Aftershocks and earthquakes in Turkey: A case study of a strike-slip earthquake on the East Anatolian Fault
As Turkey’s death toll rises — now more than 17,000 — so does criticism of the government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and what many see as its lack of preparation and sluggish response to the tragedy. The first day we had some uncomfortable sensations, then the second day and finally today, the situation got under control.
Researchers say people need to brace themselves for yet more quakes and aftershocks, as well as deteriorating weather. “The possibility for major aftershocks causing even more damage will continue for weeks and months,” says Ilan Kelman, who studies disasters and health at University College London.
A slip on a fault causes an earthquake, according to the US Geological Survey. The sides of the fault are pushed together by stress in the earth’s outer layer. The shaking that we feel when an earthquake happens is caused by the release of energy from waves that travel through the earth’s crust after stress builds up and the rocks slip.
The mainshock Monday morning struck along some 125 miles of the East Anatolian Fault, a well-known fault line in southern Turkey. Specifically, this was a strike-slip earthquake, meaning stress built up between two masses of rock moving horizontally in opposite directions until the fault ruptured. It was shallow underground, meaning it created more shaking at the surface. The San Francisco city was destroyed by a strike-slip fault in 1906.
Turkey’s government said search and rescue teams have pulled more than 8,000 people from underneath the rubble of thousands of toppled buildings in the past two days. But worries grew that survivors may succumb to their injuries or hypothermia, due to worsening weather conditions in the region.
“I know my son is inside and I think he’s still alive. His brother dug with his hands to find him,” she told NPR. Hours later, as diggers chipped away at the ruins of the building, rescuers found Sedat’s body and wrapped it in a blanket for his mother to say goodbye.
The humanitarian situation in Syria after the 2004 Gaziantep earthquake: the U.N. response and the impact of the 6.3 magnitude quake
So dire is the situation that the U.S. has softened its sanctions against Syria for three months to ensure that earthquake relief efforts are not hampered by those restrictions. Fear of running afoul of sanctions might have had an effect on the delivery of aid.
The U.N. is appealing for nearly $1.4 billion to help survivors in Turkey and Syria — $1 billion to help more than 5 million people in Turkey and $397 million for northwestern Syria, a territory devastated by civil war and divided between opposition and government control.
More than 360,000 people have been displaced in Turkey by this disaster and the emergency management agency has set up over 70 thousand tents for them to stay.
In addition to the huge number of fatalities, the quake – one of the strongest to hit the region in more than 100 years – has left tens of thousands injured.
The North Anatolian Fault is one of two major faults that lie on the Anatolian plate. The plate that carries Arabia is moving northward and colliding with the southern rim of Eurasia, which is causing Turkey to move to the west. He says Turkey is moving about 2 centimetres a year. The fault is now lit up by earthquakes.
In a study1 published last March in Soil Dynamics and Earthquake Engineering, Arzu Arslan Kelam at the Middle East Technical University, Ankara, and her colleagues suggested that the centre of the city of Gaziantep would experience medium-to-severe damage from a magnitude-6.5 earthquake. Most existing buildings are low-rise brick structures that are close to each other.
Things are worse in Syria, where more than 11 years of conflict have made building standards impossible to enforce. 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. It is possible that they fell more easily than the things they were built for. We’ve yet to find out,” he adds.
With scattered showers and snow in the region set to continue, the elements are putting the lives of those trapped underneath the rubble – who have already gone days without food and water – at risk of hypothermia. Officials have requested residents to leave buildings for their own safety as the number of earthquakes increases.
The body of a young girl wrapped in a blanket was recovered Wednesday from the rubble of a building in Kahramanmaras. She was the fifth young person to die in Monday’s huge earthquake.
Elsewhere, excavators dug out the body of man believed to be a Syrian refugee in his 40s, who seemed to be on a mattress, like many of those who died after the quake struck around 4 a.m.
In a neighboring building, also collapsed, rescuers were digging down from the top to try to reach one or possibly two people thought to be alive. A generator was brought up to power a pneumatic hand-operated drill; the man directing it cleared away the rubble with his bare hands.
