A medic from Northern Ireland has spoken of his “nerve-wracking” time in the Turkish earthquake zone, treating pregnant women caught up in the disaster.

Obstetrician Paul Holmes, who is originally from Ballymena, County Antrim, spent the past three weeks working in a field hospital in southern Turkey.

“I’ve come across mums who have literally been pulled out of the rubble,” he said.

“Carrying a baby is obviously worrying for any mother at the best of times, let alone when you have survived an earthquake on this scale and in many cases have been left totally homeless and sleeping in a tent.”

Mr Holmes also experienced two “fairly major” aftershocks during his deployment, the first of which caused an electrical fire in the grounds of a damaged hospital building where he is based.

More than 50,000 people were killed when earthquakes hit Turkey and Syria 6 February and thousands more are now missing, injured or homeless as a result.

Mr Holmes arrived in Turkey on 11 February as part of a UK-Emergency Medical Team deployed by the British government through the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO).

He helped set up a tented field hospital in Türkoğlu, in the car park of a hospital that is no longer safe because it was destabilised by the earthquake.

“The hospital was still standing, but some of the internal floors and ceilings had fallen down and it was very much not usable,” he explained.

He worked alongside Turkish medics at the joint Ministry of Defence-FCDO field hospital and spent his nights sleeping in a tent in sub-zero temperatures.

‘Ice inside tents’

Many of the women he has treated were not physically badly injured but were among the quake survivors suffering trauma, hardship and extreme temperatures as their homes were destroyed.

“Kids are coming in with lots of respiratory infections and illnesses, partly from living in tents in temperatures of minus seven or eight at night. I know the tents we are camping in have had ice on the inside some mornings never mind on the outside,” Mr Holmes explained.

He added many traumatised pregnant women were very stressed about their unborn children and his team helped to replace some of the services lost when the hospital was damaged.

“It’s been very, very rewarding to be able to see the relief on their faces as I’ve been able to show them their babies on an ultrasound scan and let them listen to the baby’s heartbeat, and just to be able to reassure them that the baby is doing very well.”

‘Grateful’

Mr Holmes grew up in Northern Ireland but moved to Scotland to study medicine when he was 18.

Now 56, he usually works at the Forth Valley Royal Hospital in Stirlingshire, but also volunteers with frontline medical aid charity UK-Med.

According to the FCDO, UK aid money pays for EMT staffs’ regular roles “to be backfilled to ensure the NHS is not impacted”.

“It is a privilege to be part of the UK government’s humanitarian response,” Mr Holmes said.

“It’s been amazing how grateful Turkish people have been for our help, partly for the medical or healthcare assistance we’ve been giving, but also I think they’ve really appreciated the expression of solidarity that the UK team coming over has meant to them.”

Mr Holmes said he was touched by the Turkish generosity of spirit, despite their loss and suffering.

He recalled that when his team apologised to patients because they had not been able to shower for a week at their camp, one patient invited them home so they could use their bathroom facilities.

Another woman collected walnuts for her garden and brought them to the aid workers.

It is not the first time Mr Holmes has been deployed to an earthquake zone to deliver medical aid, but it is the first time he has experienced powerful and dangerous aftershocks.

“The first one briefly set the hospital building on fire, which was slightly nerve-wracking. I saw smoke after it triggered an electrical fire but thankfully it was brought under control very quickly and there wasn’t huge damage.

“We had to move our overnight camping tents because they were deemed a bit close to the hospital,” he recalled.

“The other big aftershock happened in the evening time when we were standing around chatting.

“It’s not enough to knock you off your feet but the closest thing I can compare it to is when you are on a boat in choppy seas. You are not being thrown from side to side, but if you were trying to walk, you’d be unstable.”

Mr Holmes said the situation was “obviously worrying” but added he was able to stay in contact with his wife and four children every day by phone to reassure them that he was OK.

‘Brave’

He is due to return home to the UK on Saturday.

Last month, a search and rescue team from Northern Ireland returned home from Turkey after helping to rescue a woman who had been trapped in a collapsed building for nine days.

“The UK government is proud that brave firefighters and medics from Northern Ireland have been at the very heart of our efforts to help the Turkish people in their hour of need,” said UK Minister for Development Andrew Mitchell.

