Over 2,300 people killed as powerful earthquakes rock Turkey and Syria
ANKARA (Turkey)/AZMARIN (Syria), FEB. 6: The most powerful earthquake to strike Turkey and Syria in nearly a century killed over 2,300 people on Monday, sparked frantic rescues and was felt as far away as Greenland. It had its epicentre near the Turkish city of Gaziantep, which is 90 kilometres (60 miles) from the Syrian border. A major Turkish provincial capital, it consists of more than 2 million people.
At 4.17 am Monday, a powerful 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck at a depth of about 18 kilometres (11 miles), followed by dozens of aftershocks, wiping out entire sections of major Turkish cities in a region filled with millions who have fled Syria’s civil war and other conflicts.
The border region has been shaped by more than a decade of war in Syria. Millions of Syrian refugees live in Turkey. The swath of Syria affected by the quake is divided between government-held and opposition-held areas.
The quake was felt as far away as Egypt’s Cairo. It sent residents of Damascus rushing into the street, and jolted awake people in their beds in Lebanon’s Beirut. Tremors were also felt in Cyprus.
According to United State Geological Survey (USGS), the earthquake was then followed by at least 20 aftershocks followed, some hours later during daylight, the strongest measuring 6.6.
Hours later, a second earthquake of 7.5 magnitude struck the Elbistan district of Kahramanmaras province in southern Turkey. Less than 24 hours later, a third earthquake of magnitude 6.0 struck central Turkey, USGS said.
Buildings were reported collapsed in a swath from Syria’s cities of Aleppo and Hama to Turkey’s Diyarbakir, more than 330 kilometres (200 miles) to the northeast. A hospital collapsed in the Mediterranean coastal city of Iskenderun, but casualties were not immediately known, Turkey’s vice president, Fuat Oktay, said.
The head of Syria’s National Earthquake Centre, Raed Ahmed, called the pre-dawn quake “the biggest earthquake recorded in the history of the centre”. It resulted from strike-slip faulting at shallow depths and appears to be associated with either the East Anatolia fault zone or the Dead Sea transform fault zone.
The region where the first earthquake occurred is known to be seismically active. Three earthquakes of magnitude 6 or larger have occurred in this region since 1970. The largest, a magnitude of 6.7, occurred on January 24, 2020. All of these earthquakes happened along or in the vicinity of the East Anatolia fault, USGS said.
Offers of help — from search-and-rescue teams to medical supplies and money — poured in from dozens of countries, as well as the European Union and NATO.
Bitterly cold temperatures and the difficulty of working in areas beset by civil war will only complicate rescue efforts, said Dr Steven Godby, an expert in natural hazards at Nottingham Trent University.
-TNIE