He appeared to have spotted signs of life beneath the wreckage, but rescuers sent away a waiting ambulance, saying there was still a lot of work to do.
There were 350 bodies in the hospital’s mortuary that had not been collected by relatives, according to a man who is volunteering in one of the hospitals.
Primordial Address to Izmir Disaster Management: The First Minute of Erdogan’s visit to Kahramanmaras, Turkey
The need to be ready for natural disasters has been spoken of by the President. An earthquake hit Izmir and surrounding areas in 2020, and according to Erdogan, the government was with the people from the very first minute.
Flanked by officials, he visited an emergency relief area set up by the country’s disaster management agency, AFAD. Some of the thousands of families that have lost their homes are set to be housed in the sports stadium.
In a teleconference from the relief center, the prime minister stated that the government wanted to rebuild the Kahramanmaras region in a year and that people would get help with emergency housing.
Somezley says that the government has done what it can to help the victims. It’s not a time for discussion of politics, it’s a time to help people who need it.
He acknowledged the initial response had some problems in terms of gas supply and roads, but said the situation was under control. The government is planning to give 10,000 Turkish liras (around $531 USD) to help families impacted, he added.
Many people could be heard weeping at the bottom of the city because of the collapsed buildings where they or their relatives lived.
A handful clutched photographs of loved ones who are under the rubble, less in hope of their rescue than as an act of remembrance – holding out snaps of their children or wedding pictures and saying “they are gone.”
Thousands of homeless people are still searching for aid after a third-month earthquake, according to an Istanbul-Kelliah civil defense official
A three-month state of emergency has been declared in 10 Turkish provinces, and aid agencies have warned of “catastrophic” repercussions in northwest Syria, where millions of vulnerable and displaced people were already relying on humanitarian support.
Erdogan and aid workers said the scale of the quake was so large that it was difficult to reach everyone everywhere. Erdogan said nobody would be “left in the streets.”
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 in trouble.
The crowd is chanting “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.
Some efforts remain in the provinces of Kahramanmaraş and Hatay. On Saturday, a couple and their 12-year-old child were rescued in Hatay, 296 hours after the earthquake, state news agency Anadolu reported.
NPR was able to reach Kellieh on Wednesday by phone. He was talking from Jinderes, a part of the country that is under opposition control. He said countless buildings there have collapsed. People are in the streets in the freezing cold, waiting for aid to arrive. Buildings are still unlivable aftershocks.
Humanitarian aid didn’t appear 72 hours after the earthquake, he said, describing the little assistance being supplied as a haphazard grassroots effort by individual groups.
“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.”
The World Health Organization estimates that 200,000 people are now homeless in government-controlled Aleppo, where the distribution of international aid is controlled by the regime of Bashar Assad.
“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. Hospitals have had to deal with fuel shortages as a result of power failures.
More than 380,000 people in southern Turkey have been left homeless by the devastating earthquakes, as rescuers are still searching for bodies.
Erdoshalam response to the 1999 September 13 earthquake in Turkey: An assessment of Ozel’s criticism of Erdogan and his coalition government
But critics like Ozel point out that national funds meant for natural disasters like this one were instead spent on highway construction projects managed by associates of Erdogan and his coalition government.
In 1999 an earthquake in northwestern Turkey killed more than 18,000 people and resulted in an earthquake tax being imposed.
Ozel says it’s not just a “near-total incompetence on preparedness on the part of the government” in responding to this week’s earthquake. “If that were possible, it would make things worse, the government is also making it almost impossible for other organizations, civil society, citizens themselves, and mayors and municipalities to actually help,” he says.
Erdogan’s centralization of Turkey’s government has meant a plethora of restrictions on how individual cities and aid organizations can operate in the country, hampering overall rescue efforts. Turkey’s embassies along with a number of other nongovernmental organizations and cultural associations are collecting donations internationally.
With an election expected by June, Ozel says Erdogan has already been weakened by out-of-control inflation in Turkey. Ozel thinks that the government would be one of the victims from the earthquake.
A high school student is working on an aid effort for his country. Schools throughout Turkey have been ordered closed to mourn victims of the earthquake and so that people like Korkmaz can help out.
