ERCIS – Turkey struggled to provide shelter yesterday to tens of thousands left homeless by an earthquake that killed nearly 500, and rescue teams began taking painful decisions to call off searches for those buried alive.
Three days after the 7.2 magnitude quake shook eastern Turkey, demolishing 3,000 buildings, rescue workers pulled out alive a 27-year-old woman and an 18-year-old student from collapsed buildings in Ercis, the town hit hardest.
At another crumpled building in the town, rescue workers who had worked non-stop for more than 48 hours switched off their generators and lights, convinced no one was left alive. Seconds later, they received word that someone trapped below had made contact on a mobile phone.
“There are three people trapped under there. When we lifted a concrete slab, the phone must have been able to get reception,” said one rescue worker, as the lights were turned back on and his team returned to their job.
But hopes of finding more survivors were fading and attention was shifting to the Herculean task of providing shelter to victims for the approaching winter.
The disaster is one more curse for Kurds, the dominant ethnic group in the impoverished southeast, where more than 40,000 people have been killed in a three-decade-long separatist insurgency.
Perceptions of government neglect in meeting people’s needs at a moment of crisis would complicate Ankara’s efforts to win over ordinary Kurds to its side in the conflict.
Sunday’s quake, Turkey’s strongest in a decade, has spurred the government to accept offers of tents and prefabricated houses from other countries, including Israel, despite tensions between the two. A Turkish foreign ministry official said an Israeli aircraft was expected to arrive in Ankara yesterday with five prefabricated houses. Despite the humanitarian gesture, both countries played down prospects of their troubled relations being on the mend.
With temperatures falling and rain forecast to turn to snow this week, there were growing complaints of a lack of tents and of poor organisation. – (Reuters)
Aid valued at €300,000 was pledged yesterday by the Irish Government for Turkey’s earthquake victims in the form of 600 large tents and 3,000 blankets which will be airlifted from Irish Aid’s humanitarian stockpile in Dubai