Survivors live in fear a month after the earthquake in Turkey

Issued on: / 6/2023 – 4:18 PM

Before the Turkish earthquake, Abdullah Senil’s nerves were steel. But these days, just being inside a house makes him nervous—and it only takes the sound of a plane flying overhead to put him on edge.

“I wasn’t afraid in the past, but now one noise is enough to freak me out,” the 57-year-old former weightlifter told AFP.

“Everything reminds me of an earthquake – even the sound of the plane,” he said.

Last month’s devastating 7.8-magnitude earthquake flattened entire cities, killing more than 50,000 people in southeastern Turkey and parts of Syria.

In Kahramanmaras, a Turkish city near the epicenter, survivors are still haunted by trauma one month later.

“It’s been a month now but for me it feels as if it was yesterday,” said Adam Serene, as he watched heavy machinery remove piles of rubble in the high-rise complex where hundreds lost their lives.

“We could not overcome the shock. The earthquake that occurred on the eleventh floor of a high-rise building trapped me,” said Sirine, whose wife was five months pregnant.

“I can still hear people screaming for help on every floor. This pain will never go away.”

The ubiquitous rubble-clearing effort now dominates the city of 1.1 million.

Workers who have arrived from all over Turkey spray water on the rubble, and trucks laden with rubble stream along the road, waiting to be dumped at the landfill outside the city.

Clouds of dust

Plumes of dust emanating from the cleaning process cover the horizon, carried by the winds and generating gray clouds that are visible from kilometers away, blurring the view in the region surrounded by mountains.

“200 to 250 tons of rubble are removed here every day, and we do irrigation so that it does not disturb the environment and does not create dust,” said Eren Genk, from the Forestry Directorate of Sivas Oriental Province.

“We didn’t discover any bodies but there was a pungent smell yesterday,” he said, pointing a hose at the concrete slabs. “I think it will be done here in 10 days.”

Customers sometimes come across valuables while working to clear rubble.

Levent Topal, of the Black Sea Region Waterworks Authority, said his team spotted a safety deposit box among the rubble filled with dollars, euros, gold and documents.

“We never touch them, and we hand them over to the police, who find the owner,” he said.

A 54-year-old man took a huge risk and climbed to the seventh floor of his building to retrieve things – despite the danger and over 11,000 aftershocks that followed the earthquake.

“I know it’s risky,” admitted Veli Akguz, placing a door and curtain rods on the roof of his car.

His entire family of 13, who used to live in five different apartments, will now congregate in a house in the village.

‘no choice’

Officials say the nearly 2 million people made homeless by the quake are now staying in tents, container homes, guest houses or boarding houses in the region and beyond — but that is a far cry from meeting the needs of many others.

Some people are spending the night in damaged homes due to a lack of tents, despite warnings from the authorities.

“We are afraid but we have no other choice,” said Solmaz Tocakar, who was desperately looking for a tent with her neighbors in the city’s main square, where quake survivors line up to get food or tea from aid trucks.

Some residents are mobilized at the neighborhood level.

In one part of Kahramanmaras that offers a panoramic view of the city, there are dozens of tents in the garden of the two-storey local authority offices.

Locals cover the tent grounds with carpets pulled from a historic mosque whose minaret fell from the earthquake.

Ibrahim Yaila, a 31-year-old electrician, is one of the survivors who were housed in those tents along with his two children and wife.

Holding his two-month-old baby, he asked, “We are fine now because the weather is nice, but what will happen if it rains?”

Hairdresser Arif Gokeran took matters into his own hands in this neighborhood when the local mukhtar, or chief official, fled after the earthquake.

He stockpiled nappies and dry foods including beans and lentils in several rooms of the building to get them to those in need, but highlighted an acute shortage of cooking equipment.

“On that day, a lorry loaded with coal came down the hill. Before I could go down to pick them up, several bags of them were taken away by the locals,” he said.

(AFP)

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