Turkey’s Emergency Response to the July 15 Earthquake and the First United Nations Effort to Make Sense of Its Implications
ANTAKYA and ISTANBUL, Turkey — Rescue workers in Turkey and Syria pushed into a third day of recovery operations on Wednesday as the death toll from this week’s massive earthquake reached a grim milestone.
Turkey is located along a plate boundaries, and has experienced strong earthquakes before. Seven quakes with magnitude 7.0 or greater have struck the country in the past 25 years – but last Monday’s was its most deadly.
Erdogan has acknowledged some initial problems with the country’s response to the earthquake, but he has said no government could be ready for a disaster of this magnitude.
Hamideh’s family used to reside in a seven-story residential building, but she is waiting to hear if her son survived.
Many areas of Syria are isolated because of the conflict. The United Nations said the first earthquake-related aid convoy crossed from Turkey into northwestern Syria on Friday, the day after an aid shipment planned before the disaster arrived.
Iran, Libya, and the United Arab Emirates have sent hundreds of millions of dollars worth of aid to Syria, and dozens of countries have sent aid to Turkey, including more than 5,000 rescue workers who are arriving in the disaster area.
Turkey’s emergency management agency, AFAD, reports it has set up more than 70,000 tents for emergency shelter to the more than 380,000 people who have been temporarily displaced by this disaster.
A seismic event in Turkey: Earthquakes and its aftershocks on the North Anatolian Fault and east of Ekinözü
The death toll as a result of the earthquake and its aftershocks has gone up, so rescuers are digging through the rubble to find survivors. Nature spoke to four researchers about the seismic activity in the region and what the next few days will bring.
Most of Turkey sits on the Anatolian plate between two major faults: the North Anatolian Fault and the East Anatolian Fault. The tectonic plate that carries Arabia, including Syria, is moving northwards and colliding with the southern rim of Eurasia, which is squeezing Turkey out towards the west, says David Rothery, a geoscientist at the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK. “Turkey is moving west about 2 centimetres per year along the East Anatolian Fault,” he adds. “Half the length of this fault is lit up now with earthquakes.”
The epicentre of the main earthquake was 26 kilometres east of the city of Nurdaği in Turkey’s Gaziantep province, at a depth of 17.9 kilometres. The magnitude-7.5 event occurred around 4 kilometres southeast of Ekinözü in the Kahramanmaraş province (see ‘Earthquakes and aftershocks’).
Falling bricks cause deaths in earthquakes. Many people in Turkey who have been affected by the earthquake lived in structures that are very likely to be damaged by shaking because they are unreinforced brick masonry and low-rise concrete frames.
More than 11 years of conflict have made it impossible to enforce building standards in Syria. The earthquake struck Syria’s northwestern regions, with buildings collapsing in Aleppo and Idlib. Some war-damaged buildings in Syria have been rebuilt using low-quality materials or “whatever materials are available”, says Rothery. “They might have fallen down more readily than things that were built at somewhat greater expense. He adds that they have yet to find out.
“The weather forecast for the region for tonight is dropping below freezing. That means that people who are trapped in the rubble, who might be rescued, could well freeze to death. These are the hazards that continue, he says.
A day earlier, another video went viral showing volunteer rescuers in a different part of the rebel-held territory saving a family — two girls, a boy and their father — from under the rubble some 40 hours after the quake.
The Great Garden in northwest Syria: Relief and search for human assistance after the earthquake that struck Turkey on Feb. 15, 2009, according to Karam Kellieh
Istanbul’s stock exchange closed until Feb. 15 after initial trading showed rapid declines, triggering a circuit breaker when declines reached 7%. The Turkish economy was already suffering from inflation.
The crowd chants “Allahu akbar,” Arabic for God is Great. Volunteers and civil defense groups — themselves earthquake survivors — pull a boy out from the rubble alive in rebel-held northwestern Syria.
The world knows of these rescues because of Karam Kellieh, a resident who lives in the opposition-controlled territory. The area has about 4 million people who were displaced during the Syrian civil war. The area was devastated by bombs before the earthquake. Politics made it difficult to get aid from the Syrian government.
He said there wasn’t any humanitarian aid or international aid in the area within 72 hours of the earthquake.
“Rescue efforts are being carried out by poorly equipped civil defense groups and civilians are trying to help,” Kelliah said. “Everyone’s waiting for international rescue and aid just to be able to process what’s happened, this catastrophe.”
