AT LEAST 51 villagers died when an earthquake destroyed houses in a mountainous region of eastern Turkey early yesterday morning, Turkish officials said.
Measuring 6 on the Richter scale, the quake struck at 4.32am in Elazig province, while many people were sleeping.
“It was just before dawn, and I had just got up to prepare for morning prayers when the whole house started shaking,” Murat Durmaz, a livestock farmer in the village of Okcular, told television station NTV. “I grabbed my two kids and ran for the door.”
Built on a steep slope, Okcular was the worst-affected of the five villages seriously hit by the earthquake. Some 17 people died there, including nine from a single family, according to a crisis centre set up by the Turkish government.
Interviewed by NTV, one woman in Okcular described rushing out of her own house to find her brother’s house in ruins.
“I could hear somebody shouting in the rubble, and began digging with my hands,” she said. “I pulled one nephew out alive. Two others died.”
Speaking to Dogan, a Turkish news agency, Okcular mayor Hasan Demirdag estimated that 50 out of 150 houses in the village had collapsed. Most of those destroyed were made of mud-brick.
Villagers wealthy enough to rebuild their homes out of reinforced concrete appear to have escaped almost entirely unscathed, the deputy governor of Elazig province told Turkish television. “Public buildings like schools were not damaged,” Mehmet Ali Saglam said.
At a press conference he gave in Istanbul before flying out to visit those affected by the earthquake, Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said he would be sending teams from a state-run social housing project to rebuild the structures in concrete.
With aftershocks, including one of 5.7, continuing to shake the area, Mr Erdogan warned local people to stay outside.
Turkish television showed villagers huddled around fires lit in the lee of ruined houses and barns. With temperatures expected to sink close to freezing point after nightfall, the Turkish Red Crescent was erecting tents on the outskirts of the villages.
Dogan footage showed people carrying injured relatives into hospitals on makeshift stretchers. Doctors treated more than 70 survivors for injuries, according to the Elazig governor’s office.
Criss-crossed by two major fault-lines, Turkey is no stranger to earthquakes. Shoddy construction standards and lack of official control sometimes make death tolls higher.
A total of 176 people, most of them schoolchildren asleep in a state dormitory block, died when a 6.7 magnitude earthquake struck 130km east of Elazig in May 2003. In 1999, nearly 20,000 were killed in two earthquakes just south of Istanbul.