Updated on 02/25/2023 at 2:14 pm
- Two and a half weeks have passed since the earthquake in Turkey and Syria, and the death toll has already risen to 50,000.
- Turkish architects blame the government for the catastrophe.
Two and a half weeks after the earthquake disaster in the Turkish-Syrian border area, the death toll has risen to over 50,000.
In Turkey alone, there were 44,218 victims, the Turkish disaster agency Afad said late on Friday. The World Health Organization (WHO) recently reported 5,900 deaths in Syria. Activists at the Syrian Observatory came to believe that more than 6,700 had died that night. Hundreds of seriously injured people are still in mortal danger.
Aftershocks continue to shake the region and trigger panic. According to the Turkish government, 20 million people in the country are affected by the effects of the earthquake. The United Nations assumes that 8.8 million people will be affected in Syria. The earthquake areas were initially difficult to access. However, the rescue work continues and the number of victims increases as it goes along. There have been no more reports of survivors being rescued in recent days.
Updated on 2/21/2023 5:02 PM
After the devastating earthquakes in the Turkish-Syrian border area, southern Turkey was rocked by new severe earthquakes. The strength and destructive power of earthquakes depend on several factors.
Turkish Architects: The Government Endangered the Lives of Several People
The Turkish Chamber of Architects TMMOB attested that the government is largely to blame for the magnitude of the earthquake disaster. According to a council report, the government put many people’s lives at risk by later legalizing thousands of unauthorized buildings.
Nearly half of the buildings in the earthquake-affected region were built after 2001, when strict earthquake safety regulations were in place. However, half of the collapsed or badly damaged buildings date from this period. Construction supervision was transferred to the private sector, meaning that the state neglected its responsibility to the general public.
The report also criticized again that no aid had arrived in many places for days. The response to the crisis revealed that the state was extremely unprepared. Government-appointed governors would also have created a chaos of competences and delayed decisions.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and government officials have dismissed such criticism. Erdogan admitted that there were problems in the early days. For example, the government justified supply bottlenecks in crisis regions based on the size of the affected area and the severity of the disaster.
More than 9,000 aftershocks in the region
The series of earthquakes began on February 6, when two earthquakes measuring 7.7 and a little later than 7.6 hit southeast Turkey and northern Syria. According to Turkish sources, this was followed by over 9,000 aftershocks.
According to the United Nations, the earthquake disaster was not only the worst in Turkish history in terms of fatalities. The mountains of rubble are also unprecedented, said Louisa Vinton, United Nations Development Program (UNDP) representative in Turkey. According to the Turkish government, more than 173,000 buildings have been reported as collapsed or seriously damaged.
In Turkey, eleven provinces are affected by the earthquake, in Syria, the northwest. There is only scant information about the country’s situation in civil war. In the face of years of bombing and fighting, many people there were already living in precarious conditions before the tremors. (dpa/tas)