Scientists know about the Turkey–Syria earthquake

Seyhun Puskulcu, director of the Istanbul Earthquake Foundation, tells NPR that the earthquake struck a border region of Turkey and Syria

Seyhun Puskulcu, a seismologist and coordinator of the Turkish Earthquake Foundation, based in Istanbul, says people in Turkey are well aware of their vulnerability to earthquakes. “This wasn’t a surprise,” says Puskulcu, who last week was touring the cities of Adana, Tarsus and Mersin, and areas of western Turkey, delivering workshops on earthquake awareness.

The people need to prepare for more earthquakes and the weather getting worse. Ilan Kelman, who studies disasters and health at University College London, says that there is a chance of major earthquakes for weeks and months.

Every nation in the world experiences earthquakes, from the highest peaks of the Himalayan Mountains to the lowest valleys of the Dead Sea. However, the distribution of these quakes is not random.

The Arabian and the Eurasian are two massive plates that meet underneath Turkey. The earth slipped 100 miles from one side to the other.

Rescue crews pulled more survivors from the rubble of collapsed buildings despite losing hope that any of them would survive the huge earthquake that struck a border region of Turkey and Syria.

“I know my son is inside and I think he’s still alive. His brother dug with his hands to find him,” she told NPR. Hours later, as diggers chipped away at the ruins of the building, rescuers found Sedat’s body and wrapped it in a blanket for his mother to say goodbye.

Survival after a disaster: Earthquake activities in the Gaziantep region, Turkey, according to David Rothery, an engineering professor at the Open University

The first 72 hours after a disaster can be crucial for people to survive. In neighboring Syria, the government has blamed Western sanctions for hampering relief efforts, but the U.S. says sanctions do not include humanitarian assistance. Northern Syria lacks heavy equipment and infrastructure to aid the hundreds of thousands of people displaced by the disaster and the only U.N.-approved road from Turkey to that region has been damaged by the earthquake.

Syria’s 12-year war has forced millions of people to flee the country and left them dependent on aid. The fighting sent millions more to seek refuge in Turkey.

More than 370,000 people who have been temporarily displaced due to this disaster have been provided with tents by Turkey’s emergency management agency.

Rescuers are digging through rubble to find survivors after the earthquake killed at least eight people and left many more injured. Nature talked to four scientists about what the next few days will bring and they all said there has been activity in the region.

Most of Turkey sits on the Anatolian plate between two major faults: the North Anatolian Fault and the East Anatolian Fault. The tectonic plate that carries Arabia, including Syria, is moving northwards and colliding with the southern rim of Eurasia, which is squeezing Turkey out towards the west, says David Rothery, a geoscientist at the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK. “Turkey is moving west about 2 centimetres per year along the East Anatolian Fault,” he adds. “Half the length of this fault is lit up now with earthquakes.”

In a study1 published last March in Soil Dynamics and Earthquake Engineering, Arzu Arslan Kelam at the Middle East Technical University, Ankara, and her colleagues suggested that the centre of the city of Gaziantep would experience medium-to-severe damage from a magnitude-6.5 earthquake. This is because most existing buildings are low-rise brick structures that are constructed very close to each other.

Building standards in Syria have been difficult to enforce since the conflict began over a decade ago. Buildings collapsing in the northwest regions of Syria as a result of the earthquake. Some war damaged buildings in Syria have been rebuilt using low-quality materials, according to Rothery. They might have fallen down more easily than things built at a bigger expense. We’ve yet to find out,” he adds.

The weather for tonight is forecast to be below freezing. That means that people who are trapped in the rubble, who might be rescued, could well freeze to death. So these hazards continue,” he adds.

In Kahramanmaras, a city near the epicenter of the quake, Turkey’s President said that the country was faced with a “great disaster”. There is growing public anger about the rescue response and there were shortfalls by the government in the aftermath of the earthquake. The president cited winter weather conditions and destroyed infrastructure, including airport runways, as complicating factors.

Istanbul’s stock exchange was closed after the first trading session showed rapid declines and triggered a circuit breaker. The Turkish economy was reeling from the high price of goods and services.

The Importance of Design and Construction for the Study of Building Codes in the Middle East: The Case of Turkish Earthquake Turkey Syria

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.

A number of factors have contributed to making this earthquake so lethal. One of them is the time of day it occurred. Many people are trapped in the rubble of their homes because they were asleep when the earthquake hit.

