Engineers urge Venezuela to audit state housing after deadly quake

Written by: Maxwell Briceno and Sarah Kinosian

LA GUAIRA, Venezuela, June 29 (Reuters) – When Venezuela’s late leader Hugo Chávez built this coastal residential community bearing his name as part of his socialist revolution, residents got a fresh start after deadly floods devastated the area more than a decade ago.

But after two consecutive earthquakes destroyed parts of the 1,100-unit complex on Wednesday, engineers are calling on the Venezuelan government to quickly inspect similar public housing that still stands.

“I lost my entire apartment,” said Yelsa Rojas, who has been living on the second floor of the building popularly known as ‘Los Cocos’ since 2015 due to its proximity to the beach of the same name.

“We think everyone on the second floor is dead,” he said. ‌The only reason he was alive was because he was at a medical appointment when the earthquake happened, he added.

While engineers and construction experts say it is too early to explain exactly why individual buildings collapsed, decades of neglect, failure to enforce building codes and shoddy licensing practices under Chavez and his successor Nicolas Maduro likely compounded the human cost of the disaster.

They also noted soil instability in the hard-hit La Guaira province, where Los Cocos is located, making it a particularly risky place for construction.

As rescue teams race to find those trapped under the rubble, civil engineers fear other buildings may still be vulnerable after the quake and want to help the government make sure those buildings are structurally sound and residents can live there safely. So far the government has met with the country’s main association of professional engineers but has not begun evaluations, disappointing some.

UNDER FIRE

“It is a crime that the government did not accept proposals from engineers and universities more quickly,” said Enrique Larrañaga, an architect and urban planner at Simon Bolivar University who provides guidance to the government on national development.

Venezuela’s Ministry of Communications did not respond to a request for comment. On Sunday, interim Mayor Delcy Rodriguez announced that she was establishing a commission to assess damaged housing structures. He did not say when the evaluations would begin.

The government has already been criticized for not deploying much-needed heavy equipment and search and rescue teams sooner. This left residents on their own, using their hands, shovels and ropes as they scrambled to find their relatives in the critical first days after the disaster.

State television on Saturday showed heavy construction machinery sorting through broken brick and concrete. Residents said foreign rescue teams were helping them recover the bodies and called for reinforcements.

Larrañaga said that many developments rushed by the government for political purposes have proven to be security hazards over the years, and that the country also lost much of its engineering know-how during the economic collapse that started in 2013.

“They need to provide people with the know-how with access to information and resources,” he added.

EFFECTIVE ON DEMOLITION

Glennys Gonzalez, an architect and civil engineer who coordinates dozens of professionals, said volunteer engineers are providing services to citizens because the government has not yet begun its own assessments.

Gonzalez said his group’s initial assessment of the damage was that codes were not followed in most cases, but studies need to be done to determine why some structures withstood the impact and others were completely flattened.

La Guaira was also one of Venezuela’s worst natural disasters; Landslides destroyed entire coastal communities in 1999, killing 10,000 to 30,000 people.

Richard Casanova, director of the Venezuelan College of Engineers, the main professional association advising the government, said that because steep mountains drop sharply into a narrow coastline in the region, floods and landslides tend to pass directly over populated areas.

He added that this geography has soft soils, which makes it prone to destruction, especially in double earthquakes. More than 50,000 people lost their lives in Türkiye and Syria, where a similar incident occurred in 2023.

Four days after 7.2 and 7.5 magnitude earthquakes struck, Venezuelan authorities confirmed Sunday that at least 1,450 people were killed and 3,150 injured. Approximately 50,000 names were collected in citizen-led efforts to register the missing.

QUALITY CONTROL

Nicolás Labrópoulos, a civil engineer and professor at Universidad Católica Andrés Bello in Caracas, said the loose sand, gravel and debris on which La Guaira lies may cause seismic waves to travel more slowly but increase in intensity, increasing shaking.

Casanova said that the soil trapped between the mountains and the sea could become more fluid during an earthquake, making construction more risky.

Many private developments there also collapsed, likely due to a mix of the same soil weaknesses, years of corrosion and a lack of quality control, he added, noting that older buildings may also not have been reinforced to withstand such impacts after the government updated legislation after the 1967 earthquake.

“You can build there,” he said, “but you have to follow really strict rules, and given how the government has handled construction over the last twenty-five years, I have my doubts in many cases.”

After La Guaira’s 1999 disaster, the government updated building codes and building codes, Casanova said. But he said the problem in Venezuela is not the law but the lack of enforcement.

The Chavez government began building complexes like Los Cocos just before the country’s 2012 elections, as part of an effort to build millions of affordable housing units across the country. Maduro continued the project, expanding housing access for low-income Venezuelans.

But as institutions weakened as Chavez and then Maduro centralized power, so did quality controls on new construction and maintenance of existing structures, architects and engineers say.

Gonzalez and Casanova said the developments were being built quickly by various government agencies and contractors from China, Turkey and Belarus, under military supervision but with little public information.

Casanova said the failure to enforce stricter rules on public buildings signals to private builders that they can cut corners, unlike countries like Chile where such rules are more strictly enforced and fatality rates are relatively low.

Approximately 525 people lost their lives in the 8.8 magnitude earthquake that occurred in Chile in 2010; this result was widely attributed to strict and well-enforced building codes. In contrast, the weaker magnitude 7.0 earthquake in Haiti in 2010 killed hundreds of thousands of people.

Poor construction and corruption schemes linked to public housing in Venezuela have been reported by various organizations and news outlets in recent years. Independent reporting and investigations have revealed that many buildings have been built in geologically compromised areas, some with cracks, leaks and a range of other deficiencies.

“The history of Chavez’s public housing is full of corruption and low-quality construction, which in many cases was built without supervision, inspection or compliance with certain rules,” Casanova said.

(Reporting by Maxwell Briceno in La Guaira and Sarah Kinosian in Mexico City; Additional reporting by Reuters in Caracas; Editing by Christian Plumb and Lincoln Feast)