Kahramanmaras, Kirikhan Ibrahim was lucky because he had his phone with him. The young man was buried when the earthquake reduced his house and at least 6,000 other buildings in the city of Kahramanmaras in southeastern Turkey to rubble. He miraculously survived in a cavity between the rubble, found his cell phone, got signal and called his friend. More than 100 hours later, rescue workers were able to free him from the rubble.
Others were less fortunate than Ibrahim. According to previous estimates, at least 20,000 people died in the catastrophe of the century in Turkey, and around 3,400 more in Syria.
“The damage is enormous, and so is the misery of the people,” reports Markus Bremers, who is on site for the German drug aid organization action medeor. “Thousands have lost their homes and are unable to return to their homes, many spending the night outdoors for fear of being buried in an aftershock.”
The area affected is almost the size of Germany, and reconstruction will take years and cost billions. After four days, however, there are also indications that the financial damage to the Turkish economy will remain manageable – and the date for the presidential election in May does not appear to be in jeopardy.
In the meantime, a huge machinery of offers of help has started, especially in southern Turkey. Already on the way to the region, traffic jams of cars and vans that wanted to bring relief goods to the region formed.
A group from the tourist resort of Mahmutlar near Antalya, a good 500 kilometers from the crisis area, is loading blankets, clothing and old carpets from a van. They are intended for those who lost their homes and are now sheltering in tents. “We didn’t think twice and immediately started collecting donations in kind,” explains Murat, the group’s driver. Others came straight away with an articulated lorry, followed by an excavator to help with the clean-up work.
A different picture emerges in the crisis area itself. In Kırıkhan in Hatay Province there are almost no houses left. The Technical Relief Agency (THW) from Germany has settled here to free people who have been buried from the rubble. “The first few hours are always the most critical,” says Anton Hünnemeyer-Weber, who coordinates search and rescue operations for THW in Kırıkhan. The THW specializes in catastrophes such as earthquakes. The challenges are enormous. “The area is very large and the destruction extraordinary,” says Hünnemeyer-Weber.
During operations in destroyed houses, the specialists first use tracker dogs to search for survivors. When the animals strike, a camera is used to check whether the buried person is still alive. A team of construction experts then assesses whether more debris could be set in motion during the salvage that could endanger the life of the buried person.
Doctors are also involved in this process. “It may happen that the earthquake victim is injured during the rescue.” If things look good, a small tunnel will first be dug to provide the person with essentials. “In this way, we are able to free people even under difficult conditions and with a great deal of time, even if they would otherwise have died of thirst,” explains Hünnemeyer-Weber. Normally, humans can survive about three days without water. With the tunnel, they can be cared for until they can finally be rescued.
The need of the people in the earthquake areas is great.
(Photo: AP)
In Kırıkhan, the THW helpers and a German group from the aid organization Isar were able to rescue several people alive. THW operations manager Jörg Eger does not want to take part in the growing criticism of Turkish crisis management. “The entire deployment area for the relief workers is almost as large as Germany, and the destruction caused by two violent earthquakes is enormous,” he explains. “It’s almost impossible to be everywhere in the first few hours.”
While Kırıkhan was almost completely destroyed, not a single house collapsed in Hassa, ten kilometers away. Occasionally you will find a crack in the main road. The supermarkets are open.
In other parts of the region, too, the damage remained manageable. A fire in the port of the coastal town of Iskenderun is under control and the port terminals have been cleared of rubble. The petrol stations in the region remained mostly undamaged and are open. Wind turbines on the hills of Hatay province spin as if there hadn’t been an earthquake.
More on the earthquake in Turkey and Syria:
The financial damage should therefore remain manageable, experts estimate. The area affected is large, but not the industrial heart of the country. The tourist regions on the Mediterranean are also far away and not affected.
The rating agency Fitch comments that despite the immeasurable human suffering, the financial damage is likely to be in the range of two to four billion dollars. By comparison, Hurricane Ian caused $100 billion in damage in the United States last October.
Most of the factories in the region survived the tremors unscathed, and many jobs have been preserved as a result. And that, in turn, is important for someone who is observing the situation very closely: Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The Turkish President must coordinate the reconstruction. But he should also have the elections in May in mind.
Fears arose that the destruction was so extensive that the elections would have to be postponed. It doesn’t look like that at this point, considering how quickly roads have been cleared and vital infrastructure repaired.
The earthquakes are devastating and a human tragedy. But it looks like the rebuilding has started.
More: Back to Syria or to Europe – what Erdogan intends to do with millions of refugees