It has been 178 hours, i.e. a little over seven days, this Monday since the earth trembled with its epicenter in the Turkish region of Kahramanmaras when the rescue teams pulled out alive from the rubble of Adiyaman, around 160 kilometers to the east, on a six – year old girl named Miray. The next step is to get her older sister back. It’s little stories that survive the devastation a week after the movement of the East Anatolian Fault caused a magnitude 7.8 earthquake at 4:17 a.m. local time, two hours less in mainland Spain. It was only the first. At 1:24 p.m., in the same region, another earthquake, this time measuring 7.5 magnitude, again shook the ground in a strip connecting southeastern Turkey with northwestern Syria, a neighboring country.
Miracles like Miray’s continue to happen in this giant emergency device coordinated by the Turkish authorities in cooperation with foreign rescue workers. The tremors haven’t stopped either, some with magnitudes greater than 4, like the one recorded around 12:59 p.m. this Monday in Hatay province, a handful of kilometers from the Syrian border.
More information
The latest death toll is more than 35,000 (31,643 in Turkey and 4,300 in Syria), a figure that makes the Kahramanmaras earthquake the deadliest for the region in modern times. Around 13 million people were directly affected by the earthquake. As reported by Turkey’s Vice President Fuat Oktay on Monday, 1.2 million citizens have been relocated to emergency shelters, while 400,000 have been relocated to other provinces in the country.
international resonance
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The devastation caused by the earthquakes has provoked a very broad international response, but practically limited to Turkey. According to the latest data from Turkey’s Foreign Ministry, headed by Mevlut Cavusoglu, 100 countries have offered assistance to deal with the disaster; 81 are already present on Turkish soil through search and rescue teams for survivors. Ankara estimates that 9,456 foreign professionals are working on the debris left behind by the collapse of buildings and expects another 747 to join the task soon.
Despite the steady stream of successful rescue operations, the contingent of foreign rescue workers, including civilian and military personnel, who arrived in the first 48 hours after the initial tremor tended to return home. The Spanish Emergency Military Unit (UME), based in Islahiye in Gaziantep province, ended its field operations on Monday evening. The Community of Madrid (Ericam) Emergency and Response Team, who traveled to Iskenderun, will do so on Tuesday. The Kahramanmaras earthquake affected nine other provinces (Adiyaman, Kilis, Osmaniye, Gaziantep, Malatia, Sanliurfa, Diyarbakir, Adana and Hatay). Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government imposed a three-month state of emergency on all of them. Efforts to rescue survivors have already halted in four of them (Kilis, Sanliurfa, Osmaniye and Adana), where debris clearance and body recovery are continuing.
The work of some foreign contingents, such as the Austrians and Germans deployed in Hatay, was interrupted by situations of uncertainty arising from the chaos in the organization of the rescue operations, the desperation of those affected, attempts at violence, looting, etc. Appearance of gangs and armed citizens. On Sunday, the Israeli organization United Hatzalah announced that it was ceasing its activities due to an “imminent and concrete threat,” according to its Vice President Dovi Maisel.
Women and children seek shelter in a makeshift tent this Monday after the earthquakes in Ordekdede, Turkey DPA via Europa Press
collapsed buildings
The Turkish government has not provided any figures on the missing persons. Various Ministers and Vice-President Oktay have stated that it would be “wrong” to make estimates. The fact is, however, that people remain under the rubble. Geophysics professor and earthquake expert Övgün Ahmet Ercan, a regular in the Turkish media, estimates that around 155,000 people could remain under the destroyed buildings. “A person can survive even up to the tenth day. Over time they are no longer able to scream, make noise, they may seem dead but they are alive. Please be careful when removing dirt […]. In [el terremoto de 1999 en] Gölcük, these mistakes were made,” he interjected your Twitter account.
According to Turkey’s Ministry of Urban Planning, more than 33,000 buildings have collapsed or suffered serious structural damage and will be demolished. There are 153,000 apartments in these buildings, in which about 600,000 people lived, taking into account the average number of inhabitants per apartment unit of the Statistical Institute. So far, 236,000 residential buildings have been inspected, which is just over a third of the total in the region. There are cities like Kahramanmaras and Antioquia where half of their buildings and much of their infrastructure have become unusable. Because of this, the government estimates that more than a million of the region’s 13.5 million residents have been left homeless. Another source consulted by EL PAÍS, involved in dealing with the emergency, puts that number at two million homeless.
Turkish authorities have issued arrest warrants for nearly 200 builders, developers and supervisors, and police have already arrested several dozen people linked to the construction of collapsed buildings for alleged failure to follow necessary safety procedures. At least four construction workers were arrested while trying to leave the country.
More dead in Syria
The UN Office for Humanitarian Action (OCHA) has reported that the preliminary death toll in Syria exceeds 4,300. The earthquake affected parts of the northwestern edge of the Arab country, the provinces of Aleppo, Idlib, Latakia, Hama and Tartus. The country dealt a coup de grace to a region already devastated by nearly 12 years of internal conflict. The head of OCHA, British diplomat Martin Griffiths, said Monday while in Syria that efforts to rescue survivors in that country were “coming to an end”. Griffiths has confirmed that the UN is preparing to move aid from areas controlled by Bashar al-Assad’s government to regions controlled by armed groups “It is estimated that two million people in this area are in need of urgent assistance are”.
In the latest death toll released by Syrian volunteer group White Helmets, there are at least 2,167 deaths in the non-Damascus-controlled area. According to the person in charge of this rescue organization, Raed al Saleh, at least 550 buildings were completely destroyed by the earthquakes. Only a handful of foreign organizations were able to cross the border to help with the rescue effort, including one with three Spanish firefighters.
After meeting today with @UNReliefChief At the Turkish-Syrian border, thank you for apologizing for the shortcomings and mistakes. Acknowledging this is the beginning of the right path. Now @UNarabic must act outside the Security Council to open 3 crossings to NW for emergency aid #Syria. pic.twitter.com/A90knazX48
— Raed Al Saleh ( رائد الصالح ) (@RaedAlSaleh3) February 12, 2023
The only crossing point that is still open to UN convoys and has the capacity to mobilize aid on a larger scale is that of Bab al Hawa, in line with what was endorsed in the minimum UN Security Council resolution in January July reviewed ―Washington has been pushing for the past few hours to greenlight new text that opens up more border points―. However, due to deteriorating access routes from south-east Turkey, the first six trucks with humanitarian aid, which had been deployed before the earthquake, did not arrive until Friday. Safa Msehli, spokesman for the International Organization for Migration (IOM), which manages the shipment of international aid for this border crossing from its warehouses in Gaziantep, Turkey, has replied to EL PAÍS that 30 trucks are already able to reach the Syrian one Border with relief supplies for those affected by the earthquake ―they join other convoys flying the flags of Qatar and Saudi Arabia―. The White Helmets continue to call upon heavy machinery to rescue survivors, equipment that has not yet arrived.
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