Erdospheric damage to buildings and buildings in Gaziantep, Turkey, after a magnitude-7.5 earthquake and in Syria
The epicenter of the main earthquake was 26 kilometres east of the city of Nurdai in Turkey’s Gaziantep province. The magnitude- 7.5 event happened southeast of Ekinz in the Kahramanmara province.
The earthquake and its aftershocks have flattened buildings and sent rescuers digging through concrete debris to find survivors, with the death toll expected to increase further. Nature spoke to four researchers about the upcoming events and what the next few days will bring.
Most of Turkey is between the North and East Anatolian Faults. 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. The East Anatolian Fault has Turkey moving west about 2 centimetres a year. “Half the length of this fault is lit up now with earthquakes.”
Seyhun Puskulcu, a seismologist and coordinator of the Turkish Earthquake Foundation, based in Istanbul, says people in Turkey are well aware of their vulnerability to earthquakes. “This wasn’t a surprise,” says Puskulcu, who last week was touring the cities of Adana, Tarsus and Mersin, and areas of western Turkey, delivering workshops on earthquake awareness.
A study by Arzu Arslan Kelam at the Middle East Technical University, Ankara, and her colleagues suggested that the center of Gaziantep would experience moderate to severe damage from a magnitude-6.5 earthquake. This is because most existing buildings are low-rise brick structures that are constructed very close to each other.
Things are worse in Syria, where more than 11 years of conflict have made building standards impossible to enforce. Buildings collapsed when the earthquake struck Syria’s northwestern regions. There are some buildings in Syria that have been rebuilt using low-quality materials. They could have fallen down more quickly than things that were built at a higher cost. We’ve yet to find out,” he adds.
The weather forecast for tonight is very cold. That means that people who are trapped in the rubble, who might be rescued, could well freeze to death. These are some dangers that keep on happening, he adds.
Dozens of buildings across the city have collapsed. In the city center, a group of residential buildings just west of the Hacı Ali Öztürk mosque appear flattened.
There are two buildings in the street that are four and six stories tall. One of the roofs appears to remain intact, despite the building underneath collapsing.
The town’s ” Great Garden,” normally a lush green space with benches and shops, has now become filled with tents, which are likely to shelter survivors and emergency crews.
At least two large high-rise buildings, located just south of the park, have collapsed. Three more on the north side of the park have collapsed.
There are a lot of vehicles in the area. Like in other parts of the Nurdagi, some of the buildings that are still standing have a significant amounts of debris surrounding them.
Ozgur, the displaced people of Gaziantep, Turkey, during the quake, left behind by an angry rescue worker in charge of killing his father
He explained that in Gaziantep, they don’t have a way of making a plan and they have no food or money. He walked to the gas station the day before with a plastic cup in his hand to see if they would give him something to eat or drink. He returned with an empty cup.
He wants to be identified by his first name only because of the threat of punishment if he criticizes the government.
There are tens of thousands of destroyed buildings. People from the hardest-hit areas, like An Takya and the satellite villages around Gaziantep, have fled to areas like Gaziantep’s city center.
Late Thursday night in Nurdagi, a rescue worker named Ozgur says his team no longer expects to find anyone alive under the rubble. He works in construction for a large holding company and asks to only be identified by his first name for fear of reprisal for providing assistance without direct government approval.
He pointed to a collapsed six-story building in front of him and showed how many people were under it. “But none of them are going to come out alive.”
Families of 8 or more are sleeping on foam mattresses on the ground in a crowd of white tents set up by Turkey’s disaster and emergency relief arm. Wrapped in the clothes they were wearing at the time of the quake, and in donated, colorful blankets, mothers, daughters, brothers and fathers huddle to keep warm.
AFAD has said it has deployed dozens of food trucks and hundreds of thousands of meals, but opposition politicians and members of the public have widely condemned the organization’s response.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/11/1155955553/turkey-earthquake-gaziantep-displaced-people
The Faris Family, the Gaziantep Displaced People and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party: The impact of a tragic earthquake on the community in Antakya
There aren’t enough facilities in the municipal stadium for the hundreds of people who are staying there and Faris’ family doesn’t have a bathroom.