“The UK government’s priority now is to ensure that humanitarian assistance reaches the thousands of families left homeless by the earthquake. It will be so vital in ensuring those affected can begin to rebuild their lives.”

Source: BBC

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More than 17,000 people are now known to have died after the huge earthquake in Turkey and Syria and the focus right now is on supporting survivors.

But there are wider geological implications to the quake that may have consequences in the longer term slowly coming into focus. In the coastal city of İskenderun, there appears to have been significant subsidence, which has resulted in flooding, while the quake has left many hillsides around the country at a serious risk of landslip. This may result in roads and pipelines having to be rerouted and communities rehomed.

The subsidence in the city of İskenderun can be seen in CNN footage from the afternoon of 7 February – more than 24 hours after the first deadly quake struck. It shows vehicles driving along waterlogged roads, accompanied by reports that the sea had encroached 200 metres inland. Exactly what caused this subsidence is still up for debate.

“Although this very large earthquake produced mostly horizontal movement, it’s certainly plausible that there was a fault splay that caused some widespread subsidence like this,” said Tim Wright, from the Centre for the Observation and Modelling of Earthquakes, Volcanoes and Tectonics in the UK.

Jose Borrero, director of eCoast Marine Consulting and Research in New Zealand, said: “The level and size of the subsidence would be totally expected from this size of quake.”

Similar changes were seen in the Turkish town of Gölcük after the 1999 İzmit/Kocaeli earthquake, and more recently along the coast following the 2016 Kaikoura earthquake in New Zealand – both of which were also large strike-slip (horizontal movement) earthquakes. Liquefaction of soft sediment, high waves from stormy weather or a small tsunami may also have played a role and it is not yet clear whether the subsidence will be permanent. “The satellite data is coming in and that will give us a clearer picture in the next few days,” said Wright.

Cloudy weather prevented satellite imagery from being gathered immediately after the quake, but clearer skies on subsequent days have revealed significant numbers of landslides and rockfalls across the region. A map produced by the United States Geological Survey suggests that extensive landslip is likely to have occurred in the hilly region to the north of the city of Gaziantep, with tens of thousands of people affected. “Based upon this we are likely to see some landslide fatalities plus substantial numbers of roads blocked by failures. This will impede the rescue work, especially … in more remote areas,” writes Dave Petley on his Landslide Blog.

The Turkish media outlet Sokağın Sesi Gazetesi tweeted a short video of a landslip on the road between Adana and Gaziantep, showing how some upland communities will have been completely cut off by landslides caused by the quakes.

“Most of the footage continues to feature collapses in the urban areas, with very little from the more rural areas. The picture in the more remote parts of the epicentral zone is likely to be desperate,” wrote Petley.

Source: The Guardian

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One jagged scar of bare and cracked earth, opened up by Monday’s quake, cut deep into embankments and ran along expanses of open land up to the horizon near the town of Tevekkeli, in Turkey’s southern province of Kahramanmaras.

When it hit a highway, it smashed the tarmac and metal barriers. Huge boulders had tumbled down the hills on the side of the road.

Drivers had to wait in turn to navigate the fractured route.

[1/5] Aerial view shows cracks in the ground in the aftermath of a deadly earthquake, near the Tevekkeli village in Kahramanmaras, Turkey February 10, 2023. REUTERS/Issam Abdallah

Near the village of Tepehan, huge gorges cut through groves close to a house, leaving islands of grey-brown land and trees perched on the edge of new precipices. Other trees lay uprooted on their sides.

Mehmet Temizkan said the tremors woke him in the early hours of Monday morning.

“With the initial panic, nobody knew whether we could leave home or whether we could survive. We lost hope. In the morning, when we saw what happened here, we said this must be the epicentre,” he told Reuters

The combined death toll from the deadliest quake in the region in two decades that struck southern Turkey and Syria stood at more than 22,000 on Friday.

Rescue crews saved a 10-day-old baby and his mother on Friday after they were trapped in the ruins of a building in Turkey and dug several people from other sites as President Tayyip Erdogan said the authorities should have acted faster.

