Until this week, Golcuk was a quiet seaside town with a few factories and a huge naval base. Now, says the mayor, 10,000 people are buried under the rubble of collapsed buildings.
No one who witnessed the chaos and devastation unfold in the town yesterday would dare disagree.
At least half the town's living quarters fell to the ground during Tuesday's earthquake and the rest, cracked and only just defying gravity, will probably never be occupied again.
In one quarter (right), a barely-damaged mosque stands proud among the rubble of several collapsed apartment blocks. Others teeter at an angle. Almost all will have to be demolished.
Golcuk went up fast in the 1970s and 1980s to meet the needs of rapid industrial expansion, and now it has come down even faster. All this town is fit for now is the wrecker's ball.
Banks, filling stations, offices and parts of the naval base all gave way once the earth heaved. Fires have burst out in the ruins in several places, sending thick fumes of acrid smoke into the air and lending the town a doom-laden atmosphere.
Survivors young and old sleep huddled up against their belongings along the town's main street, which is constantly choked with traffic. Arriving emergency services spend precious time snarled up in traffic jams as the remaining residents flee with what little they have salvaged from the disaster.
There is no water available locally, and parts of the town are flooded due to a rise in the Sea of Marmara.
In front of the town hall the clock has stopped at the precise time the earthquake struck, at 3 a.m. And three days on, the search for survivors goes on.
Men and women grapple with masonry and steel rods with their bare hands. They lean into dark, dusty crevices and shout the names of loved ones, trying to make themselves heard above the mayhem.
Down a side-street a JCB starts to dig into a pile of rubble, watched over by the relatives of those buried inside. After a minute a body appears, but it is too late; the digger has already sliced through the man's left leg.
His relatives leap forward into the cloud of dust, fumbling the leg and the rest of the corpse into a blanket.
"There is no co-operation, no co-ordination. No one is in charge," says Bulend Ertekin. His mother is in this mound somewhere, but around the back.
He says there is a strong odour there, and her body might be easily found. But there are not enough people to start digging on a second front and the JCB, a rough instrument at the best of times, is all they have.
Bulend points in exasperation at the two soldiers who are now picking at the debris with crowbars. "They come for a while, and then they go away. They do a bit of work, then disappear. What are our soldiers good for, except coups d'etat?"
A thousand broken hopes and dreams spill out of every ruined building. Toys, English-language tapes, travel brochures, keep-fit machines, Korans. Washing still flutters on clothes-lines no one dares to approach - ordinary lives devastated by the whim of nature and the negligence of man.
Elsewhere, families are packing up to go. Men venture into their devastated homes, risking injury should the teetering edifices collapse.
A father uses a rope to lower the family sofa down from the third floor, his sons gather up their comics and books, and an empty birdcage. Their grandmother, who is 81 years old, sits in a trance by the roadside.
People like Kemal Yazgi are the lucky ones. He takes me into his ground-floor apartment, where a fist-wide crack rents the front wall.
Yet the building stayed upright and now Kemal and his family have packed up and are heading for Istanbul, like thousands of others. He says they will stay with relatives until he comes up with a better plan.
Down the street, the agricultural bank has collapsed, but no one is looking for money. Three people who lived on upper floors have died, and five are still missing.
Ergun Erdogan has come from Istanbul to look for his aunt. He hails passing rescue teams and troops, with no success. "No one is coming here, they just rush off somewhere else. No one can do anything for me," he says.
Ergun says he needs lifting equipment, a winch that would take away the concrete layers floor by collapsed floor. But this equipment is in short supply and, even if more winches were available, they would probably get caught in the traffic jam.
Next door smoke rises from the rubble-heap that used to be a sweet shop. Three times the fire has been put out, and three times it has started again. The shopping centre nearby has completely collapsed, and dozens of families are camping out in the market square, watched over by an undamaged statue of Turkey's founder, Kemal Ataturk.
Before another ruin, a man breaks down with grief and collapses in his friend's arms. Two cameramen materialise out of nowhere and trip over each other in trying to get the best shot.
The vast mound of concrete and tiles, in which 200 people may have died, makes a good backdrop for the mobile television studio which has been set up across the road on the back of two adjacent trucks. The reporter wipes sweat off her brow before speaking live to camera.
The earthquake has given rise to terrible yet wondrous sights: buildings leaning at fabulous angles, the roof of a petrol station tilting to the sky after its collapse, cars and buses completely flattened in front of the homes of their former owners.
In Izmit itself, an eerie silence has fallen over the town. Many of the heaps of rubble have been abandoned even by relatives of those who once lived there, as all expectation of finding a survivor is extinguished.
The bulldozers are ready to move in but they hesitate, knowing this means the end of hope.
The skies above the town have turned black and portentous, as billowing fumes from the fire at the oil refinery engulf the streets. Two days ago the authorities claimed the fire at the Tupras refinery, Turkey's largest, was under control, but yesterday the flames were leaping hundreds of feet into the air and two columns of black smoke rose from the site.
Small planes buzzed the blaze, dropping ineffectual loads of water on the burning plant.
It was like a rerun of the eclipse, except that this time you could look at the sun, which glinted as a bright yellow disc in a black sky. But the air smelled of burning tyres and the chemicals made your eyes burn.
In Istanbul, many people have returned to their homes or to friends' houses, after spending two nights sleeping on the streets. The warnings of further tremors continue, but the fear has subsided and some normality is returning.
The fragility of the buildings which collapsed during the earthquake is highlighted by the scene at Kadikoy, a new town situated halfway between Istanbul and Izmit. Here, dozens of bright new apartment blocks rise for 20 and 30 stories above the motorway, each one painted a different pastel shade. Clearly constructed to modern earthquake-proof standards, all the buildings are completely unharmed.
Ironically, though, their would-be tenants had not yet moved in, and every single apartment was empty.