18 semitrucks were loaded and will be sent to the earthquake zone. They’re filled with blankets, clothes, but there is a more urgent need for food,” he says, as he loads a box underneath a banner with the image of Erdogan hanging from the ceiling. It doesn’t matter if we can get it to them. People there need food.”
A Tale of Two Earthquakes in Turkey: The Causes of the Lethal Event and the Effort to Recover Aftermath
A number of factors contributed to the earthquake being so lethal. One of them is the time of day it occurred. Many people are trapped under the rubble of their homes, because they were in their beds when the earthquake hit.
Efforts to recover survivors have been hampered by a cold winter spell, while the logistical challenge of transporting aid into Syria has been made more difficult by the years of political unrest.
The images of destruction and debris show that there are inherently variable qualities of designs and construction. He says the type of structural failures following an earthquake are usually partial collapses. “Total collapses are something you always try to avoid both in codes and the actual design,” he added.
Turkey experienced two major earthquakes in 1999 and 2011, both of which were important lessons that the country’s building construction needed to be improved for future disasters.
Many of the buildings that have collapsed may have been built before 1999, according to Erdik. He added there also would have been instances where some buildings didn’t conform to code.
The codes are very modern in Turkey and similar to US codes, but the issue of codes conformity has been attempted to tackle with legal and administrative procedures. He told us what he was saying. Control for construction and design are part of the permits that we have. There are things that are lacking.
Seven rescued people are the first line of defense against quakes: When more earthquakes hit, what more? A CNN spokeswoman says the epicenter is the strongest earthquake ever recorded
And miracles do happen. Seven people were rescued from the rubble in Turkey a week after the initial earthquake.
He told CNN that the community and citizens were the first line of defense. “They dug up family, friends, neighbors.”
It’s even more important since international teams take 24 to 48 hours to arrive. Generally, there are nowhere nearly enough local search and rescue teams on the ground to respond to each collapsed building.
He added: “Time is always the enemy, as seen in Turkey and Syria. The cause of death for many people is immediate medical needs, such as bleeding to death or succumbing to crush injuries, and because of the weather which has dropped below freezing at night and when it’s chilly outside, so people die through hypothermia. Many die from lacking food and water while awaiting rescue.”
Many may recognize the term “Richter Scale” which scientists previously used for many years, but these days they generally follow the Modified Mercalli Intensity Scale (MMI), which is a more accurate measure of a quake’s size, according to the USGS.
There is a measure of the strength of an earthquake. The intensity of shaking can vary based on geography, depth of the earthquake, and other factors. On the magnitude scale, each increase of one whole number translates to 32 times more energy.
It is the largest quake to hit anywhere in the world since an 8.1 magnitude earthquake struck a region near the South Sandwich Islands in the southern Atlantic Ocean in 2021.
CNN claims to talk about the epicenter, but Chad says they should speak about the epi-line.
Buildings are not going to go back and forth in a 2004 Indonesian earthquake: “Batanga Pembangunan, Surabaya” (Perangkatan Pendua)
Plates move horizontally rather than vertically in a strike slip. “Why that matters is because the buildings don’t want to go back and forth. The secondary waves begin to move back and forth as well.
More than 200,000 people were killed or are listed as missing after a 9.1 magnitude earthquake and waves struck the coast of Indonesia in 2004.
The country had its worst nuclear disaster on record, after walls of water engulfed entire towns and houses were dragged onto highways.
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.
He says many of the buildings that toppled over this month were left with their upper stories basically intact. What was destroyed were the ground floors, often used for stores and other commercial properties.
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.
Two large high-rise buildings located to the south of the park have collapsed. Three more on the northern side of the park have also collapsed.
There is a large number 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.
A soldier in Antakya, Turkey, says there’s nothing for him to eat and neither to drink nor to drink – a miracle if people come out from the rubble
Faris, a soldier in his mid-20s who fled the hard- hit city of Antakya, says there’s nothing for them to eat. There’s not a heating system, or gas, and there’s neither electricity nor water. We don’t own any money or cards.
He is an active member of the Turkish military, so he only wants to be known by his first name because he could be punished if he criticizes the government.
