Earthquake-damaged buildings and weather in Turkey after the largest earthquake of the last 25 years: predictions for Syria, Syria and Aleppo
Turkey is no stranger to strong earthquakes, as it is situated along tectonic plate boundaries. The country has been struck by seven major earthquakes in the last 25 years but the most deadly of them was last Monday.
Researchers say people need to brace themselves for yet more quakes and aftershocks, as well as deteriorating weather. Kelman said that there was a chance of more damage from the big aftershocks for weeks and months.
There are two major faults on the Anatolians plate, the North Anatolian and the East Anatolian. 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. He says that Turkey is moving west at a rate of about 2 centimetres per year. The fault half the length is lit up by earthquakes.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has long spoken of the need to be ready for natural disasters. After a year after an earthquake hit Izmir and surrounding areas, the prime minister boasted that his government had been with the people from the beginning.
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. There are low-rise brick structures constructed very close to each other that make most existing buildings this way.
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 less than good quality materials. That might have made it easier for them to fall down than it was to build things at a higher cost. We’ve yet to find out,” he adds.
The earthquake that killed so many lives affected by the Sreyfad-Tayyip Erdogan’s government in Turkey
Even though experts say trapped people can live for a week or more, the odds of finding more survivors were quickly waning amid freezing temperatures. Rescuers were shifting to thermal cameras to help identify life amid the rubble, a sign that any remaining survivors could be too weak to call for help.
More than 380,000 people have been left homeless in southern Turkey because of the devastating earthquake that ripped through the area.
On Wednesday, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan visited Kahramanmaras, a city near the epicenter of the quake, telling survivors that “we are face to face with a great disaster.” There is growing public anger that the rescue response has been slow, and Erdogan acknowledged there were shortfalls by his government in the immediate aftermath of the quake. The president cited winter weather conditions and destroyed infrastructure, including airport runways, as complicating factors.
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 reeling from out-of-control inflation.
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.
After a catastrophic earthquake in northwestern Turkey killed more than 18,000 people in 1999, authorities imposed an earthquake tax meant to corral billions of dollars’ worth of disaster prevention and relief.
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. “To make matters worse, if that were even possible,” he says, “the government is also making it almost impossible for other organizations, civil society, citizens themselves and mayors and municipalities to actually help.”
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, meanwhile, along with an array of 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. “I would expect the government to actually be one of the victims under the rubble of this earthquake,” Ozel predicts.
An 18-year-old high school student has been working on the aid effort for a few days. Schools throughout Turkey have been ordered closed to mourn victims of the earthquake and so that people like Korkmaz can help out.
We’ve got 18 semitrucks that have been loaded and will be sent to the earthquake zone. They’re full of blankets, clothes, but there’s a bigger need for food,” he says, as he loads a box with the photo of the leader hanging from the ceiling. “However we can get it to them, it doesn’t matter. People there need to eat.
When asked if Erdogan’s government has done enough to help the victims, Soleymez says, “They’ve done what they’re able to do. This is not a time to talk about politics — it’s a time to help people who need it.”
In Islahiye, 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. The ground floors were often used for stores in commercial properties.
The Narli Family of Five Rescued from a Mound of Debris in the Gaziantep Town, Nurdagi, Turkey
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.
The high-rise buildings located just south of the park have collapsed. Three more on the northern side of the park have also collapsed.
A significant number of vehicles are seen 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.
The Narli family were rescued in central Kahramanmaras 133 hours after a 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck, which was broadcast on Turkish television. First, 12-year-old Nehir Naz Narli was saved, then both of her parents.
The family of five was rescued from a mound of debris in the town of Nurdagi, in Gaziantep province, earlier in the day. Rescuers cheered and chanted, “God is Great!” The last member of the family was lifted to safety.
The earthquake-stricken southern province of Syria killed thousands of people and displaced lakhs of civilians, with one intubated victim
The number of people killed across the region, including government and rebel-held parts of Syria, was 25,401, as a result of a tour of earthquake-hit cities by the Turkish President.
