Death toll from latest earthquakes in Turkey reaches eight | Turkey-Syria earthquake 2023
The death toll from two earthquakes that struck Turkey and Syria on Monday – two weeks after powerful tremors killed more than 47,000 people – has risen to eight, with up to 300 recovering from injuries and up to a dozen Buildings collapsed on both sides of the border.
Widespread fear and panic sparked by the recent tremors has rocked a region still grappling with the devastation caused earlier this month.
The seismic activity was felt in Egypt, Israel, Jordan and Lebanon, where schools and public services were closed on Tuesday, partly to calm people’s nerves.
Millions of people who have fled devastated cities in southern Turkey and northern Syria, both badly hit by Monday night’s two tremors, now fear for their lives in makeshift shelters.
The first 6.3 magnitude quake struck near the Turkish city of Antakya, which was nearly destroyed by the February 6 quake and is largely uninhabitable. The second hit, near the Mediterranean coast, echoed deep into the Levant, underscoring the geological implications of one of the largest earthquakes of the century.
Most of the injuries were caused by people jumping off buildings or falling over rubble and walls in an attempt to escape. With much of the earthquake area already in ruins and few people left in the hardest-hit areas, the death toll was relatively small.
In the disaster area of southern Turkey, two weeks of earthquakes and aftershocks have carved a random path, destroying some communities and seemingly sparing others.
Two weeks later, the seismology of the massive quake’s spread is largely understood, but how some population centers near the epicenters avoided the worst of the damage is increasingly the focus of regulators and politicians, who are faced with a wave of anger from some survivors who claim the catastrophe was contained by human error as well as nature.
Two major hubs in southern Turkey – Antakya and Gaziantep – were cited as case studies, with the former’s near-destruction being contrasted by locals with the latter’s near-intact state.
In the Kurdish-majority city of Adıyaman, large rows of dwellings collapsed like houses of cards, leaving much of the cityscape in heaps. The city is uninhabitable, along with nearby Antakya and Kahramanmaraş.
after newsletter promotion
Ahead of an election that could take place as early as May, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is facing mounting pressure to explain how so many buildings collapsed so easily, burying tens of thousands of people who had been sleeping when the first quake struck at 4:17 a.m.
In the aftermath, a spotlight was placed on the widespread provision of homes that did not meet seismic standards, and calls for improvements in building standards in Turkey and developing countries around the world increased.
There are new demands on the authorities to guarantee safe housing as a human right. “In principle, safe housing is already a human right that is enshrined in various UN treaties,” said Sara Pantuliano, executive director of the global affairs think tank ODI. “But the evidence from the recent catastrophic earthquakes in Turkey and Syria shows only too well that the principle is not the practice. As we have seen, unsafe housing means that a natural hazard such as an earthquake becomes a major tragedy when it could have been at least partially averted.”