Survivors angry at developers
But those miraculous rescues are overshadowed by an ongoing recovery operation that shows no signs of slowing down. The scale of the destruction in the cities of Antakya, Kahramanmarash and Adiyaman is such that officials estimate thousands of victims have yet to be found, reports the Guardian. The death toll from the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria has passed 42,000 and anger is mounting among survivors. They believe that extremely low building standards are to blame for the tragedy, just as much as the tremors themselves.
The picture of the disaster shows no signs of abating in the southeastern city of Adiyaman, where residents say the death toll far exceeds official figures. “I don’t feel death anymore,” Yusuf Dogan said as he watched rescuers pull two bodies from the rubble. “It became natural for me. I lost 70 members of my family. Ultimately, the city will become one of the biggest death zones in the country.”
Similar cries of despair, observers say, are being heard across southern Turkey as residents scramble to find what is left of their families and possessions. But their grief turns to anger at the extent of the destruction in some areas compared to neighboring communities, which were virtually untouched by builders’ adherence to new standards adopted in 1999 after the catastrophic earthquake in Turkey.
Survivors are extremely angry with developers responsible for buildings that fail to meet safety standards. They ask Ankara to explain how these companies were allowed to build such houses. According to preliminary data, up to 650 people died in a single block in Antakya, an upscale resort that completely collapsed in the earthquake. Turkish authorities have ordered the arrest of more than 100 developers and builders, and in the meantime many officials who allowed construction have managed to evade investigation.
City without casualties or destruction
In Turkey, many talk about the settlement, which has become a kind of oasis in the disaster area. In Erzina, according to the mayor of the city, no one was killed and not a single building collapsed. “The main reason we haven’t suffered significant damage is the state of the ground,” Omer Emre, a local scientist who has spent 40 years studying faults in the area and now works in New York, told New York. for Fugro, a private research group. Time. Erzin is less than a hundred kilometers from the epicenter of the earthquake, closer than southern cities like Iskenderun and Antakya. But Antakya was devastated, most of it turned into ruins, and Iskenderun was badly damaged: a major fire broke out in the port, the streets were flooded with sea water, and apartments and stores were destroyed.
According to scientists, this was due to the fact that many towns and villages in the region were built on layers of sand, silt and clay from the old river bed. According to Omer Emre, this ground, like the soft coastal ground near Iskenderun, is more prone to shaking. “These soft, waterlogged deposits make cities and towns particularly vulnerable to earthquakes,” he said. When there is an earthquake, he added, “this earth moves like a wave”. On the contrary, Erzin stands higher above sea level and is built on solid ground, composed of “bedrock and coarser grains than sand”, geographer Tamer Duman pointed out.
The UN asked for a billion dollars
Meanwhile, the UN has called on the world community to allocate $1 billion to help victims in southern Turkey, where up to a million people have been forced to flee their homes. A separate appeal for nearly $400 million has been filed for neighboring Syria, where some 6,000 people have died in government-controlled areas of Aleppo and the northwest of the country. On Thursday, up to 120 humanitarian aid trucks arrived in Syria. However, local authorities report that the needs exceed the amount of assistance received, as large numbers of people have no shelter or winter protection.
The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development said on Thursday that the economic damage caused by the earthquake in Turkey could amount to 25 billion dollars, equivalent to 2.5% of the country’s GDP.