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ISTANBUL • Rescue teams raced yesterday to find survivors in collapsed buildings in the Aegean port city of Izmir in Turkey after a powerful earthquake that killed at least 28 people.
The aftershocks continued after Friday’s 6.9-magnitude quake, with more than 5,000 people joining rescue efforts yesterday to focus on eight washed-out buildings.
Turkey’s Presidency of Emergency and Disaster Management said at least 831 people were injured, while the death toll included two people on a Greek island off the Turkish coast.
A mother and three of her children were rescued yesterday after being trapped for almost 18 hours under a building in Izmir.
Rescue teams continued efforts to free the woman’s fourth child, as the mayor of the Aegean port city said around 180 people remained trapped.
“In the meantime, we are delighted to hear miracles as a result of the diligent work of the rescue teams,” Mayor Tunc Soyer told Fox TV.
As bulldozers removed debris from collapsed buildings and rescuers dismantled the walls by hand, Environment Minister Murat Kurum said about 100 people had been rescued so far.
The first 300 of the 900 tents that were provided for the homeless were erected in the city.
Oguz Demirkapi, who was among the survivors ripped from a seven-story apartment block that collapsed in Izmir, said there could be up to two dozen people still under the rubble of his building.
“I formed a triangle of life between the wall and a television cabinet,” he said by phone.
“At first it was hard to breathe, but then a relative called and I was able to talk. The teams pulled me out half an hour later,” said Demirkapi, a 48-year-old executive at a mobile app company.
The epicenter of the earthquake, given a preliminary magnitude of 7.0 by the United States Geological Survey, was 17 kilometers from the coastal city of Seferihisar more than 10 kilometers below the seabed, authorities said.
The tremors were felt as far away as the commercial capital, Istanbul.
Izmir’s governor described a “partial tsunami” and Greek authorities issued a tsunami warning for the island of Samos after the earthquake, state-run ERT said.
“The bridges collapsed and we couldn’t get into the city,” Hasim Kavuklu, a hotel worker in the city of Sigacik, told Bloomberg by phone. “The sea first ebbed and then returned.”
Some vessels were wrecked in the Seferihisar marina, Kavuklu said, adding that there were concerns about fishing boats at sea.
A person using a wheelchair drowned in the area when the waters rose, BBC Turkish reported.
“There shouldn’t be so much destruction in this kind of earthquake,” the Birgun newspaper quoted disaster recovery expert Kubilay Kaptan as saying. “Buildings in Turkey should be resistant to earthquakes of magnitude 7, as a minimum.”
The people of Samos received a text message on their mobile phones to evacuate the coastal areas.
A high school student on the island died and another later died from injuries after a wall collapsed on them, ERT said.
Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis called on Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to offer his condolences for the “tragic loss of life from the earthquake that affected our two countries,” the Greek prime minister said in a Twitter post. “Whatever our differences, these are times when our people need to be united.”
The two countries have been embroiled for weeks in heated disputes over Turkish energy exploration in the eastern Mediterranean and the divided island of Cyprus.
France is in “total solidarity with the Greek and Turkish populations,” Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said via Twitter.
Turkey is located in one of the most active seismic zones in the world and is crossed by numerous faults. In 1999, two earthquakes with a magnitude of more than 7 struck northwestern Turkey, killing about 18,000 people.
BLOOMBERG, REUTERS
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