Venezuela’s earthquakes are a somber warning for US preparedness

Opinion>Opinions - Energy and Environment The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the view of The Hill Venezuela’s earthquakes are a somber warning for US preparedness Comments: by Kelly McKinney, opinion contributor - 06/30/26 12:00 PM ET Comments: Link copied by Kelly McKinney, opinion contributor - 06/30/26 12:00 PM ET Comments: Link copied

A man sits amid earthquake rubble in La Guaira, Venezuela, Monday, June 29, 2026. (AP Photo/Matias Delacroix)

Title: Venezuela Earthquake Image ID: 26180709899365 Article: A man sits amid earthquake rubble in La Guaira, Venezuela, Monday, June 29, 2026. (AP Photo/Matias Delacroix)

Forty-eight hours after two massive earthquakes tore through Caracas, Venezuela, we gazed at pancaked buildings, streets choked with debris and people digging with their hands. What we didn’t see is the horror beneath the rubble — the immense, private suffering of the thousands trapped in collapsed buildings, waiting in agony for a rescue that will never come.

As the death toll inexorably rises, Americans should say a prayer for the people of Caracas, and for themselves. For the other great cities — Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland and Seattle — that sit astride the planet’s restless fault lines, waiting their turn.

Consider Los Angeles, where this month, researchers reported that the southern San Andreas and San Jacinto faults are under more stress than at any point in the last 1,000 years—”critically loaded” after more than 160 years of silence. They identified a junction near Cajon Pass, northeast of Los Angeles, that could act as an “earthquake gate,” letting a rupture jump from one fault to the other and tear across Los Angeles, San Bernardino, Riverside and the Coachella Valley all at once.

If this happened today, California would be prepared in many ways, perhaps better than any other state. It has world-class urban search and rescue teams, fire services and local governments that take earthquakes seriously.

But when the Really Big One comes, more than 20 million people would wake up in a parallel universe in which 1,800 are dead and another 50,000 badly hurt. Some 1,600 fires would ignite, consuming 133,000 homes, while broken aqueducts and pipelines would leave parts of the region without reliable water for months.

Even the best state system would be overwhelmed by a disaster this big, especially an earthquake. Earthquakes are uniquely unforgiving because they do not merely create victims; they disable the very systems built to save them. Studies of major earthquake responses — from Mexico City in 1985, to Christchurch, New Zealand in 2011 to Turkey in 1999 and 2023 — have found time and again that local and state governments were overwhelmed. Not within days, but within a few short hours.

Here’s how our national disaster system is supposed to work. When the scale of a crisis exceeds a state’s capacity, the federal government steps in with money, logistics, specialized teams and national coordination. But that system is now caught between dismantling and reinvention. After cuts by the Department of Government Efficiency and former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s push to shrink FEMA’s role, the agency has been left bruised, leaderless and frozen in place.

A FEMA Review Council offered a roadmap, but its central recommendation — shift responsibility to the states — raises the very question Caracas forces us to confront: What happens when the state itself is overwhelmed? Meanwhile, if a major disaster struck tomorrow, no one would know the rules of the game.

This isn’t reform. It’s Russian Roulette — all based on the comforting fiction that all disasters are local — a concept that crumbles in the face of true catastrophe. The federal government’s own watchdog, the Government Accountability Office, has warned that the gap between what states are being asked to absorb and what they can actually handle is wide and measurable.

The unfortunate reality is that the United States of America does not have the ability to come to the aid of its citizens in the worst instance. We have the right stuff: the equipment, the know-how and the people.

But we can no longer organize those resources and bring them to bear for Los Angeles — or any other city — in the aftermath of a catastrophe. Like the one coming in the not-too-distant future, when the San Andreas finally gives way, ripping a gash in the earth’s crust along the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains through Cajon Pass into San Bernardino, flattening neighborhoods from the San Fernando Valley to East LA.

Dazed families will wander through ruined streets. Thousands will be trapped in the rubble. And no one will be coming. That failure, when it happens, will be the catastrophe within the catastrophe.

Kelly McKinney is a former deputy commissioner at the New York City Office of Emergency Management and a former member of FEMA’s National Advisory Council.