He added: “Time is always the enemy, as seen in Turkey and Syria. Ilan Kelman, professor of disasters and health at University College London, said: “Typically, few survivors are pulled out after 72 hours – yet every life saved is essential and some people are extricated after many days.” “They dug up family, friends, neighbors.”īut other experts warn that the window for post-earthquake search-and-rescue is rapidly closing. “The community, the citizens, they’re the ones that are actually the first line of defense,” he told CNN Wednesday. Kit Miyamoto, president of non-profit Miyamoto Global Disaster Relief, also praised the community in Turkey who came together and “did their part” after the quake struck. How long can people survive under rubble?ĭespite the mounting challenges, a structural engineer and humanitarian coordinator urged rescuers not to abandon hope as survivors could be found up to “weeks” after the massive earthquake hit the region. But then again, there are things that are lacking.” “We have the permits from municipalities and controls for design, controls for construction. “The codes are very modern in Turkey, very similar to US codes, but again, the codes conformity is an issue that we’ve tried to tackle with legal and administrative procedures.” he explained. Survivors are still being pulled from the rubble more than 24 hours after Turkey earthquake Because of this, he said, many parts of Turkey have regional building regulations to ensure construction projects can withstand these types of events.Ī rescue team works on a collapsed building, following an earthquake in Osmaniye, Turkey February 6, 2023. USGS structural engineer Kishor Jaiswal told CNN Tuesday that Turkey has experienced significant earthquakes in the past, including a quake in 1999 which hit southwest Turkey and killed more than 14,000 people. “Total collapses are something you always try to avoid both in codes and the actual design,” he added. It makes the operation of the search and rescue teams very difficult.”Įrdik told CNN the images of widespread destruction and debris indicates “that there are highly variable qualities of designs and construction.” He says the type of structural failures following an earthquake are usually partial collapses. “In such collapses, it’s difficult – as you can see – and a very tragic to save lives. “The thing that strikes mostly are the type of collapses – what we call the pancake collapse – which is the type of collapse that we engineers don’t like to see,” said Mustafa Erdik, a professor of earthquake engineering at Bogazici University in Istanbul. More than 5,700 buildings in Turkey have collapsed, according to the country’s disaster agency, and questions have been asked about the integrity of structures in some areas of the affected regions. Monday’s quake was also one of the strongest that Turkey has experienced in the last century – a 7.8 magnitude quake hit the east of the country in 1939, which resulted in more than 30,000 deaths, according to the USGS. More than 5,700 buildings in Turkey have collapsed, according to the country’s disaster agency. Rescuers are now racing against time and the elements to pull survivors out from under debris on both sides of the border. More than 125 aftershocks have been recorded so far. A magnitude 6.7 aftershock followed 11 minutes after the first quake hit, but the largest temblor, which measured 7.5 in magnitude, struck about nine hours later. The 7.8 magnitude quake struck 23 kilometers (14.2 miles) east of Nurdagi, in Turkey’s Gaziantep province, at a depth of 24.1 kilometers (14.9 miles), the United States Geological Survey (USGS) said.Ī series of aftershocks reverberated through the region in the immediate hours after the initial incident. One of the most powerful earthquakes to hit the region in a century rocked residents from their slumber in the early hours of Monday morning around 4 a.m. Here’s what we know about the quake and why it was so deadly. Rescue teams are still desperately searching for signs of life beneath the rubble of collapsed buildings amid grim conditions, but days on from the massive tremblor, the chances of finding survivors lessen with every passing hour. Thousands of people have died and tens of thousands of others were injured by the devastating earthquakes that rocked Turkey and Syria on Monday.
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