Turkey again devastated by a natural disaster. Two new earthquakes of magnitudes 6.4 and 5.8 were recorded Monday evening February 20 in the Turkish province of Hatay, in the south of the country. This region was hardest hit by the February 6 earthquake that killed more than 41,000 people in Turkey, Turkish relief agency Afad reported.
There are at least three dead in Turkey, Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu announced in the evening. The Vice President, Fuat Oktay, had previously reported eight people injured by falling buildings already damaged. In Syria, 47 people were injured in Aleppo, caught in a panic as they tried to flee, the Sana news agency reported. The White Helmets Syrian rescue group reports more than 130 injured in the north of the country.
The first quake, of magnitude 6.4, whose epicenter was located in Defne, a district about fifteen minutes by car – normally – from Antakya, occurred at 8:44 p.m. local time (6:44 p.m.). in Paris) and was very strongly felt by Agence France-Presse teams in Antakya and Adana, 200 km further north. It was followed three minutes later by a new earthquake of magnitude 5.8 in Samandag, a coastal town south of Antakya, reported Afad, which fears “a rise in sea level of up to 50 cm “.
An alert for risk of submersion on the Turkish coast was issued, before being lifted.
The tremors were also felt in the Aleppo region in northwestern Syria, Agence France-Presse correspondents there reported, who saw the panicked population leaving their homes and taking to the streets. . Sections of damaged buildings have collapsed, said a photographer.
In Antakya too, the tremor caused panic among the already hard-hit population and raised massive clouds of dust in the ruined city. In a square in the center of the city, Ali Mazloum, an 18-year-old Syrian, testified to Agence France-Presse about the intensity of this earthquake. “We were with Afad who are looking for the bodies of our relatives when the earthquake surprised us. You don’t know what to do,” he said.
“We grabbed each other and right in front of us the walls started to crumble. It felt like the earth was opening up to swallow us up,” he also said. Not far away, a backhoe loader with full headlights was busy clearing an avenue of two lanes, covered with rubble. “This one just fell,” a rescue worker told Agence France-Presse, pointing to the remains of a collapsed building.
A journalist from Agence France-Presse saw and heard several sections of the walls of already badly damaged buildings crumble and several people, apparently injured, calling for help. Ali, who has lived in Antakya for twelve years, is still looking for the bodies of his sister and her family, as well as those of his brother-in-law and his family who disappeared fourteen days ago.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan traveled on Monday to the province of Hatay, bordering Syria, one of the eleven southern provinces of Turkey affected by the earthquake of February 6 and one of the only two with Kahramanmaras where research and excavations continue. The Turkish authorities arrested them everywhere else on Sunday and the hope of finding survivors is practically non-existent after fourteen days.
According to the Head of State, more than 118,000 buildings have been destroyed or seriously damaged. Afad assures that more than 6,000 aftershocks have been recorded since the 7.8 magnitude earthquake that devastated southern Turkey and Syria exactly two weeks ago.
