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Aid workers are doing their best today to find survivors amid the rubble of collapsed buildings in western Turkey, after a strong earthquake that killed 27 people in the country and in neighboring Greece.
In Bayrakli in Turkey’s Izmir province, humanitarian workers, equipped with platforms, tried overnight to fight their way through the huge rubble of a seven-story building, according to an AFP correspondent.
In the distance, the sounds of a crowd could be heard as aid workers pulled a body out of the rubble. One man, with no news from relatives, said, “Let me see who it is!”
The earthquake, which the American Institute of Geophysics estimated at 7 on the Richter scale, and Turkish authorities at 6.6, struck the Aegean Sea southwest of Izmir, Turkey’s third-largest city on Friday afternoon. , and near the Greek island of Samos.
Due to the force of the earthquake, the residents of Istanbul and Athens felt it. And it triggered a limited tsunami on the island of Samos in the Aegean Sea, and a tide that flooded the streets of a city on the western coast of Turkey.
Faced with the disaster, Turkey and Greece put aside their diplomatic differences and expressed their willingness to exchange aid.
For its part, Greece announced the death of two people and the injuries of nine others, while the Turkish coast of the Aegean Sea was the most affected. In Turkey, 25 people were killed and 804 injured, the government’s emergency authority said.
Tents for those affected
In Bayergli, which has a population of 300,000, the authorities set up tents to allow local people to stay overnight and distribute soup to them.
Nermin Yeni, 56, was in her kitchen when the shaking started. “I ran out and collapsed,” he says, in front of a tent where he spent the night.
Not far away, a family gathered around a bonfire to protect themselves from the autumn chill. People slept in their cars or in sleeping bags on the street.
In the neighborhood, hammers and bulldozers are loud, and doctors sometimes call for total silence, hoping to hear from potential survivors before resuming their tireless work.
Since the earthquake, about 100 people have been pulled alive from the rubble, Environment Minister Murad Korum said today.
Replicas
Many people in the area whose houses have survived have chosen to stay outside, as the fear of aftershocks is great. Since the main earthquake on Friday, there have been more than 500 aftershocks, according to authorities.
Aziza Akion spent the night watching as paramedics tried to break through the rubble of two neighboring apartment buildings that completely collapsed. “These curtains belong to my brother-in-law,” he told the France-Presse agency, referring to a cloth that appears among the rubble.
And she whispered, “God willing, they’ll come out alive. It’s the first time I’ve experienced something like this.”
For his part, Jamaluddin Injinyurt, a fifty-one-year-old retired soldier, expressed his despair after the walls of his house were cracked, and did not know if it was still habitable.
He explained: “We felt it was better to stay abroad. The climate in Izmir is moderate and we can continue in the short term. But for how long?”
17 hours
Despite the chaos, a ray of hope emerged. Two women were rescued 17 hours after the earthquake, the government confirmed. as such More than six thousand rescuers have been deployed in the affected area, as explained by the Turkish presidency.
The strong earthquake rekindled fears of a massive earthquake expected by experts in the country’s economic capital.
It is noteworthy that in 1999 a 7.4 magnitude earthquake struck northwestern Turkey, killing 17,000 people, including about 1,000 in Istanbul.
