At least 20,000 people have now died as a result of the earthquakes that struck southwest Turkey and northern Syria on Monday. This number is expected to rise as rescue workers search through the debris left by thousands of destroyed structures. The verified fatalities in Turkey were more than 17.000 on Thursday night, while more than 3,300 people killed in neighboring Syria.
Many people are still trapped among the wreckage of collapsed buildings around southeast Turkey. As of Thursday afternoon, more than 6,444 buildings throughout 10 provinces demolished due to the two significant earthquakes and the hundreds of aftershocks.
The majority of the structures that collapsed on Monday were built before 1999, when the Western Marmara region was devastated by an earthquake with a magnitude of 7.6 that killed 17,500 people. In order to get Turkey ready for the next major earthquake, the government considerably updated the country's seismic design code and started an expansive urban redevelopment project in 2008.
“We are dealing with truly massive earthquakes here,” Professor Okan Tuysuz, a geological engineer from Istanbul Technical University, said. “The first one was roughly equivalent to the energy release from an explosion of about 5 million tonnes of TNT. The second was equivalent to 3.5 million tonnes. Most buildings would struggle to withstand such force.”
“For years we held conferences, wrote reports and sent them to local authorities. We told them big earthquakes will inevitably hit cities like Hatay and Gaziantep again,” Tuysuz said. “We explained to them however strong, no building built directly on a fault line can survive an earthquake – it would be torn apart. We said we should create accurate fault-line maps for the entire country and transform areas directly on active fault lines into green zones with construction bans. No one listened.”
Sinan Turkkan, civil engineer and president of Turkey’s Earthquake Retrofit Association, agreed. “Not only were the earthquakes extremely forceful, but they also hit in quick succession,” he explained. “Many buildings only received light to medium damage in the first quake but collapsed after the second one.”
The possibilities of finding more survivors diminished after more than 72 hours since the terrible earthquakes struck. However, 45-year-old Akgun Eker was pulled out alive by rescue workers in Adana, Turkey. Furthermore, an eight-year-old kid was rescued in Diyarbakir, while a two-year-old boy was saved from a burning building in Antakya. The two had been submerged in the rubble for about 80 hours.
Tens of thousands of survivors were evacuated from the worst-affected Turkish cities as rescue attempts went on. In the meantime, residents of Syrian towns assisted in burying those who had died in the earthquake.
Sources: aljazeera.com, aljazeera.com
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