Buildings, tents and emergency vehicles destroyed in the aftermath of Saturday’s devastating earthquake: The Florida Task Force 2 knocked on every door

Fort William Beach, Fla. On the third day after Hurricane Ian pulverized Fort Myers Beach, the rescuers from Florida Task Force 2 embarked on a laborious new task: to knock on every door that was still standing. They had to make sure they missed anyone who had died or someone still waiting to be rescued.

The fire department is what it is. Noel Armas yelled from the rescue squad as he banged on the doors at the resort in the southern part of the island which had not been hit as hard. “Anybody need assistance?”

He put his ear to the window of one of the units because he was worried that an older person or someone who had difficulty moving could be stuck inside. Pangallo clanged the elevator doors with a hammer to make sure nobody was stuck.

Collapsed buildings, emergency vehicles and tent shelters can be seen in new satellite imagery of earthquake-hit towns in Turkey, revealing the damage from Monday’s devastating earthquake.

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.

Erdospheric damage to buildings in the western Anatolian Fault-Northwestern Turkey: a response to a wake from earthquakes in Turkey

Most of Turkey sits on the Anatolian plate which is between the North and East Anatolian Faults. 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. “Turkey is moving west about 2 centimetres per year along the East Anatolian Fault,” he adds. “Half the length of this fault is lit up now with earthquakes.”

Everyone in Turkey is aware of their vulnerability to earthquakes, says a seismologist and coordinator of the Turkish Earthquake Foundation. “This wasn’t a surprise,” says Puskulcu, who last week was touring the cities of Adana, Tarsus and Mersin, and areas of western Turkey, delivering workshops on earthquake awareness.

Very few buildings in the city of Kahramanmaras have been left unscathed by the quakes, although those in mostly newer neighborhoods higher up the valley have suffered less obvious damage.

Things are worse in Syria, where more than 11 years of conflict have made building standards impossible to enforce. Buildings collapsed in Syria’s northwestern regions after the earthquake. Low-quality materials are being used to rebuild war- damaged buildings in Syria. They were less likely to fall down than things that were built at a higher cost. He does not know if we have yet to find out.

“The weather forecast for the region for tonight is dropping below freezing. That means that people who are trapped in the rubble could be killed in the cold. These hazards are continuing, he says.

The body of a 4-year-old girl wrapped in a pink blanket was brought out Wednesday from the wreckage of a building in the Turkish city of Kahramanmaras. She is one of the many young people who have been killed by Monday’s massive 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.

Rescuers are trying to reach two people that are thought to be alive in the rubble of a neighboring building. A generator was brought up to power a pneumatic hand-operated drill; the man directing it cleared away the rubble with his bare hands.

But rescuers told him there was still a lot of work to be done, so they sent away a waiting ambulance.

There were 350 bodies in the Kahramanmaras mortuary that were not collected by relatives because of their dead loved ones, according to a man volunteering at one of the hospitals.

Turkish President Recep Tayypi Erdogan, on a tour of quake-stricken cities, raised the death toll in Turkey to 21,848, which pushed the total number of dead across the region, including government and rebel-held parts of Syria, to 25,401.

Building collapses in the Kahramanmaras region of Turkey, as witnessed by Erdogan at the Kurdistan-Kahramas relief center

Flanked by officials, he visited an emergency relief area set up by the country’s disaster management agency, AFAD. Row after row of shining white tents could be seen in the sports stadium, destined to house some of the thousands of families who’ve lost their homes.

In a televised briefing from the relief center, Erdogan said the government’s target was to rebuild the Kahramanmaras region “in one year” and that people would get help with emergency housing.

“We can never let our citizens stay on the streets,” Erdogan said. Our state is using all of its resources. We will continue to do that.

The government had problems in terms of natural gas supply and roads, but he 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.

At the bottom of the city, many people could be heard crying and lamenting by the tumbled buildings where they or their relatives lived until disaster struck.

A few people held out photographs of their family and friends who are under the rubble, less in hope of their rescue than an act of remembrance, saying that they are gone.

Aid agencies have warned of a disaster in northwest Syria after a state of emergency was declared in 10 Turkish provinces.

In Islahiye, dozens of buildings across the city have collapsed. There are a number of residential buildings flattened just west of the Hac Ali ztrk mosque.

There are two buildings that are four and six stories tall. The roof of one building is intact despite it collapsing.

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.

At least two large high-rise buildings, located just south of the park, have collapsed. Three more collapsed on the northern side of the park.

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.