Many hundreds of people in these camps are from villages surrounding the cities of Gaziantep and Hatay. In villages such as Nurdagi, Islahiye and Pazarcik, small satellite districts, entire streets and neighborhoods have collapsed into rubble.
A rescue worker named Ozgur said late Thursday night that his team had stopped looking for anyone 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.
It is a miracle if people come out from the rubble. He noted that most people that come out are dead.
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.
Faris says that his family can only use the bathroom on the second floor of the stadium because there aren’t enough places for the hundreds of people temporarily staying there.
The displaced people in Antakya, Turkey: where they came from, where they lived, and how they dealt with their environment in the aftermath of a 2010 earthquake
He and his family have deep purple circles under their eyes and are covered in injuries 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.
Kurdish migrants usually use the tents that have been set up there. The government abandoned Genco and other farmers after they organized the move to this field. In a neighborhood less than 2 miles from the epicenter, no one has come to inspect or repair homes damaged in the earthquake.
Hayat Gezer is a 45-year-old woman with a traditional Kurdish tattoo on her chin and black headscarf who says the group is grappling with 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). This has led to persecution of many Kurds for alleged links to the group.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/11/1155955553/turkey-earthquake-gaziantep-displaced-people
Narli’s Life in a Camp: A Case Study of Moral Desperation in Turkey’s Third Republic, and the Rescue of a Family of Five
The desperation in the camp is obvious. At one point, a young man tries to take bread from his neighbor’s tent; a violent fight ensues. Demir has to hold the young man back.
The Hunger and cold made those in the camp highly critical of the Turkish government. Faris claims he voted for Erdogan in the past but is never going to do it again.
The rescue of the Narli family in central Kaharamanmaras, which was broadcast on Turkish television, was one of many dramatic rescues. Nehir Narli was saved by both of her parents.
The family of five who had been trapped in a mound of debris in the town of Nurdagi in Gaziantep province were rescued earlier that day. Rescuers cheered and chanted, “God is Great!” The father was lifted to safety as the last family member.
“In some parts of our settlements close to the fault line, we can say that almost no stone was left standing,” he said earlier Saturday from Diyarbakir.
A woman trapped in the rubble of Elbistan’s city of Islahiye, Gaziantep province, died in her death
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. Police told the people not to cheer or clap because they were too close to other rescue efforts. The woman was on a stretcher and covered in a blanket. Rescuers were hugging. Some people shouted “God is great!”
Just an hour earlier, a 3-year-old girl and her father were pulled from debris in the town of Islahiye, also in Gaziantep province, and soon after a 7-year-old girl was rescued in the province of Hatay.
The rescues brought shimmers of joy amid overwhelming devastation days after Monday’s 7.8-magnitude quake and a powerful aftershock hours later caused thousands of buildings to collapse, killing more than 25,000, injuring another 80,000 and leaving 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. Hurriyet newspaper reported she died before medical teams could free her from the rubble.
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. But after receiving basic first aid, he was released without getting proper treatment for his injuries.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/11/1156313344/turkey-syria-earthquake-death-toll-survivors
The World Health Organization Arrived in Aleppo and Its Redundancy Has Reached More Than 2,166 Women and Children in Syria, Says President Assad
I buried all of them, then I came here. Canbulat said, counting his dead relatives: “My daughter is dead, my sibling died, my aunt and her daughter died, and the wife of her son” who was 8 ½ months pregnant.
There was a large graveyard on the outskirts of AnTAKya. The northeastern side of the city was lined with pits dug by backhoes and bulldozers for trucks and ambulances to deliver body bags. Soldiers directing traffic on the busy adjacent road warned motorists not to take photographs.
A worker with Turkey’s Ministry of Religious Affairs who did not want to be identified because of orders not to share information with the media said 800 bodies were brought to the cemetery on the first day it was open. As many as 2,000 people were buried by midday on Saturday, he said.
Temperatures remained below freezing across the large region, and many people have no shelter. The Turkish government has provided millions of hot meals but it is still hard to reach many people in need.
Assad and his wife Asma went to see the two people who had been pulled out of rubble, Duha’s son Ibrahim Zakariya and her daughter-in-law.