Source: Reuters

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With elections on the horizon, his future is on the line after 20 years in power and his pleas for national unity have gone unheeded.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan has admitted shortcomings in the response, but he appeared to blame fate on a visit to one disaster zone: “Such things have always happened. It’s part of destiny’s plan.”

Turkey lies on two fault lines and has earthquake building codes dating back more than 80 years. But last Monday’s double earthquake was far more intense than anything seen since 1939. The first quake registered magnitude 7.8 at 04:17, followed by another of 7.5 dozens of miles away.

Delayed search and rescue

It required a massive rescue operation spread across 10 of Turkey’s 81 provinces.

But it took time for the response to build and some villages could not be reached for days. More than 30,000 people from the professional and voluntary sector eventually arrived, along with teams from many other countries.

More than 6,000 buildings collapsed and workers from Turkey’s Afad disaster authority were themselves caught up in the earthquakes.

Those initial hours were critical but roads were damaged and search and rescue teams struggled to get through until day two or day three.

Turkey has more experience of earthquakes than almost any other country but the founder of the main volunteer rescue group believes this time, politics got in the way.

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.

“All over the world, the most organised and logistically powerful organisations are the armed forces; they have enormous means in their hands,” said the head of Akut foundation, Nasuh Mahruki. “So you have to use this in a disaster.”

Instead, Turkey’s civil disaster authority now has the role, with a staff of 10-15,000, helped by non-government groups such as Akut, which has 3,000 volunteers.

The military’s potential was now far bigger than in 1999, Mr Mahruki said, but left out of the planning it had to wait for an order from the government: “This created a delay in the start of rescue and search operations.”

President Erdogan has accepted that search efforts were not as fast as the government wanted, despite Turkey having the “largest search and rescue team in the world right now”.

‘I warned them’

For years, Turks have been warned of the potential of a big earthquake but few expected it to be along the East Anatolian fault, which stretches across south-eastern Turkey, because most of the larger tremors have hit the fault in the north.

When a quake in January 2020 hit Elazig, north-east of Monday’s disaster zone, geological engineer Prof Naci Gorur of Istanbul Technical University realised the risk. He even predicted a later quake north of Adiyaman and the city of Kahramanmaras.

“I warned the local governments, governors, and the central government. I said: ‘Please take action to make your cities ready for an earthquake.’ As we cannot stop them, we have to diminish the damage created by them.”

One of Turkey’s foremost earthquake engineering specialists, Prof Mustafa Erdik, believes the dramatic loss of life was down to building codes not being followed, and he blames ignorance and ineptitude in the building industry.

“We allow for damage but not this type of damage – with floors being piled on top of each other like pancakes,” he told the BBC. “That should have been prevented and that creates the kind of casualties we have seen.”

Under Turkish regulations updated in 2018, high-quality concrete has to be reinforced with ribbed, steel bars. Vertical columns and horizontal beams have to be able to absorb the impact of tremors.

“There should be adhesion between the concrete and steel bars and there should also be adequate transfer reinforcement in the columns,” explained Prof Erdik.

Had all the regulations been followed, the columns would have survived intact and the damage would have been confined to the beams, he believes. Instead the columns gave way and the floors collapsed on top of each other, causing heavy casualties.

Quake tax mystery

Much has been made of failures in enforcing Turkey’s beefed up building code and the justice minister has said anyone found to have been negligent or at fault will be brought to justice.

But government critics such as opposition CHP party leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu argue after 20 years in power President Erdogan’s government has not “prepared the country for the earthquakes”.

One big question is what happened to the large sums collected through two “earthquake solidarity taxes” created after the 1999 quake. The funds were meant to make buildings resistant to earthquakes.

One of the taxes, paid to this day by mobile phone operators and radio and TV, has brought some 88bn lira (£3.8bn; $4.6bn) into state coffers. It was even hiked to 10% two years ago. But the government has never fully explained where the money has been spent.

Urban planners have complained that rules have not been observed in earthquake zones and highlight a 2018 government amnesty that meant violations of the code could be swept away with a fine, and left some six million buildings unchanged.

The fines brought in billions of Turkish lira in taxes and fees. But when a residential building in Istanbul collapsed in 2019, killing 21 people, the head of the chamber of civil engineers said the amnesty would turn Turkish cities into graveyards.