No food or water for the citizens of Antakya, Turkey: a rescue worker’s frustrations at the government condemns the response of AFAD

“There’s nothing for us here to eat,” says a soldier in his mid-20s named Faris, who fled from the hard-hit city of Antakya. There’s no electricity, no heating system, no gas. We don’t have money or any of our cards.”

He asks to be identified only by his first name because he is still an active member of the Turkish military and risks punishment if he criticizes the government.

Many hundreds of people in these camps are from villages surrounding the cities of Gaziantep and Hatay. Entire streets and neighborhoods in small villages have collapsed into rubble.

Late Thursday night in Nurdagi, a rescue worker named Ozgur says his team no longer expects to find anyone alive under the rubble. He works in construction and is afraid of being retaliated for giving assistance without the approval of the government.

He pointed to a collapsed building in front of him and said there were 30 to 40 people under it. “But none of them are going to come out alive.”

Crowded into white tents set up by Turkey’s disaster and emergency relief arm, known by the acronym AFAD, families of eight or more are sleeping on foam mattresses on the ground. Wrapped in the clothes they were wearing at the time of the quake, and in donated, colorful blankets, mothers, daughters, brothers and fathers huddle to keep warm.

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.

Kurdish migrant families in Gaziantep, Turkey: a crisis with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK)

Faris says his family can barely even access the bathrooms for the lines, because there are not enough facilities in the municipal stadium for the hundreds of people temporarily staying there.

He has deep purple circles under his eyes as he and his family are covered in wounds from falling rubble. They had to go through the rubble without shoes, and their hands were covered in gashes from when they dug each other out from the collapsed home.

They were told by police that they had to leave, and that they could get food and shelter in Gaziantep. Now, Faris says he regrets the decision to come.

Kurdish migrant families have set up tents in a location where they usually use them. Genco says that the government abandoned him and other farmers when they moved to this field. In their impoverished neighborhood of Sekiz Subat, less than 2 miles away, they say no one has come to inspect or repair their homes, damaged by the earthquake.

A Kurdish woman with a black headscarf is among a group who are dealing with legal problems. She says that a number of members of their community have been imprisoned for a variety of crimes.

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). Many Kurds have been persecution for suspected links to the group.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/11/1155955553/turkey-earthquake-gaziantep-displaced-people

Miracles come to an end: Nehir Naz Narli’s life saved from the mound of rubble in the Gaziantep province

The desperation in this camp is clear. A violent fight occurred when a young man tried to take bread from his neighbor’s tent. Demir has to hold the young man back.

Hunger and cold have helped make those in the AFAD camp highly critical of the Turkish government. Faris said he voted for Erdogan in the past, but that he would never do it again.

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.

Dramatic rescues were being broadcast on Turkish television, including the rescue of the Narli family in central Kahramanmaras 133 hours after the 7.8-magnitude temblor struck Monday. First, 12-year-old Nehir Naz Narli was saved, then both of her parents.

A family of five were rescued from a mound of rubble in the hard- hit town of Nurdagi in Gaziantep province. Rescuers cheered and said God is great. as the last family member, the father, was lifted to safety.

The India’s First Mission to Elbistan. — A Turkey-Syria Earthquake Death Toll Survivor in Gaziantep Province

He said that almost no stone was left standing in parts of the settlements close to the fault line.

In the middle of the night on Wednesday, a woman in her 20s was freed from the rubble of a building in Elbistan after another person was brought out of the rubble within one hour. Ahead of her rescue, police announced that people shouldn’t cheer or clap in order to not interfere with other rescue efforts nearby. She was covered in a thermal blanket on a stretcher. Rescuers hugged each other. Some 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 after the 7.8-magnitude earthquake and powerful aftershock that caused tens of thousands of buildings to collapse.

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. She died before the teams could 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 said that he had been rescued from his collapsed apartment building within an hour of the earthquake 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

Turkey’s scalar earthquake killed the last of its kind: a human tragedy unfolded in the aftermath of the Syrian civil war

″I buried (everyone that I lost), then I came here,” Canbulat listed his dead relatives and said that his daughter is dead, his siblings are dead, and his aunt and daughter are dead.

A graveyard was being built on the side of the road. 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 told motorists not to take selfies on the road next to them.

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. By midday on Saturday, he said, as many as 2,000 had been buried.

Many people have no shelter because temperatures are below freezing in the large region. Despite giving millions of hot meals, tents and blankets, the Turkish government is unable to reach many people in need.

