Dr. Zeina Hannoush felt the ground shake beneath her feet and steadied herself.\u00a0<\/p>\n
During the entirety of her childhood and early adult years growing up in the Venezuelan capital of Caracas, she had never experienced an earthquake. But when the first of two violent temblors began to devastate parts of the city of her birth last Wednesday, she knew precisely what was happening.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It was just after 6 p.m. and the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine<\/a> physician had walked only a few steps away from the home of an aunt and uncle she had just visited.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI drove the 15 minutes to the part of the city where other members of the family was staying,\u201d said Hannoush, speaking from her in-law\u2019s home in Caracas, where she and her children are staying while visiting relatives for the summer. \u201cI was fortunate. The neighborhoods I drove through didn\u2019t suffer extensive damage, hardly any.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n That wasn\u2019t the case for other areas. The two earthquakes\u2014a magnitude 7.2 foreshock followed just 39 seconds later by a larger 7.5 mainshock\u2014hit La Guaira, the coastal state near Caracas, the hardest, toppling buildings, killing hundreds of people, and trapping many more beneath rubble.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cMany of the people I know are still trying to locate their loved ones,\u201d said Hannoush, an associate professor of clinical medicine who attended medical school in Venezuela. \u201cThey have not been able to communicate with them. So, there\u2019s still much we don\u2019t know about the loss of human life.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n As of Friday, the death toll sits at 589 people, with more than 3,000 injured. But thousands more are feared dead.\u00a0<\/p>\n Search and rescue\u00a0<\/p>\n Emergency response teams within the country have mobilized, and aid from other countries is pouring in. The U.S. State Department has pledged its support, deploying search and rescue teams from Fairfax County, Virginia, and Los Angeles, Secretary of State and School of Law alumnus Marco Rubio said.\u00a0<\/p>\n In the immediate aftermath of the back-to-back earthquakes, Venezuela will face daunting challenges, with medical care for the injured being the most important, according to Dr. Elizabeth Greig, assistant professor of medicine and codirector of the Global Institute for Community Health and Development<\/a> at the Miller School, a humanitarian and disaster relief program.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cVenezuela\u2019s been hit by two, massive earthquakes in dense, concentrated urban areas. So, when there\u2019s a scenario such as that, there will always be a prolonged search and rescue effort,\u201d Greig said. \u201cEarthquakes generate a lot of injuries that require high-level surgical attention\u2014fractures, crush injuries that will require surgical intervention. So, the first few days are just about search and rescue, assessing the damage, getting people safe, getting people medical care, and increasing the amount of medical aid on the ground just because of the nature of what an earthquake disaster entails.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n As a result of the disaster, many residents are now suddenly homeless and will be living in areas with no running water and poor sanitation, exacerbating medical conditions they may already have, she pointed out.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cDisasters don\u2019t occur in isolation,\u201d said Greig, who, as a fourth-year Miller School medical student, helped care for patients and coordinated the logistics of the Global Institute\/Project Medishare\u2019s 240-bed field hospital in Haiti in the aftermath of the earthquake that struck that island nation in 2010. \u201cYou still have your routine, day-to-day health conditions, and other medical emergencies to deal with\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The Global Institute is now examining what types of aid it could provide to Venezuela, with telehealth services being one possibility, according to Greig.\u00a0<\/p>\n Earthquake \u2018doublet\u2019\u00a0<\/p>\n As for the science behind the temblors, the two powerful earthquakes that struck Venezuela\u2019s northern coast were an event known as a seismic doublet sequence\u2014two earthquakes of similar magnitude that occur close in time and proximity, which likely indicates a complex, rupture-interaction process, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt is unusual, but not impossible,\u201d Guoqing Lin<\/a>, a professor of geophysics and associate dean of research at the Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science<\/a>, said of doublet events. \u201cLarge earthquakes are often followed by aftershocks, but having two, very large earthquakes occur within such a short time window is much less common. In this case, the first event may have rapidly changed the stress on a nearby part of the fault system and helped trigger the second, larger rupture.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n As more seismic data are analyzed, she noted, scientists may refine whether Wednesday\u2019s catastrophe is best interpreted as two distinct earthquakes or as one complex, multistage rupture.\u00a0<\/p>\n Tremors were reported across northern Central America, which isn\u2019t unusual, according to Lin. \u201cA large earthquake can be felt over a very wide region, especially through long-period seismic waves,\u201d she explained. \u201cBut the strongest ground motion usually occurs closest to the rupture. In this case, Venezuela was much closer to the source and experienced much stronger shaking.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The deadly twin temblors struck more than two weeks after a magnitude 6.1 earthquake hit off the northwest coast of Cuba, triggering shaking that was even felt in South Florida.\u00a0<\/p>\n Could the two events be related? \u201cVery unlikely,\u201d Lin said.<\/p>\n \u201cThey both occurred within the broader Caribbean tectonic region, but on different parts of the plate-boundary system,\u201d she said. \u201cThe Cuba earthquake occurred near the boundary between the North American plate and the Caribbean plate, while the Venezuela earthquake occurred along the southern Caribbean boundary, where the Caribbean plate interacts with the South American plate,\u201d she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cAny stress change from the Cuba earthquake at the Venezuela source region would be expected to be very small,\u201d Lin added. \u201cThe Venezuela earthquake is much more likely to reflect accumulated tectonic strain along the Caribbean-South American plate boundary.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Hope and recovery\u00a0<\/p>\n For Dr. Lilian Abbo, a professor of clinical infectious diseases at the Miller School, the earthquakes brought back unpleasant memories of December 1999, when torrential rains caused massive flooding and landslides in La Guaira, killing thousands.\u00a0<\/p>\n Back then, she had just graduated from medical school in Caracas when the floods occurred, and she volunteered to help, flying to affected regions to provide medical care to victims. \u201cThe images we\u2019ve been seeing of collapsed buildings and flattened roads caused by the earthquakes have reminded me so much of the suffering that occurred in La Guaira 27 years ago,\u201d said Abbo, who was born in Philadelphia but moved to the South American country with her Venezuelan-born parents when she was 3 months old.\u00a0<\/p>\n What made Wednesday\u2019s one-two punch especially difficult is that it occurred on the Battle of Carabobo Day, a major holiday in Venezuela that commemorates a decisive 1821 military victory that secured the country\u2019s independence from the Spanish Empire.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cMany people, rather than being at work, were at home with their kids. Many of them were watching the World Cup. Many were in shopping malls,\u201d said Abbo, stressing that extensive aid is needed not only for earthquake victims in the capital city but in surrounding areas that may be harder to reach.\u00a0<\/p>\n Dr. Daniela Galan, an assistant professor of clinical radiology at the Miller School, who was born and raised in Venezuela and attended medical school there, said she has no doubt the people of her homeland will rebound from the disaster.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cVenezuela has faced extraordinary challenges\u2014economic hardships, political instability, humanitarian crises. Yet its people have never lost their ability to support one another,\u201d Galan said. \u201cSolidarity is deeply ingrained in our culture. And in moments of crises, neighbors become family, communities come together, people share what little they have to help those in need. So, that resilience gives me hope that Venezuela will recover from this disaster as well.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dr. Zeina Hannoush felt the ground shake beneath her feet and steadied herself.\u00a0 During the entirety of her…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":320798,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[225,227,226],"class_list":["post-320797","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-hialeah","tag-hialeah","tag-hialeah-headlines","tag-hialeah-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320797","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=320797"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320797\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/320798"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=320797"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=320797"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=320797"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}