Turkey quake kills 51 as villagers sleep
OKCULAR, Turkey (AFP) – A powerful pre-dawn earthquake buried sleeping villagers in remote eastern Turkey on Monday, claiming at least 51 lives and leaving scores injured, officials said.
Measuring 6.0 on the Richter scale, the tremor struck at 4:32 am (0232 GMT), razing mud-brick houses in five mountainous villages in a mainly Kurdish area and killing whole families in their beds.
The shallow quake had an epicentre near the town of Karakocan in Elazig province, the Kandilli observatory in Istanbul said.
"It started shaking -- first slowly and then violently. I was terrified and began crying. The cupboard fell over and then the television set exploded," said Zeynep Yuksel, a teenager in Okcular, the worst-hit village.
The Turkish army and civil defence agency rushed rescue teams to the region, but the search operations in the rubble were called off after about eight hours and preparations quickly began to bury the victims.
"According to the information we have, no one remains under the rubble. The work has been ended," an official from the governor's office, told AFP.
Crisis desks in Elazig and Ankara both put the death toll at 51, revising down an earlier figure of 57.
At least four of the dead were children.
The tremor left 74 people injured, local officials said, adding that 34 of them remained hospitalised Monday afternoon, including one in serious condition.
The heaviest toll -- 18 dead and some 30 houses destroyed -- was in Okcular, a Kurdish village of some 900 people nestled among snow-covered hills at a height of about 1,800 metres (5,900 feet) and accessible only by one narrow road.
"I rushed out after the tremor, looked to one side and saw nothing, then looked to the other side -- again nothing. Everything had collapsed," said a middle-aged woman who did not give her name.
"I pulled out the two kids from the rubble with bare hands. They were both dead," said the woman, who lost a sister-in-law and two nephews in the quake.
Wrapped in blankets and cuddling babies, women wailed around a bonfire as Red Crescent workers rushed to erect tents before night fell, distributing food and other relief supplies.
Survivors scrambled to recover any valuables from the debris, often terrified anew by a flurry of aftershocks jolting the area, with the most powerful measuring 5.5 on the Richter scale.
Graves were quickly dug for the dead and burials began Monday afternoon after brief prayers at a village mosque missing part of its minaret after the tremor.
In nearby Yukari Demirci, the quake killed 15 people, among them a family of nine, while the remaining victims died in Gocmezler, Kayalik and Yukari Kanatli.
The quake also killed many livestock, the main livelihood for locals in the impoverished region.
Officials lamented that shoddy construction exacerbated the disaster as in many other quakes that have hit Turkey in the past.
Provincial governor Muammer Erol stressed that buildings made of cement or stone had only "minimal damage, such as cracks."
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said he had instructed the public building company to immediately launch a reconstruction project in the area.
"Mud-brick construction is undoubtedly a local tradition there. But unfortunately, it has proved to have a heavy price," he said in Ankara.
In Brussels, European Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso offered condolences, saying he would monitor the situation "so that assistance can be mobilised as necessary" for the EU-hopeful country.
Major earthquakes are frequent in Turkey, which is crossed by several active fault-lines.
Two powerful tremors in the heavily populated and industrialised northwest claimed about 20,000 lives in August and November 1999.
Many deaths were blamed on sub-standard buildings, the result of widespread corruption plaguing the construction sector.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100308/wl_afp/turkeyquake_20100308170232
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