Earthquake in Turkey
On my homepage, I shared the link to the reliable US-based nonprofit Turkish Philanthropic Funds. I am linking their dedicated earthquake relief fund again.
On 6 February 2023, a fault line near Gaziantep in southeastern Turkey running northeast to southwest under Kahramanmaraş then turning south toward İskenderun in the historic Antioch region, ruptured shortly after 04:00. Everyone was in deep sleep with snow on the ground. That fault line had been dormant for five centuries and the resulting accumulation of stress produced a tremor measuring 7.8 on Richter scale. Mother’s side of my family is all from the earthquake zone and this was especially distressing.
Decades of neglect of expert warnings, of building standards, of inspection requirements and just plain corruption, incompetence and willful ignorance bringing repeated building amnesties, have created fragile cities in Turkey. Highways and airports looking impressive on the surface, often are substandard underneath. The damage was immediate. It did not help that within hours, that initial tremor triggered an adjacent fault line running west, producing another earthquake rated at 7.4 scale.
The government had dismantled the agile military response structure which was formerly in place, replacing it with a centralized civilian search and rescue organization. They were not acting without orders, not directing volunteer resources in manpower or equipment to where they were needed, but instead were basically gumming up the works. With broken runways, mangled railroads and torn up highways, help could not reach those in need anyway. Airlifting fuel, generators, mobile cellular repeaters, cranes and special equipment to nudge collapsed concrete structures to reach victims was simply not possible without involving the military resources.
There was chaos, disorganized attempts to assist, cries for help as trapped individuals succumbed to hypothermia had they survived the building collapsing on their bed. Looting in the cities, banditry on the roads, criminal behavior became more frequent as time passed. Hours led to days; while cities eventually got all the social and other media visibility, the nearby small towns and villages languished out of sight, their livestock lacking feed in winter conditions, suffering their fate in absolute abandonment. The degree of destruction and the inability of the government to rise up to the challenge was staggering to observe.
There are ongoing stories of bravery and sacrifice by all rescuers resulting in miracles. International search and rescue teams from multiple countries joined the domestic teams, offering hope and a sense of common purpose in this divided global landscape. May they all be blessed.
——oOo——
Also see:
“Why the earthquakes in Türkiye were so deadly and devastating?” — By Judith Hubbard, a visiting assistant professor at the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Cornell University in the US.
In Turkey and Syria, outdated building methods all but assured disaster from a quake - NPR