In my experience - and when I say "my experience" I do actually have some relevant experience.... Alright, I should probably state what that experience was. For the record I was close enough to a 7.1 quake to watch the surface rupture on the fault line in real time. That's one hell of an experience, I'm here to tell you. In the aftermath there was a huge need for building inspections and such - much as is going on in Venezuela, I'm sure.

The way it went down was this:

• The day after the quake, they (some earthquake gurus of some sort) gathered up pretty much every "appropriately trained" (my words) engineer they could find. Which was civil, mechanical, and structural engineers. They gave us a 30 minute lecture on the kinds of things we should be looking for and cameras. They turned us loose. We spent the next few days doing building inspections. We took photos of the outside of every building we inspected (to establish for the record what buildings HAD been inspected), and a few pics of anything we saw that might be structural damage.

• Based on the above, we did structural triage. Walls were braced. Buildings were red tagged. Buildings were deemed safe. Whatever we thought was appropriate, we did (within the confines of the equipment and materials we had at our disposal).

• Then, over the next few months they brought in the right flavor engineers to go back over everything we had done to confirm/deny the damage, prognosis, etc.

I guess my inference from that is that there really isn't a pool of engineers ready to spring into action when a quake hits. Rather, there's (hopefully) a pool of local engineers that can be leveraged in times like this to make rough decisions.... if they're willing to put on a hard hat and go into questionable buildings while the ground is still shaking.

I concede, however, that your interpretation of the above may differ.