Digging continues at dozens of collapsed buildings in Ercis and Van as death toll after 7.2-magnitude quake rises to more than 200 -
Rescue teams in eastern Turkey are working frantically to pull more survivors from the wreckage of dozens of collapsed buildings following an earthquake in which at least 279 people were killed and hundreds of others injured or trapped.There was increasing concern for tens of thousands of people forced to spend the night outdoors in near-freezing temperatures in the mountainous Van region, as their damaged homes were shaken by a succession of aftershocks.
"It is a very urgent situation," Hakki Erskoy,, a disaster manager for the Turkish Red Crescent, said, adding that his organisation was dealing with 40,000 homeless people, adding. "Right now, we are facing a race against time to provide shelter for people."
Sunday's 7.2-magnitude quake had the most severe effect in Ercis, a town of around 75,000 people, where an estimated 80 buildings collapsed. The provincial capital, Van, about 60 miles to the south, experienced substantial damage as well, and the situation was bad in many surrounding villages. According to the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who toured the region by helicopter, virtually all mud-brick homes had collapsed. He told a late-night press conference in Van: "Because the buildings are made of mud-brick, they are more vulnerable to quakes. I must say that almost all buildings in such villages are destroyed."
He returned to Ankara to chair a cabinet meeting about the disaster.
While death tolls given by government ministers varied, the number of dead is likely to rise substantially as bodies are removed from the rubble. Rescue teams used diggers and cranes to remove bigger pieces of debris before going through wreckage using picks, bars and their bare hands to find survivors, working through the night under floodlights. One report said 24 people had been pulled from rubble alive in two hours during the first morning after the quake. While this slowed, there were still successes.
Rescuers were often led to survivors via mobile phone calls. A man, Yalcin Akay, was saved from a collapsed six-storey building in Ercis after he called an emergency line and described his location, the Anatolia news agency reported. Three others, including two children, were also rescued from the building.
Witnesses watched a woman and her daughter being painstakingly released from beneath a concrete slab. "I'm here, I'm here," the woman called to rescuers.
Others had to wait and hope. One woman at another building in Ercis said she had spoken to a fellow teacher six hours after the quake. "She's my friend, and she called me to say that she's alive and she's stuck in the rubble near the stairs of the building," she said. "She told me she was wearing red pyjamas." One particularly urgent search was centred on a collapsed student dormitory in Ercis. "University students are said to be living here," Mustafa Bilgin, a mine rescue expert, said. "We don't know how many of them are still inside – we've reached their computers, clothing, but we did not see anyone."
Despite worries about the ease with which so many tall buildings collapsed – poor construction standards have been blamed for the high death tolls in previous quakes in Turkey – the interior minister, Idris Naim Sahin, said the final tally may be lower than initially feared. "There could be around 100 people [still in the rubble]. It could be more or it could be less," he said. "But we are not talking about thousands."
The Red Crescent has set up tented relief camps in two stadiums in Ercis, also distributing tents to those who prefer to remain near their homes. It was also handing out supplies such as blankets, sleeping bags and heaters.
Another task, Erskoy said, was providing emotional support for the bereaved or those waiting to hear about the missing. "This is very difficult work," he said. "We're working with psychologists to provide the best support that we can."
Some significant relief efforts were being organised via social media such as Twitter and Facebook. Erhan Çelik, a journalist for Turkey's Kanal 7 TV station, passed to his 22,000 Twitter followers an appeal for people to offer accommodation to those made homeless. Within a few hours, he said, he had received 17,000 emails in response.
There was also a darker side. Van province has a majority Kurdish population and is a centre of support for the banned separatist Kurdish Workers' party (PKK).
A Turkish TV host triggered protests after asking why Kurds who sometimes battled the police should expect help from officers. Çelik said he had received abusive replies after tweeting condolences in Kurdish as well as Turkish.
A number of countries have offered assistance with both relief aid and search and rescue efforts. Erdogan said Turkey was able to cope for the time being.