Local authorities say 11,000 families in the rebel-held part of Syria are now homeless after the quake. Up to 2,000 deaths have been reported and thousands more injured, according to the United Nations.
Rescue efforts continue as untold others remain trapped under the rubble. There are stories of rescues, like that of a baby girl who was born under the rubble.
Only five percent of reported sites are being covered by search and rescue in north-west Syria, the U.N’s Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said.
People are digging with their own hands in many areas, but the situation is particularly dire in northwestern Syria, where there is little heavy machinery to lift rubble. Hospitals have trouble with fuel shortages caused by power failures.
It was created in response to the devastating earthquake that hit Turkey and Syria last Monday, which killed tens of thousands of people and left a trail of destruction.
There are two buildings four and six stories tall that litter the street. One of the roofs appears to remain intact, despite the building underneath collapsing.
The town’s “Great Garden,” normally a verdant green space with benches and shops, is now full of tents, likely to shelter survivors and emergency crews.
At least two buildings collapsed just south of the park. Three more on the northern side of the park have also collapsed.
A significant number of vehicles are seen in the area. There are some buildings in the rest of the Nurdagi that still have lots of debris around them.
The rescue of a family of five in the wake of the 2009 Gaziantep earthquake: “God is great!” shouted Nehir Nasr Narli
The rescue of the Narli family in central Kahramanmaras was being broadcasted on Turkish television. First, 12-year-old Nehir Nasr Narli was saved, then her parents.
That followed the rescue earlier in the day of a family of five from a mound of debris in the hard-hit town of Nurdagi, in Gaziantep province, TV network HaberTurk reported. Rescuers shouted “God is Great!”. The father was the last member of the family to leave.
In some parts of the settlements, he said, “almost no stone was left standing.”
Melisa Ulku, a woman in her 20s, was extricated from the rubble in Elbistan in the 132th hour since the quake, following the rescue of another person at the same site in the same hour. Prior to her rescue, police ordered people not to cheer or clap because they didn’t want to affect other rescue efforts nearby. She was covered in a thermal blanket on a stretcher. People were hugging. Some yelled “God is great!”
A 3 year old girl and her father were pulled from debris within an hour in the town of Islahiye, Gaziantep province, and a 7 year old girl was also saved in the province of Hatay.
The rescues brought shimmers of joy in the aftermath of the devastating 7.8-magnitude earthquake and powerful aftershock that killed more than 25,000 people and left millions homeless.
Not everything ended so well. Rescuers reached a 13-year-old girl inside the debris of a collapsed building in Hatay province early Saturday and intubated her. The medical teams were able to free her from the rubble, but she died before they were able to amputate a limb.
As aid continued to arrive, a 99-member group from the Indian Army’s medical assistance team began treating the injured in a temporary field hospital in the southern city of Iskenderun, where a main hospital was demolished.
Wincing in pain, he said he had been rescued from his collapsed apartment building in the nearby city of Antakya within hours of the quake on Monday. He was released without proper treatment for his injuries after receiving basic first aid.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/11/1156313344/turkey-syria-earthquake-death-toll-survivors
Buried bodies in a graveyard in Antakya, Turkey: “I buried (everyone that I lost), then I came here”
″I buried (everyone that I lost), then I came here,” “My sister is dead and my aunt and her daughter are dead, and the wife of my son is 8 12 months pregnant,” Canbulat said.
There was a graveyard under construction on the outskirts of Antakya. Backhoes and bulldozers dug pits in the field on the northeastern edge of the city as trucks and ambulances loaded with black body bags arrived continuously. Soldiers on the busy adjacent road warned people not to take pictures.
A worker with the Turkish Ministry of Religious Affairs said that 800 bodies were brought to the cemetery on the first day it was open. By midday on Saturday he said that as many as 2000 had been buried.
People who are coming out of the rubble is a miracle. He said that most of the people that come out are dead.
Many people don’t have a place to live in the large region. The Turkish government has given out millions of hot meals, but it is still not able to reach many people in need.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/11/1156313344/turkey-syria-earthquake-death-toll-survivors
The earthquake in Syria’s coastal city of Jableh: “The problem of zoning amnesties for citizens of Maras”
Syrian state TV said that Assad and his wife Asma visited the mother and son that were pulled out of the rubble on Friday in the neighboring coastal town of Jableh.
The head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, came to Syria’s northern city of Aleppo on Saturday with 35 tons of medical equipment. He said there will be more medical equipment arriving in the next few days.