The head of the World Health Organization arrived in Syria’s northern city of Aleppo on Saturday with 35 tons of medical equipment, state news agency SANA reported. He said that there will be another plane carrying 30 tons of medical equipment.
The total death toll in Syria’s northwestern rebel-held region has reached 2,166 many of them women and children. In Syria, 3,553 died, while in Turkey, 21,043 died through the weekend.
Mom and Daughter in Turkey: How Much Can I Don’t Have the Means to Obtain a Safe Excavator and to Get Out of the Emergency Room?
It was terrible. As soon as I heard the news, I rushed there. With great effort, I tried to pull my daughter out with my bare hands. Hancer said he couldn’t save his daughter.
There was a large girder on my daughter, so I didn’t have hope. He said that her waist was free but it was crushed under the rubble. She died during the earthquake. She didn’t have a chance of survival.”
I also spoke with them. They helped as much as they could in Turkey. Hancer said they could not give an excavator to that area.
“My mother, my two older brothers, my sister-in-law and her little daughter. My daughter and seven other people were present. Hancer said they were all under the rubble.
He said that his home has been badly damaged, and he doesn’t have a place to stay. “We cannot enter our house because we don’t have the means. We are left outside.”
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/13/middleeast/turkey-quake-man-daughter-hand-photo-intl/index.html
The impact of the earthquake on the communities of Altnozu, Turkey: “We are sorry, but we are going to try to help them”
Meanwhile, amid growing public anger over the government’s response to the disaster, Turkish authorities have carried out a wave of arrests of property developers accused of “negligence” over building collapses due to last week’s earthquake.
Remarkable footage of the split olive grove has emerged from Turkey’s south-east Altınozu district, which borders Syria, showing a jagged, sandy-colored, canyon-like chasm. The cleavage is over 40 meters deep.
Irfan Aksu, who lives in the neighborhood, told Turkish news agency Demioren News Agency that when the earthquake started last Monday it created “an incredible sound” where he lived.
He implored for experts to inspect the area for possible future damage. He said there are 1000 houses and 7000 people living in the town. “Of course, we are scared… if it was a little closer, it would have happened in the middle of our town.”
The people that will have the most influence on the rescue are your neighbors. Forrest Lanning told NPR that they are the ones that are right there when it happens. He is an earthquake and volcano response liaison for the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Emergency response experts say training people to respond when official rescuers aren’t able to is one of the ways to save lives following a disaster.
Natalie Simpson, the professor and chair of operations management and strategy at the University at Buffalo School of Management, stated that responders could still locate people if a bystander couldn’t get them out of the rubble.
“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. There are thousands and thousands of these buildings in Turkey.
The Community Emergency Response Team: Importance of Strong Infrastructure for Earthquake-Preserving Communities in Syria and Turkey, with an Example from the U.S.
Knowing the importance of quick, local aid, the Community Emergency Response Team was developed in the U.S. It’s a FEMA program that trains volunteers across all 50 states with basic disaster response skills.
It teaches people what to do after a major earthquake, where to get water after an emergency, how to check on immobile neighbors, and how to search collapsed buildings, Lanning said.
Some of the factors that contribute to how likely a trapped person will survive include injuries and teams on the scene. A trapped person can last up to a week under a collapsing building, if they are not injured.
Simpson with the University at Buffalo said she wishes each time disaster strikes there would be an immediate mobilization of rescue crews and military. She said that it was not always the case in Turkey and Syria.
Simpson said the biggest failure point in emergency response was failure to pick up on the fact that this is an emergency. The instinct is to wait for more information.
“With emergencies, all of them, including the aftermath of an earthquake, you’re not in Kansas anymore,” she said. One of the traps that we fall into is “Oh God, what’s the best thing to do at this moment”, because these aren’t normal conditions. 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.
But the Turkish government failed to immediately mobilize its military to aid in the direct rescue efforts or to establish those all-important field hospitals and airstrips, according to an analysis published by the Middle East Institute, a nonprofit think tank.
“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.”
Lanning said this latest disaster shows the importance of strong infrastructure for communities in earthquake prone areas, like Turkey and Syria.
“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.