More than 100,000 applications were made for an amnesty in the 10 cities currently affected, according to Pelin Pinar Giritlioglu of Istanbul University, who says there was a high intensity of illegal construction in the area.

“The amnesty played an important role in the collapse of the buildings in the latest earthquake,” she told the BBC.

“We cannot go anywhere by blaming each other and we should seek solutions,” says Prof Erdik, who believes the problem goes beyond politics and lies in a system that allows engineers to go straight into practice after university with little experience.

Prof Gorur calls for the creation of “earthquake-resistant urban settlements” but for that there will have to be a shift in thinking, nowhere more so than in Turkey’s most populous city.

“We have been warning about a possible Istanbul earthquake for 23 years. So the policymakers of Istanbul should come together and make policies to make people, the infrastructure, the buildings and the neighbourhoods resistant to an earthquake.”

Polarised politics

President Erdogan has called for unity and solidarity, denouncing critics of the disaster response as dishonourable.

“I cannot stomach people conducting negative campaigns for political interest,” he told reporters in Hatay, near the earthquake’s epicentre.

Many of the towns and cities in the affected areas are run by his ruling party, the AKP.

But after 20 years in power, first as prime minister and then as an increasingly authoritarian, elected president, he leads a highly polarised country.

“We have come to this point because of his politics,” said Mr Kilicdaroglu.

Campaigning for elections expected in May has not yet begun but he leads one of six opposition parties poised to announce a unified candidate in a bid to bring down the president.

Mr Erdogan’s hopes of unifying the country ahead of those elections are likely to fall on deaf ears.

He has become increasingly intolerant of criticism and many of his opponents are in jail or have fled abroad. When an attempted coup against the president ended in bloodshed in 2016, he reacted by arresting tens of thousands of Turks and sacking civil servants.

The economy has been in freefall with a 57% inflation rate leading to a sky-high cost of living.

Among the government’s first actions in response to the earthquake was temporarily blocking Twitter, which was being used in Turkey to help rescuers locate survivors. The government said it was being used to spread disinformation and police detained a political scientist for posting criticism of the emergency response.

Turkish journalist Deniz Yucel, who spent a year in jail in pre-trial detention, wrote from exile in Germany that the aftermath of the 1999 Turkish earthquake helped propel Mr Erdogan to power.

This latest disaster would play a part in the next vote too, he said, but it was not yet clear how.

Source: British Broadcasting Corporation

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he gleaming black sedan wound through the epicentre of Turkey’s deadly earthquake in the town of Pazarcık. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s car glistened in the sunlight as the Turkish president passed citizens burning fires to keep warm in the freezing cold among towering piles of rubble that were once their homes.

Erdoğan limited his interactions with the public in Pazarcık, instead driving directly to the local police headquarters to discuss the aftermath of the multiple massive tremors that left a trail of destruction over 10 Turkish provinces and across northern Syria, trapping people underneath collapsed buildings and killing more than 20,000. When he did stop to speak briefly to the area’s shattered and distraught residents, it was to double down on the notion that the quake was solely responsible for the devastation, rather than poorly constructed buildings linked to corruption, or a rescue response beset by delays.

“What happens, happens, this is part of fate’s plan,” he told one person in Pazarcık, echoing his statements just months earlier after a deadly mining disaster at a state-run coalmine, where the president blamed “fate’s design”, for an explosion that left at least 41 dead. During a speech in nearby Kahramanmaraş, Erdoğan also lashed out at “provocateurs” who criticised rescue efforts, adding: “Of course, there are shortcomings. The conditions are clear to see. It’s not possible to be ready for a disaster like this.”

People who lined the streets of Pazarcık sobbing as they waited to see their dead relatives pulled from the rubble – rather than to catch a glimpse of the president’s motorcade – disagreed, as did those in other badly hit towns, who shouted angrily at Turkey’s infrastructure minister and a local official during a visit.

“If there was more help, they’d manage to get them out,” said Ayşe Kep, staring across the main road in Pazarcık as a small team of rescue workers clambered atop slabs of broken concrete and metal that once made up a residential building, a crushed flatbed truck protruding from the wreckage. Kep and other residents watched desperately in the faint hope that their family members might somehow be found alive.

