TURKEY:At least 80 people died and 480 were injured when an earthquake hit the town of Bingol in south-eastern Turkey in the early hours of yesterday morning.
Rescuers looked set to work through the night in increasingly desperate efforts to save schoolchildren believed to have been trapped when their dormitory building collapsed.
Exactly how many children remain hidden in the rubble is not clear.
While regional officials have given a figure of 94, the school's headmaster, Mr Mustafa Gurkan, thinks it could be much higher. "198 children were in the building last night," he told CNN-Turk yesterday. "So far only 76 have been saved." A further five were found dead.
Built to provide free accommodation for children from the outlying villages of this poor, sparsely populated agricultural region, the dormitory's concrete stays proved too weak to withstand the shock of the earthquake, which struck at 3.27 a.m. local time.
Some of the survivors said they owed their lives to the dormitory's heavy steel wardrobes, which prevented concrete blocks from crushing them.
Ali Kosele (16), who was pulled out unharmed after eight hours in the wreckage, told NTV that he had been "frightened but in no danger. The wardrobes saved me and many of my friends."
Locals were the first to reach the scene and were soon joined by civilian and military rescue teams equipped with heavy machinery and sniffer dogs. A cordon was formed round the dormitory after rescuers complained that agitated onlookers made it impossible for them to hear shouts for help.
Unable to cope with the number of injured, the local hospital was forced to set up beds outside. Other victims were taken by helicopter to hospitals in the town of Elazig, 85 miles west of Bingol.
On his return to Ankara from a visit to the affected region, the Prime Minister, Mr Tayyip Erdogan, said his government would send 600 billion lira (€350,000) of emergency funds to the region.
The Greek government, whose solidarity with Turkey following the huge earthquake which struck near Istanbul in 1999 did so much to improve traditionally frosty relations, also said it would be giving substantial aid.
That year is in people's minds for other reasons, too. Back then thousands of people died, crushed when their shoddily built apartment blocks collapsed.
Hundreds of court cases were brought against constructors who, in an effort to cut costs, flouted safety regulations requiring steel-reinforced concrete.
Standing near the rubble of the Bingol dormitory, supposedly built to withstand high seismic shock, many parents could not contain their anger.
"The stable I built did not collapse, but the school did," said Mr Abdullah Gunala, whose 11-year old son was pulled alive from the wreckage.
"What we see here is a failure to comply with regulations on building tenders," Mr Erdogan said during his visit to the stricken town.
"It could be that the collapsed building's preliminary ground studies were not done properly. It could be that the building materials were of poor quality."
The director of the Kandilli Earthquake Engineering Institute in Istanbul, Prof Mustafa Erdik, agreed.
"There are strict laws governing the design and construction of public buildings, particularly schools and hospitals", he said. "The problem is that, until recently, there was no pre-selection of bidding contractors. With public money short, the authorities more often than not gave work to the lowest bidder."
His colleague, Prof Nuray Aydinoglu, pointed to another problem. "Supervision [of the construction] of public buildings in Turkey is the work of state-employed engineers", he said. "But they just aren't numerous enough, or in some cases qualified enough, to do the work."
Earthquakes are commonplace in Turkey, which is drifting slowly westwards under pressure from continental plates to the north and south. But Bingol, on the cusp of two of the country's most active fault lines, is at the heart of a notoriously high-risk area.
An earthquake in 1971, measured at 6.6 on the Richter scale, killed people in the town. In 1939, in the strongest earthquake ever recorded in Turkey, an estimated 33,000 people died in the city of Erzincan, 100 miles north-west of Bingol.