The Disaster of July 11, 2004: The Syrian quake devastated by the 2009 September 11 earthquake and its impact on civilian and civilian-regime
The crowd chants “Allahu akbar,” Arabic for God is Great. In rebel-held northwestern Syria, volunteers and civil defense groups pull a boy out of the rubble after an earthquake.
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.
Ryan said that the impact of the earthquake on areas in Syria controlled by the government is significant, but there are still access to those people. We have had 10 years of war in Syria. The health system is a work of art. People have been through hell.”
humanitarian aid has not appeared in 72 hours, he said, explaining that the small amount of help is a result of a grassroots effort by individual groups.
In Turkey, the roads are so congested with trucks that everyone can’t get to the earthquake disaster zone. Thousands of tons of aid has poured in from countries around the world. The lives of those trapped under the rubble are being saved because of the arrival of special equipment.
In other parts of Syria controlled by the government, the Syrian Health Ministry said more than 1,200 people have died from the earthquake. The overall death toll across Syria and Turkey has passed 16,000, according to The Associated Press. Tens of thousands more have been injured.
“The situation remains grim in north-west Syria where only five percent of reported sites are being covered by search and rescue,” the U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in a report.
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. Power outages have resulted in fuel shortages in hospitals.
Mohammed Juma slept on a pile of rubble that was strewn with his family’s belongings. The 20-year-old and some of his friends burn their possessions in the cold to keep warm.
By contrast, across the border in the northwest of Syria, residents of the town of Jinderis heard the screams of those trapped under the rubble but, without the right machinery and equipment, were powerless to save them.
After the earthquake struck, it was four days before any international aid started to trickle into northwest Syria via the single border crossing authorized for UN aid deliveries at Bab al-Hawa. The first aid carrying tents was scheduled to be delivered before the earthquake. There was nothing to help with our rescue efforts.
Mohammed Juma said his wife and his two children were alive after their home collapsed. The neighbors tried for hours to pull at the shattered concrete but it was not successful.
Now the Syrian civil defense teams are using the few excavators they do have to recover the dead. There were at least 850 bodies that were pulled from the rubble on Friday. Zakaria Tabakh, 26, remembers cuddling his son, 2-year-old Abdulhadi, to sleep and laying him in his bed, where he was killed by the falling debris. Tabakh’s wife died in the bed beside him. He said that few friends were able to come to the burial because they were too busy burying their own loved ones.
They have been left with nothing after years of war. Tens of thousands now live with almost no access to basic services in makeshift tents set up in the olive groves where the mud clogs and weighs down the legs of children playing outside.
The cross-border mechanisms agreed on by the UN Security Council with regard to allowing aid to cross from Turkey to Syria were limited in their ability to deliver aid to Syria.
The town of Sawran has no running water, less than an hour’s drive from a border crossing. The destruction of the home of the Turki family where nine people died can be seen on the other side of the main street. Across the road a family of seven were killed. Neighbors said they had moved to Sawran after fleeing their home in Khan Sheikhoun, where in 2017 the Syrian government attacked the population with the nerve agent Sarin, killing 89 people.
The White Helmets is a group of nearly 3,000 volunteers who work to save lives and strengthen communities in Syria. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. Please read more opinions on CNN.
The White Helmets in Syria: What Have We Learned in the Last Seven Days? A Comment on Griffiths and the United Nations
The week since the devastating earthquake in Turkey and Syria has been a horrible seven days, with both sadness and horror on a scale we did not experience in the Syrian conflict.
While Martin Griffiths, the UN undersecretary for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator, hailed the search and rescue efforts after the earthquake as “unparalleled in history,” in northwest Syria we were left to do what we could with limited existing equipment and manpower. Let me be clear: The White Helmets received no support from the United Nations during the most critical moments of the rescue operations, and even now we have no promise of assistance to restore our operational capacity and help the recovery and rehabilitation efforts.
Our hope of finding survivors has faded. As we pull more dead bodies from the rubble, my heart breaks for every soul that could have been saved and was needlessly lost because we did not get the help we needed in time.
Heavy search and rescue training is the only thing that we have here. The volunteers have been doing the impossible, and I am humbled by their selflessness and dedication.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/13/opinions/white-helmets-syria-united-nations-earthquake-al-saleh/index.html
The UN Secretary-General’s Warfare on Syria: A Memorandum to the High-Redshift Observed Leader of the United Nations
The UN let down the people of northwest Syria by not acting quickly, when I met with him on Sunday. The people in north-west Syria have failed so far. They rightly feel abandoned. Looking for international help that has not arrived, that is the message from Griffiths on Sunday.
There is no more time to waste. The UN secretary-general needs to have a vision and leadership to put himself in a good position. The Security Council and the regime should not be used to restrict humanitarian aid access in the future. It is vital that the UN and international aid agencies have unfettered access to ensure more lives are not lost.
The UN was requesting that the Security Council allow aid access through two new border crossings, which wasted time and was a misguided approach. Legal analysts and scholars have argued against it, as well as humanitarian organizations who said the need is too high for aid to be politicized.
Time and again Russia has used its veto at the Security Council to shut border crossings, reducing the routes for delivery of cross-border aid via Turkey to a single entry. Opening additional crossings on a temporary basis is not enough — more cross-border routes were already sorely needed.
The local impacted communities were the most generous in helping us out, lending their cars and heavy vehicles to the response, digging and donating fuel to keep themselves warm.
