Before Venezuela earthquakes, engineers warned tall buildings could collapse atop soft soil

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Set us as preferred CARACAS, Venezuela — For years, engineers analyzing Venezuela’s construction patterns have voiced a major concern: That the country’s precarious combination of soft ground soil and tall concrete structures — many lacking sufficient seismic reinforcement — could result in catastrophic destruction when a major earthquake struck.That doomsday scenario came to pass in devastating fashion on Wednesday, when two massive, back-to-back quakes damaged or collapsed scores of buildings, leaving at least 1,430 dead, more than 3,200 injured and spurring a desperate search for survivors buried beneath the rubble.Hundreds remain missing.

“The risk was known,” said Eduardo Núñez Castellanos, a Venezuelan structural engineer working as an associate professor and head of the Department of Civil Engineering at the Universidad Católica de la Santísima Concepción in Chile.The dual quakes left a path of destruction from Caracas, the capital, to the coast and elsewhere.The death toll is on pace to be Venezuela’s deadliest in more than a century, surpassing the estimated 1,600 body count in the magnitude 6.7 Cumaná earthquake and tsunami of 1929.Michael Schmitz, a geophysics professor at Simón Bolívar University and Central University of Venezuela, said he feared casualties could reach 50,000 people.

That’s the midpoint of the most likely range estimated by the U.S.Geological Survey, which estimated there’s a 44% chance the death toll could be 10,000 to 100,000.”It’s still early to draw definitive conclusions for why the damage, and death toll, were so high.

But initial photos appear to show collapsed buildings “in some cases higher than 15 stories, with significant construction deficiencies and poor supervision during the construction phase,” Núñez said.A likely contributing factor: An e...