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At least six people were killed and 202 injured after a powerful earthquake in the Aegean Sea tore down buildings in the Turkish city of İzmir and created tidal waves on the Greek islands. .
Turkey’s disaster management authority said six people had died when the roughly 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck at 2:51 p.m. local time on Friday. One of the dead had drowned, the authority said.
The death toll is expected to rise, and Izmir’s mayor told CNN Turk television that at least 20 buildings had collapsed in the city, which is home to 4.5 million people.
The epicenter was located about 11 miles (17 km) from the province of Izmir and eight miles northeast of the Greek island of Samos, at a relatively shallow depth of about 10 miles.
Turkey’s disaster and emergency management agency calculated the magnitude lower than the United States Geological Survey at 6.6, while the European-Mediterranean Seismological Center said the earthquake had a preliminary magnitude of 6.9.
Significant damage has also been reported in the cities of Bornova and Bayraklı, Turkish Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu tweeted.
Greek media reported rockslides and some damage on the island of Samos, which is home to 45,000 people and where buildings are mostly low-rise. Local people have been urged to stay away from coastal areas in the event of a tsunami or further tremors, Efthymios Lekkas, head of the Greek organization for anti-seismic planning, told Greece’s Skai TV. Eight people are slightly injured in Samos, authorities said.
Dramatic images broadcast on Turkish television and shared on social media appeared to show flooding and receding seawater in the Turkish coastal city of Seferihisar and in Samos and Chios in Greece, which the mayor of Seferihisar described as a “small tsunami”.
Cars and household contents such as refrigerators, chairs and tables were swept through the streets of Seferihisar by moving water.
Mazlum Vesek, a reporter for the local newspaper Ege Telgraf in İzmir, said he had visited a hospital emergency room and counted dozens of injuries.
Vesek said he was walking down the street when the earthquake struck and “the ground rolled under my feet like a carpet.” He shared photos and videos of people screaming and trying to drag survivors out of one of the city’s collapsed apartment blocks.
“There are no death and casualty figures yet, but the hope of not having any is really low, looking at the collapsed buildings here in [the worst hit neighbourhood] Manavkuyu, ”he said. “People are on the street because they don’t want to go in.”
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said that “all the capabilities of our state” had been dispatched to help those affected by the earthquake. Search and rescue operations were underway throughout Izmir province, with medical helicopters and more than 100 people from the rest of the country en route.
Locals used chainsaws to cut through rubble from collapsed buildings while shouting for onlookers to be quiet, so they could hear the people trapped inside. At least one woman appears to have been rescued alive from the rubble so far.
People who cannot return to unsafe buildings can seek refuge in local mosques, said Ali Erbaş, head of Turkey’s religious authority.
The foreign ministers of Turkey and Greece have spoken by phone and are ready to help each other, Ankara said, despite tensions between the two countries over hydrocarbon exploration in the eastern Mediterranean.
Some tremors were also felt in Istanbul, Turkey’s largest city, some 500 km away, and Athens, the capital of Greece, although no damage was reported in either city, and as far away as Bulgaria.
Turkey, which sits on several active faults, is no stranger to deadly earthquakes. The most devastating in recent history was a 7.4 magnitude earthquake in the western region of Marmara in 1999, which killed more than 17,000 people.
