On June 24, 2026, back-to-back earthquakes struck in and around Caracas, Venezuela. The second quake, a magnitude 7.5 earthquake, was the strongest to hit the country in over a century. The full scale of the destruction is not yet known, but thousands of people are unaccounted for as of Thursday.
Western University experts are available to comment on earthquakes, disaster preparedness, Venezuelan history and more.
Katsu Goda
Associate Professor, Earth Sciences; Canada Research Chair in Multi-Hazard Risk Assessment
• Catastrophic earthquake risk management
• Engineering seismology
• Earthquake engineering
Keith Porter
Chief engineer, Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction; adjunct research professor, Engineering
• Disaster resilience and retrofit
• Earthquake engineering
• Costs, benefits, and the resilience investment gap
Robert Shcherbakov
Associate professor, Earth Sciences
• Earthquake physics and statistics
• Temporal and spatial scaling properties of earthquakes and aftershocks
• Induced seismicity
• Earthquake hazard assessment and forecasting
Juan Andrés Bello
Assistant Professor, Faculty of Information and Media Studies
• Venezuelan history
• Venezuelan media
• Human rights in Venezuela
MEDIA CONTACT: Jacquelyn Mitchell, Media Relations Officer, Western University, (226) 386-9683, j.mitchell@uwo.ca
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