Despite the knowledge, concrete buildings are not the best at withstanding earthquakes. They are very easy to construct and can easily hide imperfections, he said.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/16/1156636019/the-earthquake-in-turkey-and-syria-offers-lessons-and-reminders-for-disaster-res
The earthquake in Hatay, Turkey, and the response of the United Nations to the humanitarian crisis, as reported by U.N. agencies
Much of the work to analyze this latest disaster and what went wrong or right will come in the following months and years. But it’s incredibly valuable work, Lanning said.
Rescuers on Friday removed a survivor from the rubble of a collapsed building in the district of Defne, in hard-hit Hatay province, more than 11 days after the powerful earthquake struck.
A Turkish man spent over two hundred days beneath the rubble, according to Turkey’s Anadolu news agency. TV footage showed him being carried on a stretcher to an ambulance.
Neslihan Kilic, a 29-year-old mother of two, was removed from the rubble of a building in Kahramanmaras, after being trapped for 258 hours, private DHA news agency reported late Thursday.
Jens Laerke, spokesman for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said the trucks are carrying a “multitude” of items from six U.N. agencies — including tents, mattresses, blankets, winter clothes, cholera testing kits, essential medicines, and food from the World Food Program. He said they crossed through the borders of Bab al-Hawa and Bab al-Salam.
The United Nations said it was working with Turkey to find the best way to rehabilitate the infrastructure of the agricultural sector that was damaged by the earthquake.
The Rome-based agency said that the earthquakes in Syria suggest that major disruption to crop and livestock production could endanger immediate and longer-term food security.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported the number of people who were returned to Syria for burial as 1,745, based on the numbers from other smaller crossing.
The decision allows Turks who reside in earthquake- ravaged areas to cross into Syria without the need for a travel permit from Turkish authorities. Normally, Turkey would consider Syrians holding protected status who crossed into Syria without a permit to have relinquished their status as asylum-seekers. They would be required to surrender their protection cards and banned from reentering Turkey for five years.
Spain says it will take in some 100 Syrian refugees in Turkey that have suffered in the earthquake. Those most vulnerable and badly affected by the earthquake are the refugees, according to the minister.
Making the announcement late Thursday, Escrivá said “the earthquake reminds us of Syria’s drama in a tremendous way and we are going to try to help within our possibilities.”
Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/17/1157835409/turkey-earthquake-survivors
UNICEF, Donor Fatigue and Turkey’s Earthquake Aid: A case study of a child in Turkey and a Syrian refugee
Turkish Vice President Fuat Oktay has said the state cares for 1,589 children who were separated from their families during the earthquake.
Many other funded crises have lost the attention of the world, as have Syria, according to the director of UNICEF’s private fundraising and partnerships. She spoke at the World Government Summit, an annual forum of political and thought leaders.
Mardini says that donor support is essential for the organization to continue its work of returning children to families and distributing clean drinking water and sanitary services.
She says it’s essential for their support to arrive as quickly as possible so we can bring aid to where it’s needed most.
Aid groups were trying to drum up more pledges of aid for Syrians while the attention was on the earthquakes, but the road to recovery would not be easy.
He too spoke with NPR at the World Government Summit in Dubai. He’d just returned from Syria, where the WHO is delivering tons of medical supplies such as amputation equipment and IV fluids.
The UN’s humanitarian relief coordination went to the areas that were affected by the earthquakes.
A Syrian resident of Turkey, with millions of followers on social media, shared his tear-filled video in Arabic detailing psychological trauma among Syrian survivors.
Omar Abu Lebda described visiting Antakya and meeting a 13-year-old boy who’d survived three days under the rubble. He’s been living with his parents and sister in a car after suffering a leg injury. His mother and another sister were killed in the earthquakes.
Abu Lebda reported seeing a Syrian man get off the bus after he heard his children calling for him from their destroyed home.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/18/1157783760/turkey-syria-earthquake-aid-donor-fatigue
Istanbul’s 1999 Aegean quake has caused a flood: How quickly can buildings be built, or why is the state upset?
