Turkey- Syria Earthquake Status and History of Earthquakes
Written by RadioVuna on February 8, 2023
More than 11,000 people have been confirmed dead with more than 8,000 rescued;
Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has said 8,754 people have been confirmed dead in Monday’s quake. The combined total, with 2,470 deaths recorded officially in Syria, has reached 11,224.Touring the stricken epicentre, Erdoğan insisted the rescue operation was improving and told people to ignore “provocateurs” criticising the authorities’ response.
A first 7.8-magnitude quake struck at 4.17 am (1.17 GMT) on Monday near the Turkish city of Gaziantep, home to about 2 million people. It was followed by a 7.5-magnitude tremor and several aftershocks.More than 8,000 people so far had been pulled from the debris in Turkey, said the vice-president, Fuat Oktay. About 380,000 people have taken refuge in government shelters or hotels, with others in shopping malls, stadiums, mosques and community centres.
Erdoğan declared a disaster zone in the 10 provinces affected by the earthquakes on Tuesday, imposing a three-month state of emergency in the region.Turkey’s disaster management agency said it had 11,342 reports of collapsed buildings, of which 5,775 had been confirmed. The ministry of transport and infrastructure said 3,400 people took shelter in trains being used as emergency accommodation overnight.
Turkey has deployed more than 24,400 search and rescue personnel to the quake area. The number of personnel was expected to rise, the disaster management agency official Orhan Tatar said.Three British nationals were missing since the earthquake, the UK’s foreign secretary said on Tuesday. “We assess that the likelihood of large-scale British casualties remains low,” James Cleverly said.
Four Australians are unaccounted for. Australia’s foreign affairs department is providing consular assistance to the families of the nationals who were where the catastrophe struck and to about 40 other Australians and their families who were also in the area.
A plane carrying 77 UK search and rescue specialists, state-of-the-art equipment and four search dogs has landed in Gaziantep in south-east Turkey, the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office said. The team, made up of firefighters and staff from 14 fire and rescue services from across the country, will cut their way into buildings and help locate survivors in the rubble of the earthquakes.
At least 20 people have escaped from a jail holding members of Islamic State in north-west Syria, according to local media and Agence France-Presse. The military police prison in the town of Rajo, near the Turkish border, was damaged in the quakes and aftershocks, a source at the facility said, leading to a riot and escapes.
Syria was accused of playing politics with aid after the Syrian ambassador to the UN, Bassam Sabbagh, said his country should be responsible for the delivery of all aid into Syria, including those areas not under government control. The dispute over the control of the aid is hampering efforts into northern Syria, which is held by rebel groups. The government in Damascus allows aid to enter the region through only one border crossing.
Aid from Turkey to north-west Syria has temporarily stopped due to the fallout of the devastating earthquake, according to a UN spokesperson on Tuesday, leaving aid workers grappling with the problem of how to help people in a country fractured by war.
The UN’s cultural agency, Unesco, said on Tuesday it was ready to provide assistance after two sites listed on its world heritage list in Syria and Turkey sustained damage in the earthquakes. In addition to the old city of Aleppo in Syria and the fortress in the south-eastern Turkish city of Diyarbakır, Unesco said at least three other world heritage sites could be affected.
Let Us Now Look Back in History.
According to History.com
On February 7, 1812, the most violent of a series of earthquakes near Missouri causes a so-called fluvial tsunami in the Mississippi River, actually making the river run backward for several hours. The series of tremors, which took place between December 1811 and March 1812, were the most powerful in the history of the United States.
The unusual seismic activity began at about 2 a.m. on December 16, 1811, when a strong tremor rocked the New Madrid region. The city of New Madrid, located near the Mississippi River in present-day Missouri, had about 1,000 residents at the time, mostly farmers, hunters and fur trappers. At 7:15 a.m., an even more powerful quake erupted, now estimated to have had a magnitude of 8.6. This tremor literally knocked people off their feet and many people experienced nausea from the extensive rolling of the earth. Given that the area was sparsely populated and there weren’t many multi-story structures, the death toll was relatively low. However, the quake did cause landslides that destroyed several communities, including Little Prairie, Missouri.
The earthquake also caused fissures—some as much as several hundred feet long–to open on the earth’s surface. Large trees were snapped in two. Sulfur leaked out from underground pockets and river banks vanished, flooding thousands of acres of forests. On January 23, 1812, an estimated 8.4-magnitude quake struck in nearly the same location, causing disastrous effects. Reportedly, the president’s wife, Dolley Madison, was awoken by the tremor in Washington, D.C. Fortunately, the death toll was smaller, as most of the survivors of the first earthquake were now living in tents, in which they could not be crushed.
The strongest of the tremors followed on February 7. This one was estimated at an amazing 8.8-magnitude, a reading that ranks among the strongest quakes in human history. Church bells rang in Boston, thousands of miles away, from the shaking. Brick walls were toppled in Cincinnati. In the Mississippi River, water turned brown and whirlpools developed suddenly from the depressions created in the riverbed. Waterfalls were created in an instant; in one report, 30 boats were helplessly thrown over falls, killing the people on board. Many of the small islands in the middle of the river, often used as bases by river pirates, permanently disappeared. Large lakes, such as Reelfoot Lake in Tennessee and Big Lake at the Arkansas-Missouri border, were created by the earthquake as river water poured into new depressions.
This series of large earthquakes ended in March, although there were aftershocks for a few more years. In all, it is believed that approximately 1,000 people died because of the earthquakes, though an accurate count is difficult to determine because of a lack of an accurate record of the Native American population in the area at the time.
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