He said that “almost no stone was left standing” in some areas close to the fault line.
The rescue of a woman in her 20s from the rubble was done in the same hour as that of another person, after 131 hours since the earthquake. Ahead of her rescue the police said that people shouldn’t cheer or clap in order to not interfere with other rescues nearby. She was covered in a blanket. Rescuers were hugging each other. Some people shouted that God is great.
A father and his daughters were pulled out of the debris just an hour later in the town of Islahiye, also in Gaziantep province, followed by another girl’s rescue in Hatay.
The rescues brought shimmers of joy days after the 7.8-magnitude earthquake and terrifying aftershock caused thousands of buildings to collapse, killing tens of thousands 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. But she died before the medical teams could amputate a limb and free her from the rubble, Hurriyet newspaper reported.
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.
He was in pain and said he had been rescued from his apartment building within hours of the earthquake. 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
The first day of operation of a cemetery in Antakya, Turkey, declared by the U.N. in the aftermath of the 11-day Aleppo earthquake
″I buried (everyone that I lost), then I came here,” Canbulat said, “My aunt and my niece died, my sister-in-law died, and my son’s wife was 8 months pregnant.”
A graveyard was being built outside of Antakya on Saturday. 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 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 wish to be identified because of orders not to share information with the media said that around 800 bodies were brought the cemetery on Friday, its first day of operation. He said that as many as 2,000 people had been buried.
“People who are coming out from the rubble now, it’s a miracle if they survive. Most of the people that come out now are dead, and they come here,” he said.
Many people have no shelter, as the temperatures were below freezing in the large region. The Turkish government has distributed millions of hot meals, as well as tents and blankets, but is still struggling to reach many people in need.
Efforts to get aid in have been difficult 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.
Assad and his wife visited a mother and son who had been trapped in the rubble of a building in the nearby coastal town, according to Syrian state TV.
35 tons of medical equipment were brought by the head of the World Health Organization to the city of Damascus, according to state news agency SANA. There will be another plane arriving with 30 tons of medical equipment in the coming days.
Amnesties for Buildings in Hatay, Turkey, after the Erdosenide Earthquake and 2025: Importance of Early Intervention
He said that he had solved the problems of 205,000 people in Hatay by using the amnesties to facilitate construction practices that could leave buildings unable to resist earthquakes.
More than 50,000 building incentives were granted before the election in 10 provinces impacted by the earthquake, according to a senior Istanbul city official. They included more than 40,000 amnesty certificates in the hard-hit Gaziantep province, the official said.
Turkish media reports that the builders had to pay fines but their projects could still go forward if they met code restrictions.
The country’s main association of engineers and architects attacked the practice of amnesties for builders, saying that it was an invitation to death.
A verdant olive grove was cleaved into two during last week’s devastating earthquake in Turkey, creating a valley 984 feet long (about 300 meters) that now divides the area.
The earthquake created an amazing sound in his home, according to a report from the Turkish news agency.
He implored for experts to inspect the area for possible future damage. There are 1000 houses and over 70000 people in this town. If it was a little closer, it would have happened in the middle of our town.
Last Monday’s earthquake was the strongest to hit anywhere in the world since an 8.1 magnitude quake struck a region near the South Sandwich Islands in the southern Atlantic Ocean in 2021, though the remote location of that incident resulted in little damage.
A number of factors have contributed to making this earthquake so lethal. The day is one of them. With the quake hitting early in the morning, many people were in their beds when it happened, and are now trapped under the rubble of their homes.
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.
“While search and rescue operations are critical, research is very clear that mitigation and prevention are the most effective when it comes to minimizing disaster losses,” Davis with the U.S. Geological Survey said.
More than 39,000 deaths in Turkey and Syria show how important the search and rescue efforts are within the first 24 hours.
