Death Toll in Turkish and Syrian Earthquake Hits 50,000
Widespread destruction occurred in Turkey and Syria | Mehmet Kacmaz / Getty via The Atlantic
On Feb. 3, a 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck southwestern Turkey and northern Syria, succeeded by a second earthquake of 7.5-magnitude in the following hours. The tremors were the deadliest quakes in Turkey since an earthquake in ancient Antioch in 526 and the deadliest in Syria since an 1822 earthquake in Aleppo. By Feb. 28, the death toll had surpassed 50,000 in the two nations.
The earthquakes devastated Turkey and Syria’s provinces along the Mediterranean coast. The quakes are estimated by the Turkish Enterprise and Business Confederation to have inflicted €80 billion in damages.
According to the Turkish government some 3,450 buildings had collapsed within two days of the disaster, while by Feb. 26, over 150,000 buildings had collapsed. A lack of seismic reinforcement and poor construction standards were at least partly to blame, according to CBS, and the Turkish government later arrested over 200 people for poor building construction.
According to CNN, the Turkish government would often provide exemptions from safety standards in exchange for fees. These exemptions - called “construction amnesties” - were also used to protect older structures and allowed them to not be brought up to code.
Emily Garthwaite / The New York Times
Multiple foreign governments and organizations, including India, the European Union, the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, Ukraine, and Israel, dispatched teams and humanitarian assistance. US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan remarked that the US was “ready to provide any and all needed assistance” to Turkey.
Many collapsed buildings are still being excavated for potential victims, and over the past month many casualties were found long after the event itself.
Aid has been able to make it through to the affected people despite the often cool diplomatic situation in the region, with Syria receiving aid through diplomatic backchannels from Israel and from the traditionally-hostile Bahrain. Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu stated that an aid request had been relayed unofficially “by a diplomatic official,” though Israel’s public broadcaster later claimed that Russia had relayed the request to the Israeli government.
According to Turkish vice president Fuat Oktay, over one million refugees are living in tent encampments where the temperature can go to -9 C, while the Syrian representative at the UN High Commission for Refugees reported that “as many as 5.3 million people in Syria may have been left homeless by the earthquake.”