The disaster compounded suffering in a region beset by Syria’s 12-year civil war, which has displaced millions of people within the country and left them dependent on aid. More people sought refuge in Turkey because of the fighting.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/11/1156313344/turkey-syria-earthquake-death-toll-survivors

Syrian cries in the rubble: two more survivors are still hiding under the weight of their apartment building, their mother Sakine Demir, 35, and her sister Semra Demir

The Syrian state TV said that Assad and his wife visited the two people who were pulled out of the rubble the night before.

According to SANA, the head of the World Health Organization arrived in Syria’s northern city of Damascus on Saturday with 35 tons of medical equipment. An additional 30 tons of medical equipment will be arriving soon, he said.

The total death toll in Syria’s northwestern rebel-held region has reached 2,166 many of them women and children. In Turkey, the death toll through Saturday was 21,043 and in Syria it was 3,553.

Rescuers pulled a woman from the rubble of her collapsed apartment in the southeastern Turkish city of Islahiye, with her four children surrounding her.

In the last moments of their lives, crushed under the weight of their shoddily built apartment block, Demir and her sons Emir, 3, and Mehmet Ali, 13, and daughters Damla, 8, and Yagmur, 10, had all clung to each other tight.

Looking at the ruins of an apartment building, Melike Bayar can’t stop crying. Their mother, Sakine Demir, 65, and another sister, Semra Demir, 35, are still beneath the rubble. They haven’t been found yet. The night of the earthquake Kamil was in a hospital with a life-threatening condition.

Mehmet Gezici and his wife, Zhan Gezici, flew to Paris to help after the earthquake, but are less hopeful. They believe Sakine and Semra are dead.

Activist Garo Paylan in the city of Adiyahman, Turkey: “Between the earthquake and the destruction of the buildings”

Many believe that a lack of regulations and corruption is to blame for the large scale of the tragedy. A group of contractors have been arrested by the Turkish government for their involvement in the deaths.

Garo Paylan of the opposition People’s Democratic Party in the city of Adiyahman, one of the cities that was devastated by the earthquake, sent out a message on Saturday saying that the government had undercounted the dead. As many as 200,000 people could be under the rubble according to experts. Search teams in both Turkey and Syria believe the hope of recovering people alive at this point is slim.

He arrived in Islahiye before the sun came up, an hour away, from his home in Gaziantep. The building his mother and sisters had lived in looked like a stack of plates, as the ceilings pressed one on top of the other. He tried to clean the rubble with only his hands. He has not left the site since.

The first crane that was needed to lift concrete arrived Wednesday, but it only lifted 100 tons. The second arrived Saturday, six days after the earthquake. Volunteers have only been able to go down from the sixth floor to the third floor in a week.

The Destruction of Kurdish Family Property During the December 6, 2009 Anisotropic, Teheran-Kuzmin Earthquake

Almost a week after the 6.9 earthquake hit, members of the family of the murdered girl, who were all Kurds, have been living here. The first to arrive was her brother Hidayet, 45, the middle of the six Demir siblings and the only brother among the bunch.

When asked how he is doing, he says, “Incredibly badly,” speaking in a shocked monotone. As he speaks, his eyes dart back to the collapsed building where his sister and mother still lie.

Hidayet says that when he arrived Monday morning, people told him they had heard children’s screams from the direction of Derya’s apartment. For at least some time after the earthquake, the family believes, the children were alive. They believe that help came too late.

As they wait for crews to find their mother and sister, they hold each other as they warm themselves around a fire that’s been burning for a week next to the site.

They try to share happy memories and speak of their loved ones in the present tense. The four young children, and Derya, Sakine, and Semra — all, in their telling, still exist.

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.

According to the Turkish news agency, Aksu said that when the earthquake started he heard an incredible sound in his house.

He implored for experts to inspect the area for possible future damage. “This is not a small town, there are 1000 houses, and 7000 thousand people live here,” he said. If it happened in the middle of our town, we would be scared.

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. One of them is the time of day it occurred. Many people are trapped underneath the rubble of their homes because they were asleep when the earthquake hit.

In the immediate aftermath of a devastating earthquake, where someone is trapped in their collapsed home or office building and waiting for help, it’s likely that the first people to help won’t be trained professionals.

Emergency response experts say training people to respond when official rescuers are not available is essential to saving the most lives after a disaster.

Experts say the growing death tolls — more than 39,000 in Turkey and Syria — reflect how important search and rescue efforts are within the first 12 hours to two days.

The time to save people is when the buildings are falling, and it will be done by the 4th or 5th day.

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 at each building, to have to listen and carefully remove pieces of the building debris 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.

Knowing the importance of local aid, the team was developed in the U.S. FEMA has a program that teaches volunteers basic disaster response skills in all 50 states.

