Turkey has been hit by a second massive earthquake, hours after an earlier catastrophic quake devastated the region and killed more than 1,600 people.
The 7.8-magnitude night-time tremor, followed hours later by a slightly smaller one, wiped out entire sections of major Turkish cities in a region filled with millions of people who have fled the civil war in Syria and other conflicts.
The later 7.5 magnitude quake struck at 1.24 pm (1024 GMT) two-and-a-half miles southeast of the town of Ekinozu and around 60 miles north of the first quake that has wrought devastation across Turkey and Syria.
Hundreds are still believed to be trapped under rubble on both sides of the border as a result of the first, and the toll is expected to rise as rescue workers continue to search through mounds of wreckage for families crushed in their sleep.
Orhan Tatar, an official from the Turkish disaster agency, told reporters that the two quakes were independent of each other. He said hundreds of aftershocks were expected after both. Tremors were felt as far away as Greenland.
Monday morning’s earlier 7.8 magnitude quake jolted residents awake. They fled from their homes in terror out into the cold, rainy and snowy night across southeast Turkey and northern Syria, taking shelter in cars as thousands of buildings collapsed.
Tremors from the first quake – which lasted about a minute and could be Turkey’s largest ever – were felt as far away as Greenland, the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland said. People reported feeling tremors in Egypt, Lebanon and also Cyprus, while a tsunami warning was briefly issued by authorities in Italy.
After a 3.8 magnitude earthquake struck Buffalo, New York in the United States, meteorologist Tyler Metcalf suggested on Twitter that the Turkey earthquake could have ‘destabilized faults across the world.’
As Monday rolled on, concerns grew for people trapped under the rubble as thousands of rescue workers jumped into action, searching through tangles of metal and giant piles of concrete for survivors who could be heard calling out from underneath the wreckage.
Terrifying videos and pictures from across the region showed the destruction caused by the quake. One clip from the border town of Azaz, Syria, showed a rescuer desperately running through a field of debris with an injured child in his arms, while another showed the total collapse of a building in Sanliurfa, Turkey.
Monday’s first quake was centered north of Gaziantep, Turkey, which is about 60 miles from the Syrian border and has a population of bout 2 million. The region is home to large numbers of Syrian refugees.
It struck at 04:17 am local time (0117 GMT) at a depth of about 11 miles, the US Geological Survey said. A strong 6.7 aftershock rumbled about 10 minutes later, causing more havoc. Turkey’s own agency said 40 aftershocks were felt.
Turkey’s Disaster and Emergency Management Agency said the earthquake killed scores of people across seven Turkish provinces. At around 12.10 GMT, Turkey’s disaster agency updated the death toll, saying the earthquake had killed 1,014 (rising from an earlier 912 figure given by Turkey’s president Recep Erdogan), and that 2,824 buildings had been destroyed. (READ MORE)