Meanwhile, the U.N. refugee agency says it closed last year with only 56% of its funding needs met, leaving a $4.7 billion budget shortfall. The agency, which assists millions of Syrian refugees, says to date it has received just 15% of its global funding requirements for 2023 — a budget that’s yet to factor in the impact of the earthquakes.
Erdogan’s government has been stung by criticism about its initial response to this month’s earthquake, with prosecutors launching an investigation into a lawyer who tweeted “where is the state?” in criticism of the response. The lawyer was reportedly charged with “insulting the state.”
“Everyone is more scared than ever at the moment, because so many buildings are at risk in Istanbul, and that’s why the people are sad,” he says.
Ozgenler’s answer is yes. After the 1999 Aegean earthquake that killed more than 17,000 people, he says improvements were placed on the books but more needs to be done.
Critics have pointed outzoning amnesties given to contractors. These allowed buildings to be constructed more quickly, in part by skipping safety measures intended to strengthen a building’s capacity to resist an earthquake.
He says many acted to increase their commercial space by knocking out load-bearing walls or columns, compromising the structural integrity of the building.
“They have blood on their hands, and that makes me really, really angry when I see this,” Ozgenler says. “I mean, you don’t need an earthquake of 7.7 [magnitude] to see a building … fall over like this, if there’s no walls in the building, no core.”
Even if building owners or tenants do bear some blame for weakening buildings in earthquake-prone areas, analyst Sinan Ulgen at Istanbul’s Center for Economics and Foreign Policy says ultimately it’s up to the state to regulate that — to enforce the building codes on the books.
Ulgen says there will undoubtedly be a backlash of some kind against the government’s initial quake response, which may be why Erdogan has already pledged to provide shelter for all of the estimated 20 million people affected by the quake who need housing within a year.
It is happening just weeks before elections were expected to be held in May. It remains to be seen whether elections will be possible, given the challenges of holding a vote in heavily damaged cities in the earthquake zone.
Ulgen said that the political impact of the disaster will be a handicap for the government.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/20/1157837625/turkey-earthquake-damage-istanbul-safety-readiness
Erdospheric aftershocks in Turkey have caused more than 130 deaths, white helmets and the evacuation of a dozen injured buildings
It will be up to President Erdogan to decide if he wants to delay the vote, but he does not expect the opposition to support him in an election.
The opposition coalition has yet to announce its own candidate, creating more uncertainty as to where Turkey goes from here.
The quake’s epicenter was in the province’s Defne district, Turkish Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu said Monday, adding that there have been 26 aftershocks since.
In northwest Syria, there have been more than 130 injuries, the White Helmets volunteer rescue group said Monday. The quake also led to the collapse of a number of buildings that were already hit by the previous earthquake.
White Helmets said their teams are working to take the wounded to hospitals and check out the areas that have been damaged.
The United States Geological Survey (USGS) initially reported the quake as being of magnitude 6.4 at a depth of 10 kilometers before revising it down to 6.3 magnitude.
The deadly earthquake of February 6 killed six people, and a man in Antakya, Turkey, allegedly left by a rescue team
“Don’t enter damaged buildings,” Oktay warned in a televised statement. Think about your loved ones and your spouse. You should think about your nation. Don’t worry about your belongings, they’re replaceable.”
Zahir said that they went back to their home in the town of Iskenderun and Antakia in Hatay province, thinking that God would help them.
On Sunday, Turkey’s disaster management authority said it had ended most search and rescue operations nearly two weeks after the earthquake struck as experts say the chances of survival for people trapped in the rubble this far into the disaster are unlikely.
Turkish Interior Minister Soylu said there were at least six people trapped. He said those killed were from the cities of Antakya, Defne and Samandag.
Turkish public broadcaster TRT broadcast live footage of rescue crews operating at a collapsed building in the city of Antakya, one of the worst-hit cities in the Feb. 6 earthquake. The building collapsed after the ground shook again on Monday and residents were trying to recover their belongings.
A video that was aired on Turkey’s public broadcaster said that a man was trapped in the debris after he tried to rescue a cat from a damaged building.
Patrons on the second floor of a Gaziantep baklava restaurant calmly walked outside as a chandelier swung lightly. A waiter’s family escaped their home and brought blankets into the restaurant to sleep there.