It is now a week since Türkiye and Syria were hit by two major earthquakes in succession which flattened large areas around the border between the two countries, killing over 30,000 people, injuring thousands more and leaving millions of people homeless.
In Syria aid has been slow in arriving, with humanitarian operations being hampered by the fact that the affected areas are in rebel-held territory, so that access must be through restricted crossing points on the Turkish-Syrian border. In Türkiye, however, tens of thousands thousands of aid workers, including teams from many different countries, have been combing through the ruins of buildings, extracting residents trapped in the wreckage, some alive, some dead – the latter now more common as the 72-hour window of probable survival in the conditions and the prevailing temperatures has long since passed.
Despite the recent tense relations between the two countries, Greece was quick to respond the situation. Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis telephoned President Erdogan on the day of the earthquake to offer Greece’s commiseration and support – their first contact since the Turkish President had publicly broken off relations ten months previously. “I just spoke to the President. On behalf of the Greek people, I extended my deepest condolences for the devastating loss of life and reiterated our readiness to provide all further assistance necessary,” he announced on Twitter. Greece has sent 80 tons of medical and first aid equipment, and a team from Greece’s Emergency Services accompanied by sniffer dogs has spent the past week searching day and night for survivors.
On Sunday 12th February the Greek Foreign minister Nikos Dendias flew to Adana, one of 10 Turkish provinces affected by the earthquake, where he was met by his Turkish counterpart Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu. His arrival was the first visit by a European minister to Türkiye since the earthquake. The two ministers travelled to Hatay, where Greek rescuers were helping with search and rescue operations, and met rescuers from the Greek and other European teams.
The two men had embraced warmly at the airport, renewing a friendship which had been established over many years of diplomatic relations, but had seemingly withered under the recent onslaught of anti-Greek rhetoric from President Erdogan and his aides. Speaking at a press conference with Mr Çavuşoğlu in Hatay, Nikos Dendias said that Greece would continue its support to Türkiye to overcome the difficult days ahead. Mr Çavuşoğlu said that it was important for the two countries to support each other in difficult days, adding that they should not “wait for another disaster to hit one country to restore their relations”, a sentiment echoed by the Greek minister.
“We met the Greek search and rescue team here, and they have worked nonstop since they arrived here. We witnessed how they and the entire Greek nation were overjoyed when a victim is rescued alive,” Mr Çavuşoğlu said. Harsh times prove the goodness of neighbours, he said, recalling the mutual aid between the two countries when both were hit by earthquakes in 1999. (Dailysabah.com)
Scientists look for answers
Less visibly, earthquake specialists have been analysing the circumstances of the earthquakes, searching for explanations of the scale of devastation they caused. Talking to the Anadolou Turkish news agency, Harold Tobin, Professor of Seismology and Geohazards at Washington University, noted that the two earthquakes had occurred in quick succession on two different fault lines. The combination was very unfortunate, he said, because the the first quake had caused major damage to buildings, and then the second tremor affected buildings already damaged by the first.
Professor Tobin underlined that earthquakes are caused by the motions of tectonic plates, with Türkiye’s landmass “squeezed” between the North Anatolian and the East Anatolian faults, with fractures between the plates where they come together. “So, what happens is the fault is stuck and held together by friction, just like when you try to push a heavy piece of furniture, you know, at first it resists, it doesn’t move. That builds up the strain in the Earth’s crust,” he said. “And then when the earthquake happens, it releases all of that in one minute or something like that.” Monday’s earthquakes were the result of accumulated strain from hundreds of years of plate tectonic motion as Africa moves northward and Arabia pushes towards the east, he said, causing the Anatolian plate to shift a total of about 3 metres.
Efthymios Lekkas, Professor of Geology and Natural Catastrophes at the University of Athens, accompanied the Greek Emergency Services team to the earthquake zone and was able to collect at first hand evidence of the how the tremors had progressed. Predicting that the final death toll would be over 50,000, he told APE-MPE that it was one of the biggest disasters ever, affecting 12 cities and an area the size of Greece.
There were five main factors affecting the severity of the earthquake’s effects, he said. The first and most important was the violence of the tremors themselves, but there were other contributing factors:
“The second factor is the underlying terrain…. In this case it was very soft, which reinforced the seismic movement.
“The third factor is that the antiseismic regulations there are inferior to ours.
“The fourth was the building materials used. Building is of an inferior grade in the area generally.
“The fifth factor is that their buildings may look fine from the outside, but they have certain architectural characteristics which are highly dangerous for the buildings. They were not symmetrical buildings and they had projections, so that the masonry was not connected to the frame.”
(ERT News)
One factor which Professor Lekkas did not mention, and which has been widely commented on in the international media, is that while Türkiye has anti-seismic building regulations in place they are frequently ignored by developers, and defective buildings have regularly been legalised by the government to avoid their having to be demolished. Indeed some of the buildings which collapsed had been built within the last few years. Along with what has been criticised as the government’s slow response to the disaster, this will be a factor which could cause difficulties for President Erdogan and his AKP party in the upcoming national elections. It is reported that to date some 100 property developers have been arrested for their role in the catastrophe.