“We solved the problem of 144,156 citizens of Maras with zoning amnesty,” Erdogan said, using his term for the construction amnesties handed out to allow contractors to ignore the safety codes that had been put on the books specifically to make apartment blocks, houses and office buildings more resistant to earthquakes.
The Istanbul city official,Bugra Gokce, gave a breakdown of the number of building permits given before the election in 10 provinces that were struck by the earthquake. The official said they included over 40,000 certificates in Gaziantep province.
According to Turkish media reports, some builders had to pay fines but their projects could go on if they met code restrictions.
The country’s main association of engineers and architects had a bad thing to say about the practice of amnesties for builders.
A 984-foot long valley was created when two olive trees were cleaved by the earthquake in Turkey.
Irfan Aksu told Turkish news agency that after the earthquake, he could hear a noise in his house.
He called for experts to look at the area for future damage. He said that there are 7000 thousand people living in this town. It would have happened in the middle of our town if it was a little closer.
An 8.1 magnitude earthquake near the South Sandwich Islands in the southern Atlantic Ocean was the strongest to ever hit anywhere in the world, though the remote location of that event resulted in little damage.
Lanning and other emergency and disaster response experts say that no matter the area around the world hit by an earthquake or other kind of emergency, people should know that effective help often comes from the immediate community.
The majority of research shows that prevention is the most effective method to minimize disaster losses, despite the importance of search and rescue operations.
The window of opportunity to save people trapped under collapsed buildings “will start to close pretty fast and by the time you get around day four or five, it’s done,” Lanning said.
Natalie Simpson is the professor of operations management and strategy at the University at Buffalo School of Management and she said that if a bystander can’t save someone from the rubble, they can still find them.
“It takes a long time at each building, to have to listen and carefully remove pieces of the building debris to get to people,” Lanning said. He said there were thousands of buildings in Turkey.
The Community Emergency Response Team: How many search and rescue teams are on the scene and how many hospitals does it take to survive a major earthquake?
The Community Emergency Response Team was developed because of the importance of local aid. FEMA trains volunteers in all of the 50 states with basic disaster response skills.
It teaches people how to search for survivors after a major earthquake, where to get water after an emergency and how to check on immobile neighbors.
How many search and rescue teams are on the scene can play a role in how likely a trapped person is to survive. He noted that if a trapped person is not seriously injured, they can last up to a week under a collapsed building.
Simpson with the University at Buffalo said she wishes each time disaster strikes there would be an immediate mobilization of rescue crews and military. That’s not always the case, and it wasn’t in Turkey and Syria, she said.
The Turkish government has come under fire. The president admitted that the first day was not great, but he insisted that the situation got under control by the second and third days.
Simpson said the single biggest failure point is failure to pick up on the fact that this is an emergency. The instinct is to wait to get more information.
“With emergencies, all of them, including the aftermath of an earthquake, you’re not in Kansas anymore,” she said. “These are not normal conditions and so one of the traps that we fall into is, ‘Oh God, what’s the best thing to do at this moment?’ Stop it with ‘best.’ It’s all good. Let’s get moving.”
In many areas around the world, including Turkey, the military is best equipped to operate in a disaster-transformed landscape and to open airstrips to get aid in quickly, she said.
The Turkish government failed to organize its military to help in the direct rescue efforts or to establish field hospitals, according to an analysis published by the Middle East Institute.
“There’s a very important lesson here: It’s never too early to activate your large-scale response when you’re not getting any information out of a region,” she said. “I think that that will make an impression on decision-makers elsewhere, that will actually help people in the future.”
Major earthquakes that struck Turkey in 1999 and 2011 served as two important lessons to officials that the country’s building construction needed to be retrofitted to combat future disasters.
“A lot of the damage there is because of the type of construction and type of buildings,” which is mostly concrete, said Lanning, who has worked for 15 years in various earthquake-prone areas of the world.
This is despite the knowledge that concrete buildings are not the best at withstanding earthquakes. He said that they are easy to build and can hide flaws.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/16/1156636019/the-earthquake-in-turkey-and-syria-offers-lessons-and-reminders-for-disaster-res
What have we learnt from RHIC at the Fermilab Tevatron? “This is what happened, I learned,” said Lanning
It will take a long time for the work to analyze and figure out what went wrong with this latest disaster. Lanning said it is incredibly valuable work.