“We are here to wait for the funerals,” she said grimly. “I only have hope, but I still don’t believe they’re alive. My cousin is under there, and these rescue workers didn’t arrive until today. But it’s worse in my village, there’s no electricity or water, no help at all.”

Erdoğan’s refusal to accept criticism of the state’s response has done little to quell growing public anger at a disaster response that has often arrived too late, or in the case of some remote villages, appears yet to have arrived at all. Across southern Turkey – areas traditionally considered bastions of support for the president and his Justice and Development party (AKP) – displaced citizens surviving in freezing conditions complained openly about delays and sleeping in the cold despite the state’s promises . Their increasing discontent represents an unforeseen and major test for Erdoğan’s 20-year leadership, just three months prior to an election expected in May.

“Erdoğan has an image he’s cultivated in the last 20 years, it’s both sweet and sour: he’s autocratic, but effective, a patriarchal figure almost replacing what used to be called devlet baba, the fatherly state. This is why his base loves him and his opponents fear him – his wrath is serious as much as his compassion is real. That’s his whole brand, which is now being tested,” said Soner Cagaptay of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and author of several books on Erdoğan’s leadership. “It’s remarkable as Erdoğan replaced another overarching, autocratic fatherly state which essentially collapsed following another massive earthquake in 1999.”

The state’s lacklustre response to the 1999 İzmit earthquake helped propel Erdoğan and the AKP to power in 2003, where the young and enigmatic figure promised efficiency and care to heal the country’s wounds following a disaster that killed over 17,000 people. The İzmit earthquake, which destroyed part of Istanbul and loomed large over Turkey’s recent history as the country’s largest natural disaster until this week, prompted the introduction of a tax to provide economic support after disasters, which experts estimated to total about £3.8bn – raising questions from opposition politicians as to how that money has been spent in the years since.

The two-decade reign of the AKP has been marked by a nationwide construction boom, as Erdoğan worked to transform a country once beset by widespread infrastructure and housing issues, promising economic and social transformation in the process. In the years immediately following his election, government permits for housing construction tripled. Skyscrapers, bridges and smooth tarmac roads spread across the vast country, as a handful of construction companies with ties to the government grew powerful while the new infrastructure demonstrated the state’s presence even in the most remote cities.

Many of the same concrete apartment blocks built as part of the AKP’s construction boom were razed to the ground by the earthquake earlier this week. In Kahramanmaraş, some of the new towers remained standing while others on the same block had collapsed entirely, a grim showcase of which constructions had conformed to building codes intended to prevent them from collapse in the event of tremors.

During a speech in the town, Erdoğan promised that new homes to replace destroyed buildings would be constructed across the 10 affected regions within a year, a pledge that appeared hard to fathom as emergency teams struggled to pick through towering piles of rubble with little prospect of clearing it in sight.

Instead, the message from the presidential palace appears to be one born of fear and control in the quake’s aftermath, amid reports that Turkey briefly blocked Twitter, which citizens had been using to locate lost loved ones amid the rubble. On state television, a reporter turned her back on a person in Kahramanmaraş who described delays in aid delivery, instead reassuring viewers that “there are still places workers are unable to reach” in the town. After touring areas destroyed by the quake and its aftershocks, Erdoğan described the state of emergency allowing him to bypass the rule of law in the 10 affected regions as “an opportunity to foil moneylenders and seditious groups who abuse due process in Turkey”.

Cagaptay said the presidency had opted to focus on control, rather than compassion. “The argument that Turkey needs an effective if autocratic leader falls apart if people say the state isn’t there when they need it,” he said. “His base is going to have a hard time accepting the autocratic part of his political identity without effective relief after the earthquake.”

He added: “He’s trying to double down on the fear factor in the hope it doesn’t vanish, as once it goes away and citizens aren’t afraid of Erdoğan, that’s a very different Turkey.”

In Pazarcık, Kep looked on despondently as she watched mechanical diggers and volunteers continue to scrabble among the remains of her relatives’ apartment block. She turned to warm herself by a small fire surrounded by mourning people. “No one is helping us,” she said, moments before the president’s motorcade passed.

Source : theguardian

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