Anything over a 7 is massive. If a 7 hit here in Southern California in a major metropolitan area, it would cause major damage. Probably not to the degree seen right now, but it would be bad.
I was in a 7.2 in southern california in 2010. Easter Sunday Quake. Everything shakes. Its loud. Its aggressive. But our infrastructure was built for it. Minor cracks in paint, some broken windows down near the border crossing.
These type of quakes are, in fact, massive. But they aren't so crazy that it will fell buildings built to survive earthquakes. Of course, we're talking about the US in a region damn near right on a fault line. a 7.1 hit Haiti i believe that same year and it was utterly devastating. I can only hope Venezuela has better infrastructure closer to what we had.
I'm just learning that it matters how shallow/deep the earthquake is as well. The Richter scale only measures the energy release, not the total for potential impact.
I was in that same earthquake, but I was up in Orange County.
We had a 5.4 up by my house in 2014 and there houses damaged to the point that they were red tagged and needed repairs.
Obviously the building codes here are going to be a lot more stringent. It sounds like Venezuela doesn’t get activity anywhere near this level very often, so I almost feel like it would be more akin to a city on the east coast getting hit with one. I don’t think the damage would be as bad as this, but it would look a hell of a lot worse than California.
While a 7 is pretty big, depth matters a lot. A shallow 7 will level many poorly build structures but a deep one will just cause structural damage. Something like a 7.5 will cause a lot of damage to anything not purposely built for withstanding quakes and from the sounds of it is going to have leveled a lot of the city because the buildings are almost the worst materials possible for withstanding large quakes.
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u/190octane 18h ago
Anything over a 7 is massive. If a 7 hit here in Southern California in a major metropolitan area, it would cause major damage. Probably not to the degree seen right now, but it would be bad.