The window of opportunity to save people trapped in collapsed buildings will be over by the time you reach day four or five, Lanning said.
Even if a bystander can’t pull someone out of the rubble, they can still pinpoint for responders areas where people were located, said Natalie Simpson, the professor and chair of operations management and strategy at the University at Buffalo School of Management.
“It takes a long time to listen and carefully remove pieces of the building debris from a building to get to people,” Lanning said. And with the scene in Turkey “there’s thousands and thousands of these buildings,” he added.
This is made even more important by the fact that international teams take 24 to 48 hours to arrive, Lanning said. Generally, there are nowhere nearly enough local search and rescue teams on the ground to respond to each collapsed building.
The Community Emergency Response Team was formed in the US to provide quick, local aid. The FEMA program trains volunteers across the country on disaster response skills.
It teaches people how to respond after an earthquake, where to get water, how to check on one’s neighbors, and how to search collapsed buildings.
“It’s never too early to get involved,” said Lanning, president of the University of Buffalo, Istanbul, and criticized for the earthquake-transformed landscape
The number of search and rescue teams on the scene and the type of injuries a person may have can contribute to how likely a person is to survive. He noted that if a trapped individual is uninjured or has minor injuries, they can last up to a week under a collapsed building.
And miracles do happen. Reuters reported Tuesday that seven survivors were rescued from the rubble in Turkey more than a week after the initial earthquake.
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 criticism for its response. The first day was difficult, but by the second and third day the situation got under control, according to the president.
“The single, biggest failure point in emergency response is failure to pick up on the fact that this is an emergency,” Simpson said. I want 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 did not immediately give its military the power to help in direct rescue efforts or set up 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 it will help people in the future, and that’s something decision makers will be more interested in.
Lanning said this latest disaster hammers home how important it is for global communities in earthquake-prone areas to strengthen infrastructure to withstand a disaster like the one in 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 fact that concrete buildings don’t have the best withstanding earthquakes, this is still going on. He said that they are very 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 Happened to Istanbul After the 1999 Earthquake? An Istanbul Citizen’s View on the State’s Initial Response and Public Perception of Turkish Security Policies
Much of the work to analyze this latest disaster and what went wrong or right will come in the following months and years. It’s extremely valuable work, he said.
The initial response from the government to the earthquake has been criticized by many, with prosecutors launching an investigation into a lawyer who wrote on his social media accounts that “where is the state?” The lawyer was reportedly charged with “insulting the state.”
He says that the people are sad, they are scared of what will happen in Istanbul, and that there are a lot of buildings at risk.
Ozgenler’s answer is yes. Improvements made after a 1999 earthquake killed more than 17,000 people were a good start, but much more needs to be done.
Critics have pointed tozoning amnesties given to contractors. These allowed buildings to be built more quickly because they allowed skipping safety measures meant to fortify a building’s ability to resist an earthquake.
He said many people increased their commercial space by knocking out load bearing walls or columns, which weakened the building’s structural integrity.
Ozgenler says he’s really, really angry when he sees blood on their hands. “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 are to blame for the weakened buildings, it is up to the state to enforce the building codes, says analyst Sinan Ulgen at Istanbul’s Center for Economics and Foreign Policy.
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.
This is all happening just weeks before elections were expected to be called, possibly to be held in May. It is questionable whether elections can be held in the cities that have been ravaged by the earthquake.
The political consequences will be a handicap for the government because there are no polls showing the political impact of the disaster.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/20/1157837625/turkey-earthquake-damage-istanbul-safety-readiness
Where Turkey goes from here? An additional layer of uncertainty about Turkey’s presidential campaign and the epoch of re-election
It is up to the President of Turkey to decide if he wants to delay the vote, but he thinks that it is unlikely that the opposition would support him.
Meanwhile, the six-party opposition coalition has yet to announce its own presidential candidate, adding one more layer of uncertainty to where Turkey goes from here.