Poor conditions have made rescue and recovery operations more difficult on both sides of the border after teams have arrived because of the cold and wet weather.

The images of widespread destruction and debris show that there are many variable qualities of designs and construction. Participants collapses are usually the type of structural failures after an earthquake. “Total collapses are something you always try to avoid both in codes and the actual design,” he added.

The structures may not perform well if they are not designed for the intensity of the earthquake that they will experience.

Erdik also said he believed many of the buildings that have collapsed were likely “built pre-1999 or … with older codes.” He added there also would have been instances where some buildings didn’t conform to code.

The codes in Turkey are very modern and similar to US codes but the issue of codesconformity is something we have tried to address with legal procedures. He explained what he had said. “We have the permits from municipalities and controls for design, controls for construction. There are things that are lacking.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/07/middleeast/earthquake-turkey-syria-why-deadly-intl/index.html

Why is the epicenter of earthquake-turkey-syria so dangerous? CNN interviews with Miyamoto, a human-centered humanitarian mission in Turkey, during the 2020 January earthquake

Rescuers were urged not to abandon hope, as survivors could be found up to weeks after the earthquake, despite the mounting challenges. 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.

“The community, the citizens, they’re the ones that are actually the first line of defense,” he told CNN Wednesday. “They dug up family, friends, neighbors.”

Some people warn that the window is rapidly closing for search-and-rescue. 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.”

He said that time is the enemy in Turkey and Syria. People die due to immediate medical needs such as bleeding to death or succumbing to crush injuries; due to aftershocks that collapse precarious structures with people underneath; and due to the weather which has dropped below freezing at night and which has been cold during the day, so people die through hypothermia. Many die from lacking food and water while awaiting rescue.”

Many people may not know that the “Richter Scale” which was used by scientists for many years is still used today, but that the MMI is a more accurate measure of a quake’s size.

The power of an earthquake is known as magnitude. The intensity of shaking is affected by a number of factors, such as the geography and depth of the earthquake. On the magnitude scale, each increase of one whole number translates to 32 times more energy.

The 8.1 magnitude quake that struck a region near the South Sandwich Islands in the southern Atlantic Ocean in January of 2020 is the strongest one to hit anywhere in the world.

CNN has a severe weather expert who says they always discuss the epicenter, but in this case they should talk about the epi-line.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/07/middleeast/earthquake-turkey-syria-why-deadly-intl/index.html

Implications of the 2011 Japan earthquake in Islahiye: The collapse of buildings and pedestrian buildings, and the destruction of buildings across the Nurdagi

But in a “strike slip,” the plates move horizontally, rather than vertically. “Why that matters is because the buildings don’t want to go back and forth. Then the waves begin to go back and forth as well.

In comparison with other large earthquakes around the world, the 2011 Japan quake and tsunami – in which more than 22,000 people were killed or went missing – registered a magnitude of 9.1.

The worst nuclear disaster on record was caused after walls of water engulfed entire towns and dragged houses onto highways.

In Islahiye, dozens of buildings across the city have collapsed. In the city center, a group of residential buildings just west of the Hacı Ali Öztürk mosque appear flattened.

The debris of those two buildings, four and six stories tall, litter the street. Despite the building underneath collapsing one of the roofs appears to remain intact.

The town’s “Great Garden,” normally a verdant green space with benches and shops, is now full of tents, likely to shelter survivors and emergency crews.

At least two large high-rise buildings, located just south of the park, have collapsed. Three more on the northern side of the park have also collapsed.

A significant number of vehicles are seen in the area. Like in other parts of the Nurdagi, some of the buildings that are still standing have a significant amounts of debris surrounding them.

Dramatic Rescue of a Narli Family, a 12-year-old, and a Girl in a Building in Hatay

Dramatic rescues were being broadcast on Turkish television, including the rescue of the Narli family in central Kahramanmaras 133 hours after the 7.8-magnitude temblor struck Monday. First, 12-year-old Nehir Naz Narli was saved, then both of her parents.

The TV network reported that the rescue of a family of five from a mound of debris in the town of Nurdagi happened on the same day. The rescuers yelled, ” God is great!” as the last family member, the father, was lifted to safety.

“In some parts of our settlements close to the fault line, we can say that almost no stone was left standing,” he said earlier Saturday from Diyarbakir.

