New Delhi: The toll from two earthquakes that hit Turkiye and Syria on Monday has risen to eight, with up to 300 recovering from injuries, The Guardian reported.
The latest tremors have spread anxiety and panic in a region that is still coming to terms with the devastation caused earlier this month.
Monday’s quake was felt in Jordan, Cyprus, Israel, Lebanon and Egypt, where schools and public services were closed on Tuesday, partly to calm people’s nerves.
The first 6.3 magnitude quake hit near the Turkish city of Antakya, which was all but destroyed by the February 6 earthquake and is largely uninhabitable. A magnitude 5.8 quake followed on the Mediterranean coast, reverberating deep into the Levant and underscoring the geological impact of one of the century’s biggest earthquakes.
Most of the people were injured after jumping off the building and falling as they fled over rubble and walls.
In Turkiye, teacher Zuher Capar, 42, said he was mourning the loss of relatives in the original earthquake and having a meal with his aunt and uncle near the Hatay town of Samandag when they felt Monday’s temblor, according to Associated Press.
“It shook a little, then it grew strong,” he told AP. “The electricity went and there were screams everywhere. There were small children in the house. They were screaming, my aunt was crying.”
“We had barely overcome the sadness (from the first earthquake),” he said.
Earlier this month, two powerful earthquakes killed more than 47,000 people.
According to The Guardian, almost two weeks later, the seismology of the massive quake’s spread is mostly understood but the population centres and epicentres which avoided the worst damage are now under the increasing focus of regulators and politicians who face anger from some survivors who claim the disaster stemmed as much from human failings as it did from nature.
In southern Turkiye, the two main hubs – Antakya and Gaziantep – have been cited as examples, with the former almost annihilated, contrasted by locals to the nearly intact state of the latter.
In the majority Kurdish city of Adiyaman, large rows of flats collapsed like houses of cards, leaving much of the urban landscape in piled heaps. The city is uninhabitable, along with nearby Antakya and Kahramanmaras.
In the aftermath, a spotlight has been cast on the widespread provision of homes that did not meet earthquake standards, with increasing calls for construction standards to be enhanced in Turkiye and developing countries around the world, The Guardian reported.
There are fresh calls for safe housing as a human right. “Safe housing is in principle already a human right enshrined in various UN treaties,” Sara Pantuliano, the chief executive of the global affairs thinktank ODI told The Guardian.
“But the evidence of the recent catastrophic earthquakes in Turkiye and Syria shows only too well that the principle is not the practice. As we’ve seen, unsafe housing means a natural hazard like an earthquake becomes a large-scale tragedy, when this could have been at least partially averted,” she stated.
Meanwhile, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan faces immense pressure ahead of the election, due to be held as early as May, to explain how so many buildings so easily collapsed, entombing tens of thousands of people who had been sleeping when the first quake struck at 4:17 am.