It teaches people what to do when there is an earthquake, where to get water in an emergency, and how to Search collapsed buildings.

The earthquake in Turkey and Syria: Offers lessons and reminders for disaster-response in a disaster-transformed landscape

There are factors, like types of injuries and how many search and rescue teams are on the scene, that contribute to how likely a trapped 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.

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 wasn’t always the case in Turkey and Syria.

“The single, biggest failure point in emergency response is failure to pick up on the fact that this is an emergency,” Simpson said. The instinct is to wait 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 move.

The Turkish military is best prepared to operate in a disaster-transformed landscape and open airstrips to get aid 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.

She said it is always early to start your large-scale response when there is no information out of the region. “I think that that will make an impression on decision-makers elsewhere, that will actually help people in the future.”

The latest disaster in Turkey andSyria makes clear how important it is for communities that are prone to earthquakes to strengthen their infrastructure.

A lot of the damage in that area is due to the fact that the buildings are mostly concrete.

Concrete buildings are not the best at withstanding earthquakes, even though they are aware of that. He said that they are very easy to make 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

Born in the Wild: How a Small Triangle Saves a Child from Death: The Case of an Izlahiye

The work to analyze this latest disaster and understand what went wrong or right will take a long time. Lanning said it’s incredibly valuable work.

A tipped wall creating a small cavity is one way several lucky people managed to stay alive under the rubble after last week’s massive earthquake and aftershocks.

Some people were trapped underneath a wall that fell over onto a bed or object, creating a small triangle that protected them.

“They have a space to live,” says Osman Turk, a response specialist on Turkey’s National Medical Rescue Team coordinating triage units that help survivors pulled out of the rubble.

He points to a case where a wall fell onto the fridge giving a girl a protective space and food for four days before she was rescued.

Ali Kafadenk believes that was the only option. “Any minute there’s going to be something that’s going to fall down on our heads and this is going to be the end.”

He put his wife in the bedcovers to protect her. They cried and prayed with each other. We said that we came from God. We will go back to God,” he says.

There was an opening in the wall. It was too cold and dusty to see, but he felt it. He heard his neighbors’ screams. There’s a baby stuck here. There is a stuck leg. My mom’s under here. My father is over there.

He said that he has seven children who are stuck under the rubble. I just heard you, so I tried to help you. So I came for you. “Now I have to deal with my kids,’” Ali said.

Nine days after the quake, Kafadenk is back in the disaster zone with his brother to retrieve the registration papers from his buried car for an insurance claim. He hasn’t been back to the ruins of his home before.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/19/1157801615/turkey-earthquake-survivor-islahiye

Merve, the best teacher in Antakya, the worst city of February 6 earthquake: What’s wrong with a cat?

Merve teaches kindergarten, and he teaches first through fourth grade. They can’t get in touch with their colleagues. He thinks they’ve died.

Good news comes a few days later: After years of trying, he finally got accepted to teach in a school that pays about triple the salary he used to make.

The Turkish Interior Minister said at least six were trapped when the buildings collapsed. 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. It reported that residents were recovering belongings from their damaged building when it collapsed on Monday.

Oktay said in a televised statement that they shouldn’t enter damaged buildings. “Remember, your family, your loved ones and your spouses.” Think about your country. You shouldn’t worry about your belongings, they are replaceable.

Turkey’s public broadcasting service said it aired a video that showed a person crying for help after he was trapped in rubble while trying to save a cat from a damaged building.

The Sehit Zafer Yilmaz Project: Volunteering for neighborhood search and rescue teams in a seismically-impacted neighborhood, as witnessed by Gaziantep baklava

At a Gaziantep baklava restaurant, patrons on the second floor calmly walked outside and a chandelier swung lightly. A waiter’s family escaped their home and brought blankets into the restaurant to sleep there.

During the pandemic, I joined an organization that trains volunteers for neighborhood search and rescue teams so that each neighborhood has people who know what to do in the first crucial hours. An organization born out of the shared belief that when the next earthquake struck, we’d have only one another to rely on, and here we were.

When an earthquake hits at night, the usual approach is to try to reach the bedrooms first, but the Sehit Zafer Yilmaz apartments folded like a book: An upstairs bathroom spilled into a downstairs balcony, and a kitchen floor dangled above our heads. We began to dig at random. We were a loud mess of gendarmerie, miners, construction workers, police, municipal workers, local volunteers and searchers and rescuers, with our jackhammers, hydraulic cutters, shovels, grinder machines, excavator and crane, each of us answering to a different team leader, all of us balancing on a precarious mound of twisted metal and concrete that could tumble at the next aftershock.