The Sheer Scale and Scope Of It
We're going away, but we have no idea what will happen when we get there.""We have no goal. Even if there was a plan what good will it be after this hour?""I no longer have my father or my uncle. What do I have left?"Musa Bozkurt, 25, Adiyaman, Turkey"Those who have the means are leaving, but we're poor.""The government says, go and live there a month or two.""How do I leave my home? My fields are here, this is my home, how do I leave it behind?"Fuat Ekinei, 55, farmer, Adiyaman, Turkey"Everyone's saying they're not in charge. We can't find who's in charge.""I've been begging and begging for just one crane to lift the concrete ...""Time's running out. A crane, for God's sake."Keyser, Antakya, Turkey
The woman who gives her name as Keyser in Antakya is desperate, but there is no one to help. Through "the stench of dead bodies waft[ing] through the cold, dusty air",
her two sons, trapped below the rubble of their collapsed apartment
building could be heard crying for rescue. She tried for two days to
approach anyone with a vestige of authority to help rescue her children.
In the end she failed. There was no one available, no emergency
response leader she could make contact with, to order her sons' rescue.
A day later, neighbours reported that there were no more survivors pulled from the building's wreckage. "The general problem here is of organization, especially in the field of health",
observed Onur Naci Karahanci, a doctor working out of Turkey's
southeastern city of Adiyaman. There were not even enough body bags for
the dead, an acute shortage in the first two days following the two
earthquakes.
EPA-EFE/Yahya Nemah |
The
trembling of the earth collapsed thousands of buildings in countless
towns and cities, leaving rubble under which were thousands of people, a
scant handful of whom were rescued. Antakya in particular, known
historically as Antioch, the capital of Hatay province. The damage
realized in Turkey was estimated by the Turksh Enterprise and Business
Confederation at $84.1 billion. Human life was destroyed to a total of
30,000 in Turkey alone.
Rescue
teams flew in from various countries, both near Turkey and Syria, and
from parts distant. Astonishing stories of survival and rescue have
surprised and encouraged rescue teams, but the total, still growing, and
standing at 36,000 dead is a grim reminder of the force and extent of
the catastrophic natural disaster. On one occasion, a father with a
child in his arms was rescued, in another a baby with its mother's hair
clutched in its fist; a newborn; a 13-year-old boy saved a week after
being buried alive
Over
150,000 survivors have been moved to shelters outside the affected
provinces, according to Turkish authorities. Turkey is now a country
that has been markedly changed, where the massive earthquakes cut a
slash through the landscape shifting roads, bending and breaking rail
lines, smashing buildings to the ground. There are now new canyons
across the East Anatolian Fault running through southern Turkey and
northern Syria.
The
window for finding survivors is fading. Rescue work moving vast
tonnages of steel and concrete to find anyone still alive is now turning
to the need to complete the work of destroying unsafe buildings
partially destroyed. The work of the moving tectonic plates; where the
fault line that slipped to cause the quakes -- the East Anatolian
between Turkeys Anatolian Plate and the Arabian Plate -- moving
northward created a double disaster.
Turkey's
geologic crust was altered in a few seconds when the plates slipped
side to side leaving rail lines bent into S-curves, roads laterally
split. Where an olive grove in Altinozu split in two leaving a
200-metre-wide rocky chasm between trees growing in neat rows, once
side-by-side.
Mikenorton/Nasa/wiki, CC BY-SA |
Labels: Death Toll, Earthquake, Natural Disasters, Search and Rescue, Survivors, Tectonic Plates, turkey-Syria
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