He and his mother, three sisters, brother and brother-in-law all have deep purple circles under their eyes and are covered in wounds from falling rubble. Their hands are covered in deep gashes from where they dug each other out from their collapsed home, their feet cut from when they finally made it out and had to find their way through the rubble in the cold without shoes.
They were told by police in Antakya that they had to evacuate, and that they could find shelter and food in Gaziantep. Now, Faris says he regrets the decision to come.
Kurds often set up tents at that location during the planting season. The community organized a move to this field, and Genco says that the government has abandoned them. In their impoverished neighborhood of Sekiz Subat, less than 2 miles away, they say no one has come to inspect or repair their homes, damaged by the earthquake.
Hayat Gezer, a 45-year-old woman with a traditional Kurdish tattoo on her chin and a black headscarf, says the group is grappling with the additional stress of legal problems. Many members of their community, she says, have been imprisoned for crimes ranging from theft to aiding and abetting terrorism.
Southeastern Turkey is a heavily Kurdish region, and the Turkish government has been involved in a four-decade-long conflict there with the armed separatist group, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Many Kurds have been persecution because of their alleged links to the group.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/11/1155955553/turkey-earthquake-gaziantep-displaced-people
The Desperate Camp of Faris and his Soldier, Bayar, and Sakine Demir, 46, in Islahiye, Turkey
There is desperation in this camp. At one point, a young man tries to take bread from his neighbor’s tent; a violent fight ensues. The young man has to be held back.
Those in the camp are critical of the Turkish government because of hunger and cold. Faris says he voted previously for Erdogan, who is up for reelection this year, but the soldier vows he never will again.
ISLAHIYE, Turkey — When volunteer rescue workers pulled Derya Demir, 44, from the rubble of her collapsed apartment in the southeastern Turkish city of Islahiye last Tuesday, her arms were wrapped around her four children.
All of their family had made it through the last moments of their lives, and were all wrapped tightly around each other.
Looking at the ruins of the apartment building, Demir’s youngest sister, Melike Bayar, 34, can’t stop crying. Their mother, Sakine Demir, 65, and another sister, Semra Demir, 35, are still beneath the rubble. They have not been found. A hospital was where Kamil was during the night when the earthquake hit.
Younger relatives, including 26-year-old Mehmet Gezici and his wife, Zinan Gezici, 23, who flew in from Paris to help after the quake, are less optimistic. They believe Sakine and Semra are dead.
The tragedy of Adiyaman, Turkey, comes as a wake from a city rich in corruption: A tweet from Garo Paylan
Many blame the scale of the tragedy on a construction industry that runs on corruption and a lack of implemented regulations. The Turkish government has arrested at least twelve building contractors for their alleged role in the deaths.
On Saturday, Garo Paylan, a representative of the opposition People’s Democratic Party from Diyarbakir, one of the cities affected by the quake, tweeted from the devastated city of Adiyaman that the government was undercounting the dead. Experts believe that as many as 200,000 people could still remain under the rubble. The hope for recovering people alive at this time is not very high in Turkey and Syria.
He drove to Islahiye from Gaziantep, which is one hour away, before the sun came up. The building where his mother and sisters lived looked like a stack of plates, the floors and ceilings pressed one on top of the other. He tried to clear the rubble with his hands. He hasn’t left the site since.
The first winch, needed to lift concrete, arrived Wednesday, but could only lift 100 tons. The second arrived Saturday six days after the earthquake. In a week, volunteer crews have only made it down from the sixth floor to the third floor of the building.
“Help came too little, too late,” says the elder sister of the Colaklar quake-hit victim Hidayet
Shortly after the quake hit last Monday, a group of people who are Kurdish and from Colaklar came to this area. The first brother to arrive was her older brother Hidayet, the middle brother of the six siblings.
He said, “I am doing incredibly badly,” when he was asked how he was. As he speaks, his eyes dart back to the collapsed building where his sister and mother still lie.
