The violent earthquakes on Monday caused the death of more than 5,000 people, tens of thousands of injured and immense destruction in south-eastern Turkey and northern Syria.
by Nicolas Bourcier (Adana, Hatay, Samandag (Turkey), Special Envoy), Marie Jégo and Laure Stephan (Beirut, Correspondence)
On both sides from the border that separates Turkey and Syria over several hundred kilometers, everywhere they are the same scenes of dread, fear, deaf worries and anger. Twenty hours after the magnitude 7.8 earthquake occurred Monday, February 6, at 4:17 a.m., in the district of Pazarcik, located about sixty kilometers from the Syrian border, near the big city of Gaziantep, tens of thousands people continued to wander on the side of the roads, or what remains of it, looking for shelters or help.
The provisional assessment went to 3,419 dead in Turkey on Tuesday, according to the Government Catastrophe Management Organization (AFAD). This is the deadliest earthquake since 1999, when a violent shock had devastated the eastern part of the Marmara Sea, near Istanbul, killing more than 17,000 people.
The shock was felt throughout the region, causing immense destruction in ten Southeast provinces – Kahramanmaras, Adiyaman, Diyarbakir, Sanliurfa, Gaziantep, Kilis, Osmaniye, Malatya, Adana and Hatay. Replicas followed around forty in total, including a particularly strong (7.5), which occurred in the early afternoon, at 1:24 p.m. local time. Thousands of additional buildings, which had seemed to resist the first shock wave, collapsed.
Late in the evening, the emergency services had still not arrived in Kahramanmaras, considered to be the epicenter of the first earthquake, where hundreds of houses were destroyed. Nearly eighteen hours after the earthquake, neither the research and rescue teams nor the food supply had reached the area.
flattened houses
Elsewhere, the same scenes are repeated. The extent and extent of the damage is striking. Miles of lights without light, thousands of flattened or simply overturned houses. The asphalt torn here and there, like a vulgar sheet of paper. Everywhere, mud, stones or earth flows on the road and dwellings. The electric posts are lying on the aisles like simple pencils placed on the corner of a table. Some are folded in two or sprayed.
It was in Hatay that the earthquake struck the hardest, with 502 dead, according to the count – provisional – on Monday evening. In Diyarbakir, 309 deaths were counted, and 205 in Osmaniye.
By the road, at the entrance to the city, a house like so many others seems to be sunk in the ground like a boat in the ocean. They are a dozen to turn around, call, shout, in vain. Under the rubble is Remzi Saldiray, 63 years old. Father, he managed to get everyone out of the house. His mother, children, cousins, except him. He hasn’t answered for a few hours. His brother fixes the debris, his hands in heaven. He calls God for help, and cries. “No one has come since this morning, nobody …”, he repeats.
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