Surrendering Hostilities to Mutual Disaster Response
"We have never experienced anything like it.""People are panicking."George Dionysion, vice-mayor, Greek island of Samos"Everybody says it was 15 seconds but it was like 15 hours for us.""Everything inside our house dropped to the floor. The building next to ours was completely destroyed and ours has cracks in the walls. We are obviously happy to get out alive.""Some of our neighbours, unfortunately, did not make it."Resident, Izmir, Turkey"I am very used to earthquakes ... so I didn't take it very seriously at first but this time it was really scary."Ilke Cide, doctoral student, Guzelbahce, Izmir
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| Rescue workers and local people carry a wounded person found in the debris of a collapsed building, in Izmir, Turkey, on Friday. (Ismail Gokmen/AP) |
Turkey is one of the most earthquake-prone countries in the world. It sits atop major fault lines that criss-cross under the Aegean Sea, close to Turkey's coastline. It has a recent history of truly deadly catastrophic earthquakes. In August of 1999 a 7.6 magnitude quake struck Izmit, a city located southeast of Istanbul, when 17,000 people were killed. Another quake in 2011 that took place in the eastern city of Van killed over 500 people.
This most recent earthquake that struck the Aegean Sea on Friday was rated at 7.0 by the U.S. Geological survey, felt along Turkey's Aegean coast and the north-western Marmara region. It also struck the coast of Greece, affecting the Greek island of Samos, where the destructive force of the tremor was far less pronounced. In Izmir, 20 buildings collapsed entirely, leaving 30 people dead, but the death toll is certain to rise as five thousand emergency rescue personnel desperately dig through the ruins in hopes of rescuing people.
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| Rescue teams on Saturday plowed through concrete blocs and debris of eight collapsed buildings in Izmir, Turkey's third-largest city, in search of survivors of a powerful earthquake. (Darko Bandic/The Associated Press) |
To the present, there have been one hundred people rescued from the collapsed buildings in the tragedy that left 885 residents injured. Frightened people ran from their homes onto streets in a general state of panic in Izmir. Soon afterward the tsunami struck, leaving neighbourhoods deluged with surging sea water sweeping debris inland, and fish stranded once it began to recede. The country's Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency began compiling casualty figures which swiftly began to increase from the initial counts.
Social media footage shows debris including refrigerators, chairs and tables floating through the streets carried by the deluge. Cars in Izmir's Seferihisar district were dragged by the seawater to eventually be piled atop each other, a mountain of vehicles sloshed together in a heap by the tsunami. Fish were found 50 metres inland from the shore. The 45,000 residents of the Greek island of Samos were urged to remain far from coastal areas.
"It was a very big earthquake. It's difficult to have a bigger one", said Eftyhmios Lekkas, head of Greece's organization for anti-seismic planning.
The presidents of both Greek and Turkey set aside their longstanding differences most recently exacerbated by rival oceanic natural resource claims, to offer condolences and assistance to one another.
Labels: Deaths, Earthquake, Emergency Search, Greece, Infrastructure Collapses, Survivors, Tsunami, Turkey
posted by Pieface @ Sunday, November 01, 2020
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