Hidayet says that when he arrived Monday morning, people told him they had heard children’s screams from the direction of Derya’s apartment. The children are believed to have been alive for some time after the earthquake. They think help came too little, too late.
As they wait for their mom and sister to be found, they hold each other as they look at the fire that’s been burning next to the site.
Still, they try to share happy memories, and they speak of their loved ones in the present tense. The four young children, and Derya, Sakine, and Semra — all, in their telling, still exist.
The first day of earthquake search and rescue in the Hatay province — A crowd of strangers in Arsuz, Turkey — began digging at random
I joined a organization that trains volunteers for neighborhood search and rescue teams so that every neighborhood has people who know what to do in the first hours of a disaster. An organization that was born out of a shared belief that when the next earthquake struck we would only have one another to depend on and here we were.
When an earthquake hits at night, the usual approach is to try to reach the bedrooms first, but the Sehit Zafer Yilmaz apartments folded like a book: An upstairs bathroom spilled into a downstairs balcony, and a kitchen floor dangled above our heads. So we began to dig at random. We were a loud mess of gendarmerie, miners, construction workers, police, municipal workers, local volunteers and searchers and rescuers, with our jackhammers, hydraulic cutters, shovels, grinder machines, excavator and crane, each of us answering to a different team leader, all of us balancing on a precarious mound of twisted metal and concrete that could tumble at the next aftershock.
One of these new cities is in Arsuz, a town in Turkey’s Hatay province. A group of people standing in a line formed for lunch on a recent day, as cooks served Doner kebab, a classic Turkish dish featuring meat grilled on an open spit. There is a vat of tomato sauce.
Fatma Guner did not stir from her seat at the edge of the tent filled with cots and temporary beds as she watched the line grow. Iskenderun is a nearby city but she wouldn’t feel safe in it right now because her home is still standing.
The tent city in Hatay: a desperate community forced to leave amidst the destruction of human rights and livelihoods after a devastating earthquake
She says her immune system is very low and she is sick with heart disease. I can’t stay here because it’s crowded.
Her father-in-law, as well as other family members, have claimed the only tent that the family was allocated. She doesn’t know who she should ask for a tent of her own.
There were no tents when tens of thousands of people were killed in the earthquake. The AK Party initially said it had enough tents, but later acknowledged there was a shortage and began trying to acquire more.
The government has also promised to build 270,000 new homes – built to the highest safety standards and located away from fault lines – within a year. The pledge was met with skepticism by the politicians.
As a result of the earthquake, families in Hatay province left homeless say proper shelter remains their top priority.
In another sprawling tent city in Antakya, in central Hatay, Ali Bilir watches his young son and daughter play with their four songbirds, chirping away in two small cages. He’s a former bus driver, and he says that his family is probably lucky to have survived the earthquake with only a few injuries.
The building was sideways, I wasn’t there and three children and their mother got out. My 12-year-old daughter is in the hospital, she had a leg injury,” he says.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/26/1159528534/turkey-earthquake-tent-cities
A tent city in Turkey: a refugee camp for humanitarian aid and a container Ihsan wants to move into a new home
This tent city is the most secure because it is a large open space, no tall buildings are near enough to crush them, and there is no fear of another earthquake. He says he’s not sure where they might live next, but it could be in a shipping container.
They are rumored to be offering us either some money or a container. We want a container. We’re going to live there for a while, and then, if they build it, maybe I can have a home,” he says.
The first of five ships carrying humanitarian aid and “living containers” should reach the area by the first week of March, according to Turkey.
In another corner of the tent city Ihsan watches over two of his children. Six-year-old Elif is busy with crayons and a coloring book, giving a camel a coat of the proper shade of brown.
“I ran barefoot, without any socks, my mom was on my back, and my wife and the kids were taken away, and we barely made it out, stepping on broken glass and rubble,” he cried, his eyes welling with tears. He says his mother made it to Izmir to stay with a sister.
When asked what he’s most need right now, he instantly said a tent. He and his family have been sleeping at a friend’s house some 25 miles away, returning to the camp each day for food – and in hopes of getting their own tent.