Suddenly it all became too much for Sibel Celik. As another corpse was dragged out of the ruins of Golcuk and zipped into a yellow body bag her grief boiled over into anger.
"Where are all our damned MPs now? Where's the bloody prime minister now?" she screamed at no one in particular. "Just look at this place. My father's dead in there. But where's all the machinery and all the help? The soldiers get everything and we get nothing."
Others joined in the sobbing. Everywhere, an incoherent rage was swelling.
Further along the road, a stone's throw from the oily waters of the Sea of Marmara, Ilhan Feyzioglu picked up a piece of rubble from a collapsed six-storey building in which his niece and mother-in-law died, crushing it into dust between his forefinger and thumb. "Just look what they build these houses from. It's worthless. Nothing. There are 20 people still buried in there. They've all been murdered."
Wearing a hat of folded newspaper as a sun shield, he rejoined the other local men digging with hammers, shovels, and one pneumatic drill. "Where is all the machinery anyway? The whole world has to help you."
Much of Golcuk, near Izmit in western Turkey, has been levelled by Tuesday's earthquake. After the shock, the terror, and the grief, anger is bubbling over.
Anger at the blase politicians who feign surprise at yet another earthquake, despite the fact that the north Anatolian faultline runs right across the country, leaving 85 per cent of Turkey vulnerable to devastation. Rage at the greedy contractors who make a killing out of building cheap slums on what might as well be sand. Despair at the corrupt bureaucrats who turn a blind eye to construction laws in return for the builders' kickbacks.
"We're all very angry," said Tarik Turhan (24), an engineering student. "We need machinery, experts, and technology. But the big guys in their big safe houses just think of money and nothing else. They're okay in their palaces."
The road around the Sea of Marmara yesterday was a scene of heat, dust and anarchy. Traffic ground to a halt for hours as five columns of vehicles tried to squeeze on to three narrow lanes.
Policing was left to young local vigilantes brandishing big sticks and enforcing their own kind of order, while a dozen policemen sat in the shade of the mosque drinking tea, chewing olives, and playing with their mobile phones.
Ambulances screamed up and down the middle of the road while countless private charities dashed around aimlessly, seeking a target for their benevolence.
The hapless military bore the brunt of local tempers, with screaming matches erupting between soldiers and civilians.
There was no one in charge. There was no co-ordination. And away from Golcuk and the inarticulate rage of the victims, a flood of more reasoned criticism was directed at Turkey's political elite whose complacency has been staggering given the high probability of the earthquake striking here.
The 500-mile north Anatolian fault that runs east to west across Turkey has caused an earthquake stronger than 6.7 on the Richter scale every six years on average for the past half century.
Yet when disaster struck on Tuesday the lack of preparation was such that President Suleyman Demirel was left incommunicado for four hours when the phone lines were knocked out. "Earthquakes are Turkey's fate," noted Rahmi Pinar, Istanbul University professor of geophysics. "Precautions need to be taken through government legislation."
The National Association of Geophysics Engineers echoed the criticism of the government, blaming "uncontrolled construction" in the earthquake zone for the high casualty toll.
Tuesday's catastrophe hit the most heavily populated part of the country. The 60-mile road along the Marmara shore from Istanbul to Izmit is one long building site, with shoddy, unfinished breezeblock structures sprouting everywhere out of the sunbaked earth.
That the earthquake would strike where it did was predicted as a 12 per cent probability by US and Turkish scientists two years ago. The warnings were ignored and now the recrimination is great, not least because of the haphazard and anarchic response to the tragedy.
While the damage to Golcuk is shocking, locals complained bitterly that most of the rescue and relief effort was being directed at the adjacent naval base where 200 people died.
Scratching around in the rubble, Mr Feyzioglu said: "We heard voices here yesterday. But we couldn't do anything. There was no help. A couple of bulldozers have come now. But it's too late."
Tim Radford adds:
Global positioning satellites mapping fixed points on the ground to within millimetres around Izmit might have provided warning of the calamity, US scientists said yesterday.
Prof Nafi Toksaz, a Turkish-born geophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said he and colleagues were within six months of placing a surveillance system around Izmit, which might give hours of warning of future shocks.
The landmass south of the Anatolian fault - the site of Tuesday's earthquake - is moving westward at 3 cm a year relative to the northern landmass.