The Rescue of Mustafa Avci, 33, from a Ruined Building in Hatay, Turkey, during the February 6 Earthquake Revisited
“How is my mother and everyone?” the man on the stretcher asks, speaking calmly into a cell phone. He cries in disbelief and his friend replies that everyone is well and that he is coming to you.
This was the emotional exchange that followed the rescue of Mustafa Avci, 33, who was pulled from the rubble of a collapsed building in Turkey’s southern Hatay province 261 hours after a powerful 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck the region on February 6.
On Friday, Turkish Health Minister Fahrettin Koca released a video showing the phone call between Avci and his friend, in a powerful reminder that even now – 11 days after the quake struck – finding survivors against the odds remains possible.
As the death toll in Turkey and Syria rose to over 42,000, the rescue of Avci late on Thursday night came.
In the video, Avci can be seen wearing a neck brace and appears wide-eyed with hope as he asks: “Did everyone escape okay…? If they want, I can hear their voices for a moment.
Koca, the minister, said both Avci and a second man, Mehmet Ali Sakiroglu, 26, were rescued around the same time from under the ruins of a private hospital building.
CNN’s Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta, who is in southern Turkey, said it was unusual for people to survive more than 100 hours trapped in rubble and most successful rescues usually occurred within 24 hours.
Aydinli assumed the boy had died with his eyes open because he thought his fellow rescue workers were hallucinating. But the child cried out, “Brother! I don’t feel my legs. Save me!”
“Even now, we get tears in our eyes from time to time,” Aydinli said, referring to the boy’s rescue. He is awake and alert. Hopefully, he will get better.”
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/17/middleeast/turkey-earthquake-survivor-emotional-phone-call-intl-hnk/index.html
Thousands of people have been left homeless since the 2011 Arab Spring: a response to Syrian earthquake and the need for diagnostic equipment, medical equipment and medical supplies
Meanwhile, though donations are pouring in from all over the world, many survivors have been left homeless in near-freezing winter temperatures with a lack of access to basic necessities.
“A lot of lives have been saved, a lot of people have been pulled from rubble by their neighbors, by their friends, by their sons, daughters, mothers, fathers. The WHO emergencies director, Mike Ryan, said during a briefing on Wednesday that frontline health workers have done amazing work in both countries.
Doctors in the northwest Syria are racing against the clock to treat 8,500 injuries, because they only have 64 X-ray and 73KidneyDeficiency machines.
After the 2011 Arab Spring, Syria’s government used military force against all opposition. Around 600,000 people were internally displaced in northwestern Syria after the government of Bashar al-Assad was overthrown with the help of Russia.
Hospitals in this region have been overwhelmed as they attempt to accommodate thousands of injured people in spaces with severely limited beds, medical supplies, surgical equipment and intensive-care facilities.
“The supply of antibiotics ran out from day three” after the earthquake, says Abdulkarim Ekzayez, an epidemiologist at King’s College London, who now fears widespread infections. “We have used the medications and serums that would have lasted us for four to six months in two to three days,” adds Haboush. The World Health Organization says northwest Syria also needs diagnostic equipment, despite the fact that they have started transporting medicine and medical supplies.
“People are running all over the place to make use of any existing resources, including basic ambulances,” Ekzayez says. Haboush worked at the maternity hospital in Idleb when the first earthquake hit, and says that the medical staff have been working non-stop. The fifth and sixth floors of the building are occupied by the hospital. We had to move the babies from the incubators to the ground floor.
The disaster of February 25th 2006: Doctors, engineers, and the Syrian diaspora in Yarmuatlam: The impact of humanitarian crisis on Syria
According to three doctors who spoke to Nature, the most common injuries are broken bones, trauma injuries, crush injuries, and bleeding.
Jawad Abu Hatab is dean of medicine at Free Aleppo University in northwest Syria, and he says that people with crush syndrome need intensive care. The WHO-compiled data shows that there are only 73 machines left in the region.
The horror and shock of the catastrophe can be said to have led to a number of cardiac arrests. The medical community is expecting to deal with more cases of trauma, especially among children and women.
The engineers are trying to estimate whether buildings are inhabitable (safe with minor cracks), temporarily unusable (needing reinforcement) or unsafe — in which case occupants must evacuate immediately.
It is not easy. According to the Association of Free Syrian Engineers, as of February 25th, around 2,643 damaged buildings had been assessed.
At the same time, experts from the Syrian diaspora are helping with virtual assessments in places inaccessible to local engineers. People living in damaged buildings are taking pictures and videos of their interiors and sending them to the Syrian Engineers Association inQatar.
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00547-7
Seismic reinforcement with carbon-based reinforced polymers: how we are going to need reconstruction engineers in northwest Syria – an engineer’s perspective
Building in danger of collapsing are reinforced with whatever they can get their hands on. Mohammad Khear Hayek is an engineer with a volunteers association and told Nature that the Carbon- Fibre-reinforced Polymer was better for seismic reinforcement. Instead, they are having to use brittle industrial iron. “We are in an emergency situation, so we must respond quickly using the resources that we have,” Hayek says.
Ali Hallak, a computer engineer, is a member of the engineers association in northwest Syria and he says that the next step is to analyse the reports and produce statistical studies which will be important in the reconstruction phase.
Many buildings will need to be rebuilt, but there is a shortage of engineers in northwest Syria, says Hayek. Hayek says that before the earthquake we talked about a need for training engineers on reconstruction. He explains that it has become a necessity.