Interesting that Reuters used the old spelling ‘Turkey’.
Maybe they’re less interested in indulging Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s whims.
A lot of that area in Syria has been suffering from brutal Syrian and Russian bombardment and aid is restricted. Those poor people.
Well, gosh.
How horrible. That’s the adding-insult-to-injury aspect of earthquakes, unlike many other natural disasters: with earthquakes, what gets you is overwhelmingly the built environment intended for your shelter, rather than the direct impacts of the natural world itself. Nature says “watch this, i’mma kill you puny little ants with your own buildings.”
Yeah, earthquakes don’t kill people - poorly constructed buildings near earthquakes kill people.
Some of the photos are just shocking. Buildings pancaked, with people still in there. One photo is of a man holding his deceased 15 year old daughter’s hand, the only thing visible. It looks like she was in bed and the floor above landed on her. Link.
Buildings collapsing a day or two after the first quake, either from continued aftershocks or just simply too much damage to stand for long, is not helping at all.
I’ll never understand why the army is not immediately called out to assist after a domestic mega-disaster such as this one (21,000 dead at last count, with the toll projected to double).
Even if the military is not expressly designed for relief work, it has the vehicles, the gasoline, the shelter, the hospitals, the manpower… all standing by.
And many stricken areas had no help at all for days. No help at all in freezing temperatures. People will die for lack of help.
The BBC says the army has been sidelined for political reasons:
“After the last major earthquake in August 1999, it was the armed forces who led the operation but the Erdogan government has sought to curb their power in Turkish society.”
Al Jazeera, too.
And at least turkey has a government and something resembling infrastructure. In Syria, it’s hard to bring aid anywhere.
Also mentioned in that BBC article:
A tax enacted after the 1999 quake has raised $ billions intended for building improvement, but there are serious questions as to where these funds actually went.
A 2018 amnesty allowed millions of buildings that did not meet construction codes to be deemed acceptable upon payment of a small fine.
We had dinner tonight at a Turkish restaurant here in Northern Virginia. The chef told us that members of his mother’s family had died in the quake. Half a world away and yet there are still connections.
Here’s a list of places you can donate if you wish.
Yesterday’s paper said building codes in Turkey had been greatly improved - but were poorly and inconsistently enforced.
For some reason it strikes me as sad that 20k folk have died and this thread has only 33 posts over 6 days. Myself, I don’t know quite what to think other than that this is another reason to be thankful that I had the great fortune to not be born somewhere like that.
There’s not a lot to say other than, “oh my God, how horrible”.
I’m hearing reports that the death toll has risen to more than 36K. The living conditions are abysmal.
They are starting to arrest construction company officials.
I suppose it’s small and cold comfort that the hypothetical existence of robust building code law gives a good legal pretext to arrest people, if you choose not to enforce those proactively and allow illegal shit-stack high rises to get built in the first place.
There is also that problem with “amnesty” where building owners paid a fine to get the government to look the other way, and then left owners to their own devices to improve earthquake readiness for their existing and out-dated buildings, which, evidently, most of them did nothing:
Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) pushed ahead with legislation on a construction amnesty, under which previously illegal buildings were approved without requiring that they comply with an updated building code, before the presidential and parliamentary elections of 2018 in a move apparently intended to woo voters.
A total of 438,000 property owners benefited from the legislation and had their buildings approved by paying a fine without the need to conform to the building code, putting the responsibility for earthquake readiness on the property owners.
I guess that’s one way to make a problem go away, or not.
I wonder how many of the arrestees are saying “Hey! you can’t arrest me! I already paid my bribe amnesty fines!”
That’s the real problem: bought-off bureaucrats don’t stay bought off.
I suspect, aside from possible corruption and actual illegalities, the government there is setting these people up as fall guys so the government doesn’t have to take any responsibility for debacle that is the search/rescue/recovery/clean-up/rebuilding.