At 8:05 p.m., while a mass was underway in Caracas Cathedral, the earthquake struck. The century-old stained glass windows exploded outward. Parishioners near the doors fled into Plaza Bolivar as the Pontifical Cross, which had crowned the cathedral's facade for generations, broke free and plummeted to the ground. It shattered on impact but left a clear silhouette imprinted in the pavement - an image one witness described as looking "like a red-hot iron burn." The earthquake stopped at what felt like the same instant the cross struck the earth, and many attributed the coincidence to divine intervention. For several days, the faithful gathered to venerate the silhouette. On August 2, city authorities removed the piece of concrete without explanation. Decades of rumors about its whereabouts followed, until the fragment was located in the Chapel of the Holy Christ of Mercy in the Valley sector of Caracas.

Across the city at the Cadena Venezolana television studios in Ruices, folk singer Purita Reina was performing with Mario Suarez's musical ensemble for a program commemorating the network's third anniversary. As the background scenery began lurching vertically, the lighting technician shouted an alarm - but the musicians kept playing, not immediately grasping what was happening. When they finally fled, a studio camera toppled to the floor and continued filming as the studio floor visibly undulated in a wave pattern. In an adjacent studio, 600 spectators who had gathered for a live wrestling broadcast managed to evacuate without injuries. The television building, remarkably, suffered no structural damage. Other buildings were not so fortunate.

The worst destruction concentrated in the Altamira and Los Palos Grandes neighborhoods, where four apartment buildings between 10 and 12 stories tall collapsed entirely. Huge sections of walls peeled away from other structures, flattening cars parked below and exposing the interiors of apartments to the open air. Along the coast in Caraballeda, five of the eleven floors of the Charaima Mansion apartment building were destroyed. Attempts to demolish the ruin with explosives failed, and a wrecking ball had to finish the job. The Macuto Sheraton Hotel sustained heavy structural damage. In Maracay, about 80 kilometers west, five more people died and 100 were injured. Rescue workers with cranes and bulldozers searched the rubble for a week.

One of the earthquake's most unsettling details was institutional, not geological. At the Cagigal Observatory, the pendulum seismometer's needle straps snapped and the photoelectric equipment malfunctioned, leaving Venezuela's own seismological station unable to determine the quake's epicenter or magnitude. The observatory director initially placed the epicenter 350 kilometers away in Lara state; he corrected himself the next day, after studying damage reports, to a location in the Caribbean Sea 70 kilometers from the coast. The director of the Naval Observatory admitted he would need foreign institutions to determine basic data about the event. For a city sitting atop one of South America's most active seismic zones, the inability to measure its own earthquakes was a failure that demanded a reckoning - one that the FAVEDICA recording, the television footage, and the silhouette of a fallen cross would not let the country forget.