, there are earthquake survivors who were trapped in the rubble and who will die soon (or already have) without rescue. Now and then there’s a feel-good story such as this one, which reports a father and son rescued after four days. But such tales are not common, despite rescue teams from varied countries.

There are also many aftershocks still occurring. and the death toll at present is 1700 and rising, with estimates that go above 10,000.

And the Venezuelan government is being blamed, not for the earthquake itself but for problems with the response:

According to [Venezuelan pollster] Chirinos, public outrage is especially intense toward the armed forces, police and senior Chavista officials, including Delcy Rodríguez, Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello and National Assembly President Jorge Rodríguez.

He said one of the biggest grievances centers on allegations that authorities obstructed humanitarian aid collected by civilians during the critical first hours after the disaster.

“The two biggest sources of anger are clear,” Chirinos said. “First, the obstruction of aid organized by ordinary citizens. Second, the inaction—or worse—of the armed forces.”

Videos circulating on social media over the weekend showed residents confronting military personnel, accusing them of standing by while civilians carried out rescue operations with little official assistance.

In some videos, survivors accused soldiers of looting apartments and confiscating donated supplies—claims that remain difficult to independently verify but have fueled widespread outrage.

The armed forces, already burdened by years of public distrust, now face what analysts say could be a near-total collapse in legitimacy.

Not surprising. It’s a terrible, terrible situation, and Venezuelans had already been through a lot before this.