On June 24, 2026, Venezuela experienced an unprecedented pair of earthquakes within 39 seconds of each other.

A massive 7.2 magnitude earthquake was quickly followed by an even larger 7.5 magnitude quake. The event, known as an “earthquake doublet,” has left the northern coast of the country devastated.

As the death toll has reached more than 4,000 people, researchers from right here at North Carolina State University are lending a helping hand.

“I have family there, I have friends there and I am from there,” Ashly Cabas, associate professor in the Department of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering (CCEE) said. “So it felt really personal. Then, the scientist in me kicked in, and I thought, ‘Oh my god. Two earthquakes 39 seconds apart? What happened?’”

Cabas has dedicated her career to studying earthquakes and designing infrastructure that can withstand seismic hazards. She is the director and founder of E2SCALA, which stands for Earthquake Engineering and Seismology Community Alliance in Latin America and the Caribbean. This virtual collaboration effort consists of students and professionals interested in reducing seismic risks in these regions.

Within 24 hours of the quakes, Cabas and her E2SCALA team connected with Geotechnical Extreme Events (GEER) and Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI) to see how they could help. Cabas now co-leads the GEER team response to this disaster alongside Rodolfo Sancio of Geosyntec Consultants.

But surveying a seismic event 2,000 miles away is no easy feat. It takes great coordination and collaboration.

One way Cabas is able to help remotely is by geolocating damaged buildings from social media data and contributing to validation efforts of through a crowdsourced platform called Crisis Venezuela. The platform uses artificial intelligence to scan social media and locate collapsed buildings and other damage.

GEER members, including CCEE students David Barba Galdamez and Melanie Dickson, then help validate cases remotely through georeferencing, or finding coordinates of digital data through satellite imagery and adding relevant information to this database, such as building height or number of stories.

“These platforms, we’re using them as a baseline,” Cabas said. “Then we add validated cases, which is one way we can help understand patterns of damage remotely. It’s all about patterns, areas of interest and using what we know from geology and geotechnical engineering to understand the subsurface and the potential behavior of geomaterials during the earthquake loading.”

Cabas is also collaborating with the United States Geological Survey’s (USGS) Landslide Hazards Program and the NASA Disasters Program, which produce maps of deformations in the soil and in the land.

“That helps us, again, identify patterns where it is more likely to have a landslide than other places,” Cabas said. “The city of Caracas, Venezuela, is a valley, with areas likely to experience slope instability, especially induced by earthquake loading. The Landslide Hazards Program has been very helpful in understanding which areas should have seen significant deformations and then trying to locate those and document the movements with our local teams’ help.”

While earthquakes are inevitable, Cabas hopes that one day, earth scientists, engineers and social scientists will collectively help reduce earthquakes’ impacts on infrastructure and people. She envisions a future where communities can recover from these events more smoothly and efficiently, where children can return safely to school, hospitals can stay functional and homes can remain intact.

“Some people lost their lives during these earthquakes, and those who did not either lost a loved one, their homes or know of someone who did” Cabas said. “As an earthquake engineer, that tells me that our work is not done. We still have very complex interactions among the built, natural and social environments to unveil, understand and incorporate in our processes to reduce seismic risks, not only in Venezuela, but worldwide. Our duty is that we understand the science and the engineering aspects so that the devastation and disruptions we see today after extreme events do not happen again.”

This post was originally published in Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering.