---
title: "Venezuela's deadly faults resemble the San Andreas, Lucy Jones says"
description: "The twin earthquakes that killed hundreds in Venezuela this week struck on a strike-slip fault system built much like the San Andreas, the seismologist Lucy Jones notes — a geological kinship that makes the disaster less a distant tragedy than a mirror for California."
category: "California"
category_url: https://herald.la/category/california
author: "Gabriela Soto"
published: 2026-06-26T20:37:36.000Z
updated: 2026-06-26T20:37:36.000Z
canonical: https://herald.la/article/venezuela-s-deadly-faults-resemble-the-san-andreas-lucy-jones-says
tags: ["earthquake", "san-andreas-fault", "seismology", "lucy-jones", "preparedness"]
---
# Venezuela's deadly faults resemble the San Andreas, Lucy Jones says

The twin earthquakes that killed hundreds in Venezuela this week struck on a strike-slip fault system built much like the San Andreas, the seismologist Lucy Jones notes — a geological kinship that makes the disaster less a distant tragedy than a mirror for California.

The two earthquakes that struck northern Venezuela on Wednesday — a magnitude 7.2 followed seconds later by a magnitude 7.5 — killed hundreds of people and left parts of Caracas in ruins. For Southern California's best-known seismologist, the disaster carried an uncomfortable familiarity: the fault that broke is built the same way as the one beneath Los Angeles.

## The same kind of fault

"What happened in Venezuela was movement on their plate boundary strike-slip fault," Lucy Jones [told ABC7](https://abc7.com/post/fault-produced-venezuelan-earthquakes-is-similar-san-andreas-seismologist-dr-lucy-jones-says/19382422/). "That's what the San Andreas is."

A strike-slip fault is one where two blocks of the Earth's crust grind horizontally past each other rather than one riding over the other. In Venezuela, the Caribbean plate slides eastward past South America; in California, the Pacific plate moves north past the North American plate. The mechanics are nearly identical, and so are the slip rates — both boundaries move on the order of an inch or so per year, storing strain over decades that releases in seconds.

Christine Goulet, who directs the USGS Earthquake Science Center, described the Venezuelan movement as "on the order of the San Andreas fault," while cautioning that horizontal faulting is not inherently more dangerous than other kinds, [PBS NewsHour reported](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/the-2-earthquakes-that-struck-venezuela-are-known-as-a-doublet-heres-what-to-know-about-them). What ultimately determines destruction is the length of the rupture, how close it is to cities, and the soil beneath them.

## A rare 'doublet'

Scientists are also describing the Venezuela sequence as a [seismic "doublet"](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/the-2-earthquakes-that-struck-venezuela-are-known-as-a-doublet-heres-what-to-know-about-them) — two quakes of nearly equal size striking close together in time and place, each effectively loading stress onto the next fault segment. The San Andreas is itself a segmented fault, and researchers have long studied how a rupture on one section could cascade into another.

## What it means for California — and what it doesn't

Jones was careful to draw a structural comparison, not a forecast. The kinship between the faults does not predict when California's next great earthquake will come. But she did not soften the stakes. A major rupture on the southern San Andreas, she has noted, would shake the Inland Empire hardest, while the Los Angeles Basin faces serious risk from liquefaction, in which water-logged soils briefly behave like liquid. "It isn't just near the fault," she said.

She also questioned how much comfort building codes should provide, pointing out that current standards still allow a share of code-compliant structures to fail in a severe quake. The collapsed towers in Caracas, in her telling, are not evidence of a uniquely unprepared country so much as a warning written in the same geology that runs through California.

The lesson, Jones argues, is preparation rather than panic: retrofit vulnerable buildings, store water, and plan for a major quake to disrupt utilities and supply lines for weeks. Northern Venezuela and Southern California sit on different shores of the Caribbean, but on closely related faults — and what happened this week, she suggests, is not a foreign event so much as a preview.

## Sources

- [Fault that produced Venezuelan earthquakes is similar to San Andreas fault, Dr. Lucy Jones says](https://abc7.com/post/fault-produced-venezuelan-earthquakes-is-similar-san-andreas-seismologist-dr-lucy-jones-says/19382422/)
- [The 2 earthquakes that struck Venezuela are known as a 'doublet.' Here's what to know](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/the-2-earthquakes-that-struck-venezuela-are-known-as-a-doublet-heres-what-to-know-about-them)
- [Venezuela's deadly earthquakes happened on a fault similar to the San Andreas — a geophysicist explains](https://theconversation.com/venezuelas-deadly-earthquakes-happened-on-a-fault-similar-to-the-san-andreas-and-the-risks-arent-over-yet-a-geophysicist-explains-286236)