Melisa Ulku, a woman in her 20s, was extricated from the rubble in Elbistan in the 132th hour since the quake, following the rescue of another person at the same site in the same hour. The police told people to not cheer or clap in order to avoid interfering with other rescue efforts nearby. She was covered in a thermal blanket on a stretcher. Rescuers were hugging. Some people shouted that God is great.

Just an hour earlier, a 3-year-old girl and her father were pulled from debris in the town of Islahiye, also in Gaziantep province, and soon after a 7-year-old girl was rescued in the province of Hatay.

The rescues brought shimmers of joy amid overwhelming devastation days after Monday’s 7.8-magnitude quake and a powerful aftershock hours later caused thousands of buildings to collapse, killing more than 25,000, injuring another 80,000 and leaving millions homeless.

Not everything ended so well. Rescuers were able to get to a girl inside the debris of a collapsed building in Hatay province. But she died before the medical teams could amputate a limb and free her from the rubble, Hurriyet newspaper reported.

As help continued to arrive, a 99-member group from the Indian Army’s medical assistance team started treating the injured in a temporary field hospital in Iskenderun, where a main hospital was demolished.

He claims to have been saved from the collapsed apartment building in Antakya in the middle of the day on Monday. But after receiving basic first aid, he was released without getting proper treatment for his injuries.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/11/1156313344/turkey-syria-earthquake-death-toll-survivors

The Miracle of Antakya Is Over: The First Day of Operation of a Graveyard for Syria’s Earthquake Death toll Survivors

I buried everyone that I lost, then came here. Canbulat said, counting his dead relatives: “My daughter is dead, my sibling died, my aunt and her daughter died, and the wife of her son” who was 8 ½ months pregnant.

A large makeshift graveyard was under construction on the outskirts of Antakya on Saturday. The field on the northeastern edge of the city was dug up by backhoes and bulldozers as trucks and ambulances arrived in large numbers. Soldiers directed traffic on the busy road and warned motorists not to take pictures.

A worker with Turkey’s Ministry of Religious Affairs who did not wish to be identified because of orders not to share information with the media said that around 800 bodies were brought the cemetery on Friday, its first day of operation. He said as many as 2,000 people had been buried by midday on Saturday.

If the people survive, it’s a miracle. Most of the people that come out now are dead, and they come here,” he said.

Temperatures remained below freezing across the large region, and many people have no shelter. The Turkish government has distributed millions of hot meals, as well as tents and blankets, but is still struggling to reach many people in need.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/11/1156313344/turkey-syria-earthquake-death-toll-survivors

The Assad-Zakariya Campaign in Aleppo, Syria: Construction amnesties released before the 2018 general election in a coastal city

Assad and his wife Asma visited Duha Nurallah and her son Ibrahim Zakariya, who were pulled out of rubble in a nearby coastal town, Syrian state TV said on Saturday.

The World Health Organization’s head, Tedros Adhanom-Gybeyesus, came to Syria’s northern city of Aleppo on Saturday with 35 tons of medical equipment. He said that another plane carrying medical equipment will arrive in the next few days.

The total number of deaths in Syria’s northwestern rebel-held region have now reached 2,166. The death toll in Syria was 3553 while in Turkey it was 21,043.

The problem of over 150,560 citizens of Maras was solved with the release of the construction amnesties that allow contractors to ignore safety codes when building apartment blocks, houses and office buildings.

Duvar cited a senior Istanbul city official, Bugra Gokce, who gave a breakdown of the tens of thousands of building amnesty certificates granted before the 2018 general election in 10 provinces struck by the earthquake. There are more than 40,000 certificates in the hard-hit Gaziantep province.

According to Turkish media reports, some builders had to pay a fine, but their projects could go forward, if they did not meet code restrictions.

The country’s main association of engineers and architects lambasted the practice of amnesties for builders, saying that it was an invitation to death.

On the earthquake that caused a valley to divide: “An unbelievable sound that could have caused an unbelievable sound” a Turkish resident told AFP

A verdant olive grove was cleaved into two during last week’s devastating earthquake in Turkey, creating a valley 984 feet long (about 300 meters) that now divides the area.

A Turkish news agency quoted an individual who lives in the neighborhood as saying that last week’s earthquake created an incredible sound where he lived.

He implored for experts to inspect the area for possible future damage. He stated that there are 7000 thousand people living in this town and there are 1000 houses. If it had been closer, it would have happened in the middle of our town.