Residents express concerns about their safety as experts say studies suggest that a powerful earthquake is expected to hit Turkey’s largest city soon.
Death toll in Turkey, Syria quake tops 28,000; Turkey moves against some builders
As Turkey reels from its deadliest earthquake in decades, some residents of Istanbul have already turned their growing anxiety elsewhere – towards the next big quake.
“We live in distress,” said Aysegul Rahvanci, a lifetime Istanbul resident, of her fears about a possible strong earthquake in the city.
By Umut Uras
Published On 11 Feb 202311 Feb 2023
As Turkey reels from its deadliest earthquake in decades, some residents of Istanbul have already turned their growing anxiety elsewhere – towards the next big quake.
“We live in distress,” said Aysegul Rahvanci, a lifetime Istanbul resident, of her fears about a possible strong earthquake in the city.
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“Our life equals to anxiety.”
Many people living in Turkey’s largest city shared Rahvanci’s feelings, in particular following the massive earthquakes – with magnitudes of 7.8 and 7.6 – on Monday that killed more than 21,000 people and wounded more than 80,000 others in southeastern Turkey as of Saturday. Thousands of others were killed in Syria. Officials said they expect the death toll to continue to rise.
The country is particularly prone to earthquakes, as it lies in an area where several tectonic plates meet. Quakes usually occur along the boundaries between plates. The North Anatolian Fault, which divides the Eurasian and Anatolian plates, runs close to Istanbul.
According to Sukru Ersoy, a professor of geology from Istanbul’s Yildiz Technical University, the question is when a powerful earthquake will hit Istanbul, not if it will happen.
“With the data we have on the past earthquakes, and through certain modellings, we can say that an Istanbul earthquake is near and we would not even be surprised if the city is hit by it today,” he told Al Jazeera, adding that it was impossible to know when the disaster would take place.
Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu said in a recent interview that there were some 90,000 buildings that were highly vulnerable to earthquakes in the megalopolis with a population of some 20 million people.
The mayor said another 170,000 buildings were in the medium-risk status in case of a strong earthquake, according to research conducted by Istanbul Municipality.
After Monday’s earthquakes, more than 6,400 buildings have reportedly collapsed in southeastern Turkey.
By Ali Kucukgocmen and Maya Gebeily
ANTAKYA, Turkey (Reuters) -Rescuers pulled more survivors from rubble on Sunday, six days after one of the worst earthquakes to hit Turkey and Syria, as Turkish authorities sought to maintain order across the disaster zone and started legal action over some building collapses.
With chances of finding more survivors growing more remote, the toll in both countries from Monday’s earthquake and major aftershocks rose above 28,000 and looked set to keep growing. It was the deadliest quake in Turkey since 1939.
Displaced residents in the Turkish city of Kahramanmaras, near the epicentre, said they had set up tents as close as they could to their damaged or destroyed homes in an effort to prevent them from being looted.
Facing questions over his response to the earthquake as he prepares for a national election that is expected to be the toughest of his two decades in power, President Tayyip Erdogan promised to start rebuilding within weeks.
In Syria, the disaster hit hardest in the rebel-held northwest, leaving many homeless for a second time after they were displaced by a decade-old civil war, though the region has received little aid compared to government-held areas.
The European Union’s envoy to Syria urged Damascus not politicise issues of humanitarian aid, and rejected accusations that the bloc had failed to provide sufficient help to Syrians following the disaster.
“It is absolutely unfair to be accused of not providing aid, when actually we have constantly been doing exactly that for over a decade and we are doing so much more even during the earthquake crisis,” Dan Stoenescu told Reuters.
In Turkey’s southeastern province of Hatay, a Romanian rescue team carried a 35-year-old man named Mustafa down a pile of debris from a building, broadcaster CNN Turk said, about 149 hours after the quake.
